Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

You can find shortcomings in just about any application if you look hard enough. The plans for the glasnevin interchange for example could be considered underdeveloped, not enough information etc.

Yes. Let’s not invent political barriers where there are none. Even SF wants this built - they might have a large voter base in the North West that gets angry whenever anything is spent in Dublin, but they’ve a bigger base in North Dublin that will not take kindly to having this taken away from them.

So, unless we end up with a government entirely composed of rural, independent TDs (deliberate lowercase and comma there), MetroLink is safe whenever the election happens. The only impact of an election would be a delay in signing the enabling legislation if we had a protracted government formation process, but for it to interfere with an election would mean that the RO was granted earlier than we expect/fear.

The opening of Dublin’s MetroLink in the mid-2030s is said to be “looking like a pipe dream,” as planners in An Bord Pleanala have instructed Transport Infrastructure Ireland to hold a secondary public consultation period to enable the public submissions on additional information submitted during the projects oral hearings.

The oral hearing concluded four months ago, and consultation on the new information will run from August 19th to October 8th, 2024.

An Bord Pleanala’s ability to deal with large transport projects was recently questioned as it took two years to approve the Dart+ West project. In that case, the An Bord Pleanála board had its inspector’s report for around 180 days before making a decision on the project.

MetroLink’s railway order planning application was submitted in September 2022. If there is a similar time frame between an inspector’s report being submitted to the board and the board publishing its decision, the project is unlikely to be decided on until at least mid-2025.

Professor Brian Caulfield, head of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, said: “More consultation, this will bring us into a 3rd year of the planning process… mid-2030s looking like a pipe dream for the delivery of Metro.”

Dublin Commuters, a group that advocates for better sustainable transport, said, “Another round of consultation for MetroLink will surely lead to more delays to its implementation and increased costs.” The group added: “We’ll be encouraging everyone to submit positive responses when it reopens later this month.”

https://irishcycle.com/2024/08/10/opening-of-dublins-metrolink-in-mid-2030s-looking-like-a-pipe-dream-as-planners-order-consultation-to-be-reopened/

I hope hes wrong but right now i feel it could go either way. Our planning system is a mess.

What's the point in a consultation. They can't change anything at this stage anyway.

Seems like a flawed system. More proof that it needs replacing.

These claims are easy to make but what exactly should the current system be replaced with?

Issues with planning are common across the entire developed world. Google "planning" anywhere in Europe, the UK, the USA, or any western-liberal democracy and you will find similar discussions and complaints as you hear about the Irish system - sometimes the systems sound much worse actually (in many US cities for example).

The Irish planning system isn't a unique invention - it has roughly followed the same pattern of evolution as in most western liberal democracies. Planning hardly existed as a government function pre-1950s but was introduced in response to citizen and democratic demand.

We have two extremes. We have the historical experience of having no planning restrictions at all and it was an environmental and human-quality-of-life disaster. On the other extreme, completely banning all new development would obviously also be a disaster.

So the not-so-simple task is to find a compromise somewhere between these extremes which reasonably balances the legal and constitutional rights of both existing property owners and those proposing new developments.

We're not China, individuals have fundamental human rights and are guaranteed access to the courts to protect their rights. So I'm pretty sure that if you tried re-building a planning system from scratch, you'd probably end up with something similar as the system we have today.

The biggest issue for me with Irish planning is not that it's fundamentally broken and needs rebuilding from scratch but just that it's been woefully inefficient. And the main source of this inefficiency is pretty obvious - APB and local planning authorities were severely under-resourced and unprepared for the construction boom which has followed the IMF years during which hardly anything was built (housing unit completions last year were 10 times those of 2014). As construction took off post 2014, backlogs and queues inevitably appears. Toss in the biggest public transport development plan since the foundation of the state and the system effectively collapsed under the work-load.

This issue has been somewhat addressed by: the planner hiring spree of the last year or so (and we're already starting to see ABP case times dropping from ludicrous to just v bad - and I expect further drops) and the setting up of a dedicated property court in the high-court - modeled along the same lines as the commercial court - manned with specialists which should mean that JRs and the like can be processed quickly and don't have to join the general queue for high-court time.

If, after resourcing the system appropriately for the workload it has to deal with, and after providing fast-track access to specialist courts with dedicated personnel, the system remains "broken", then we can talk about "throwing out the planning system". Before that, "the entire system needs to be thrown out" feels like a populist politician's sound-bite.

If, for example, a landowner refuses to engage with a CPO, where is the 'common good' override allowed in the Constitution?

Hyperbole from Caulfield.

The slowness deserved criticism but we don’t need those headlines.

I'd argue our system is far too weighted towards the often petty and selfish concerns of individuals than the greater societal good, though I'm no legal expert so don't know how far the other way we can actually go. It's strange that on one hand the state could seize huge amounts of land and properties without much fuss for the motorway network but at the same time a NIMBY can find a stupid technicality on some minor inconsequential aspect of a project that can collapse the whole thing and delay it by years.

Also there's bigger problems than just ABP, here's the original project timeline that was drawn up by professional engineers at the tax payers expense, it's three years behind schedule even fully discounting the ABP delays yet there's been no explanation on why from TII. Right across the board there's just a culture that deadlines and timelines are completely meaningless as there's no consequence for failure.

https://pc1.metrolink.ie/#/project-timeline

Based on that timeline, we are looking at 12-15 months of that delay being down to the change to Charlemount.

In 2019 when it was announced it was expected that the Railway Order would go in
2020.

It didn’t go in until Q3 of 2022.

Covid is the reason for that.

The State advanced very little in that time.

Excusable for the first three months, inexcusable beyond that.

So I would say 12-15 months of messing around over Sandyford followed by 18-24 months over Covid. 15-18 months is down to planning.

ABP collapsed for more reasons than just that. We are looking at least a year of the delay being due to that.

We should be in year three of construction now. Currently I’d estimate that we are 4.75 years behind from where we should be, with this like to get up to 5.25.

That’s what the “it won’t be done by 2040” brigade doesn’t make sense. They baked in a lot of slack when the date move from 2027 to 2035.