Mary O'Rourke did her best to startle yesterday by outlining the scale of the "transportation challenge" facing Dublin. By 2016, according to official projections, total peak-hour trips throughout the metropolitan area are forecast to reach 488,000, or nearly double the number recorded in 1997. Unless serious money is invested in public transport - and the figure she has in mind is at least £4 billion - the capital will be faced with the dire prospect that most of these additional trips will be undertaken by private car.
Given the levels of congestion that already exist in the greater Dublin area such an outcome would be totally unsustainable economically, socially and environmentally. Dublin has developed a critical mass in European terms, which explains why it has become such a magnet for inward investment, but it cannot continue to function without a high-quality public transport system. And the procurement of such a system must be addressed both in the short-term, though Luas and bus corridors, and further into the future with a metro.
After years of negligence and dithering, the penny has finally dropped and, it would seem, the billions will follow. Although Mr Noel Dempsey stole a march on Ms O'Rourke's announcement by requesting the National Roads Authority to commence planning for an Eastern Bypass motorway, it is clear that more roads alone will not solve the growing problem of congestion. As in other civilised European cities, alternatives must be provided so that those travelling to work, in particular, can be confident of doing so by using public transport.
What the capital has now been offered is "le grand plan", as Ms O'Rourke calls it, incorporating at least three metro lines, running underground where required. Sensibly, however, the Government decided not to scrap the already-approved plan for Luas Line B (Sandyford-St Stephen's Green) in favour of a metro at this stage; to have done that, as ministers must have realised, would have risked incurring the wrath of an increasingly frustrated electorate which wants to see action taken now, rather than in ten years' time.
The Government's "grand plan" has clearly been culled from the Dublin Transportation Office's £8 billion-plus blueprint, as yet unpublished or justified by a serious cost-benefit evaluation. Serious criticism of this blueprint has been expressed by Mr Owen Keegan, Dublin Corporation's Director of Traffic - in particular about whether it is realistic to attempt to cater for "all" peak-time trips in 2016. He has warned that concentrating on "extremely expensive fixed-track options" could divert attention from achievable short-term measures.
Against the background of failure to implement earlier "grand plans" what worries him, as well as senior CIE officials, is that the DTO's updated strategy is based on the "potentially very dangerous" assumption that funding will present no problem. Given that the costs of tunnelling are unquantifiable, the Government has sought to answer this fear by opting for public-private partnerships as a procurement method for the skeletal metro now being proposed. Nonetheless, a thorough economic analysis is required before anything is cast in stone. Dubliners have waited long enough for a decent public transport system. They do not wish to endure incipient gridlock before the semblance of such a system is delivered.
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