It didn't need much research to establish eight years ago that the Luas project was, literally as well as metaphorically, on the wrong track, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
First of all, one of the two proposed lines - that from Tallaght - was planned to operate along a circuitous and consequently time-consuming route, 2.5 kilometres of which is to run through an area virtually without housing. It clearly could, and should, have been constructed to run along a more direct, faster and more populated route through Kimmage and Crumlin; for which, belatedly, a metro is now planned that will make the circuitous Luas largely redundant.
Next, both of the new lines were to be tram services, with a limited capacity which, at least in the case of the line from Stillorgan, would at an early stage prove inadequate for the traffic demand from Ranelagh inwards. And, by operating on-street through the centre of the city, they would block traffic flows, including bus traffic, across both the north-south and east-west axes.
In 1995 I took these matters up with CIÉ, and was told that the points I had raised were to be "examined in detail by our project team" and that it was hoped "to be in a position to meet you soon for further discussion of the matter". Naïvely expecting a response that never came, I refrained for 12 months from raising this matter publicly. Then, in the latter part of 1996, I went to see the consultants who were preparing the plans for the project.
Perhaps because this team did not include an economist, even as late as 1997 they were still using as the basis for their traffic forecasts outdated 1991 projections of Dublin's future workforce and car ownership. They had failed to observe that both of these had in fact been rising during the intervening six years at a rate 2.3 times faster than had been provided for in their out-of-date projections.
On a more technical point, I also discovered that they had substantially underestimated peak traffic demand, because they had not allowed for the fact that during part of the peak hour commuter traffic attains a level 25 per cent above the average for that hour.
In addition to writing about these matters in this column, I also approached the relevant minister, Alan Dukes, and later talked to Mary O'Rourke about it. But, despite having a further study carried out that validated points I had been making, the Fianna Fáil-PD government that came to power in 1997 eventually settled on a half-baked compromise.
The Government accepted that I had been right to point to the traffic chaos that would be created if a high-frequency tram were allowed to run down Dawson Street and through College Green to O'Connell Street, but refused to accept the logical corollary: the need for a tunnelled system through the city centre, a blunder that it is now attempting belatedly to retrieve. Instead, it decided to terminate at St Stephen's Green the tram service that had been designed to run from Stillorgan to the airport.
As a result, we are now to have two unconnected tram services - one from Stillorgan, which will use the old Harcourt Street rail bed and, even in its present truncated form, will create traffic congestion between the Grand Canal and St Stephen's Green; and the other, wandering north-west from Tallaght to the Red Cow before turning east again through Inchicore to run through the city centre, which will hold up traffic on all north-south streets from Heuston Station to the docks.
In an effort to rectify the damage done by his predecessors, Séamus Brennan is now proposing to build a tunnelled metro from the airport to the Luas terminus at St Stephen's Green. At this station every cross-city passenger will have to change vehicles by way of an escalator. Anyone wanting to get from southern suburbs to either Connolly or Heuston will now have to change from tram to underground metro, and then back to tram again, hauling their bags up and down two sets of escalators.
The stated intention to convert some years hence the Stillorgan-St Stephen's Green Luas into a metro means that the stretch of overground tram route now being completed between Ranelagh as far as St Stephen's Green will have to be abandoned within a few years of its expensive construction, and the rail service may have to be closed down for quite a long period in order to permit a new tunnel entrance to be constructed somewhere south of Ranelagh.
That is not the whole of the mess involved in this totally botched project. With quite extraordinary perversity, the tram line is being constructed to a gauge (4'8") different from the Irish heavy rail gauge (5'3"), with the result that it is going to be impossible to link this system into our heavy rail network, either north of the airport, or at the other end, north of Bray, where it is proposed eventually to connect what is to become a metro line with the existing DART. Passengers on this line going to and from Bray will thus have to change at a junction in the fields between Bray and Shankill.
The purpose of constructing new rail services in Dublin was to relieve traffic congestion in and around Dublin.
Instead these on-street trams are now going to hold up traffic at our busiest road junction near the Red Cow; where the main route to the south-west intersects the M50; around busy Heuston Station, where all traffic to and from the west and north-west passes; on all north-south routes within the city; on the key eastern entrance to the Stillorgan and Sandyford business parks; and - my own pet grievance - on Dunville Avenue near Ranelagh, where a former bridge over the road is currently being gratuitously replaced by a level-crossing that will hold up traffic quite unnecessarily.
Finally, there is the decision by the Railway Procurement Agency to persist with the €30 million demolition of the ramp at Connolly Station. Now that the Tallaght trams are not to terminate at Connolly but are to run on through the Financial Centre to the Point Depot, it does not seem to make any sense to persist with this very expensive job, especially as it means that the trams will all have to reverse out of a terminal bay at Connolly instead of running straight through to their destinations.
On top of all this we now find that this agency also failed to propose a means of building the airport metro at reasonable cost, an omission now being rectified by the Minister himself.
Why has this whole project turned into such an unmitigated disaster?
First, at no stage was there any economic input into the project, which seems to have been seen solely as an engineering undertaking. Second, there was a clear reluctance at Civil Service level in the mid-1990s to admit that the passage of time had made the initial plans quite inappropriate; a bureaucratic reluctance to admit a mistake.
And, third, at Government level there was a lack of decisiveness, a reluctance by all the previous ministers involved to take their responsibilities by rejecting inadequate advice given to them by civil servants unwilling to admit mistakes.