MetroLink could jeopardise the real missing link in Dublin’s transport plans

Nearly 120 years ago, James Joyce diagnosed Dublin as “the centre of paralysis”, and that’s certainly true of rail transport planning in the city. It has long been characterised by a combination of vaulting ambition and political indecision as plans are first announced and then pigeonholed before being dusted down, or chopped and changed, to emerge in a new guise – and then announced again.

The lack of a consistent vision over time would make anyone despair. And it’s been going on like this since 1975, when CIÉ published the Dublin Rail Rapid Transport Study. It proposed an extensive electrified commuter rail network with an underground line in the city centre, including a huge transportation centre in Temple Bar. It didn’t happen, of course, and instead we got the “Temple of Bars”.

Only the first electrified line, running between Howth and Bray, was delivered (in 1984) and later extended to Greystones and Malahide. Dart certainly caught the public imagination, but not many of its regular users know that the name itself is an acronym for Dublin Area Rapid Transit. For CIÉ, electrification of the largely coastal railway line was meant to be merely the first phase of a much bigger plan.

In that context, the National Transport Authority (NTA) has put the cart before the horse by prioritising Metrolink rather than Dart Underground, the long-delayed plan to link Heuston Station with Spencer Dock running in a tunnel through central Dublin. This is unquestionably the most strategic transport project for the city because it would transform disparate commuter rail lines into a coherent rail network.

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An application by Transport Infrastructure Ireland for a Railway Order to permit construction of the proposed 19.5km Metrolink line between Swords and Charlemont on the Grand Canal is already before An Bord Pleanála. But in the latest version of the NTA’s transport strategy for the greater Dublin area, construction of Dart Underground – rebranded as Dart+Tunnel – has been postponed indefinitely.

[ 2022: A history of the metro project that never was ]

Earlier iterations of both schemes were approved by An Bord Pleanála in 2011, but neither could proceed because the cash-strapped Government of the day decided to defer funding until at least 2016. Two years later, Metrolink made it into National Development Plan, but Dart+Tunnel didn’t. By then, the NTA was already “reviewing” the project and putting its delivery on the long finger, until after 2042.

For politicians, Metrolink was more alluring and conjured up images of the Paris Metro; they never seemed to grasp the strategic importance of Dart Underground. Also, the latter was an Iarnród Éireann project, whereas Metrolink is the NTA’s baby, having been conceived by its predecessor, the Dublin Transportation Office. Such bureaucratic compartmentalisation is the enemy of joined-up thinking on public transport.

In April 2021, the NTA engaged Jacobs Engineering to examine lower-cost options for Dart+Tunnel by shortening the city centre underground section and also recommending the “location of new stations required (if any)”! Their report recommended a 7.8km route, with five stations – at Heuston, High Street, St Stephen’s Green, Westland Row and Spencer Dock – at an cost of between €5 billion and €6 billion.

[ Frank McNally: MetroLink will lay waste to chunks of the city centre but won’t integrate city transportation ]

The Irish Cities 2070 (IC 2070) working group, formed by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and the Irish Academy of Engineering, agrees that Dart+Tunnel “would indeed be transformative and justify the investment required” by integrating Heuston into the entire suburban rail system, as well as eliminating a chokepoint at Connolly Station caused by converging northern and western commuter rail services.

Gerry Duggan, the group’s transport specialist, notes that Dart+Tunnel “requires approximately half the tunnelling distance of the Metrolink proposal and half the number of underground stations, thus reducing capital cost, technical risk and construction time”. It would also “maximise redevelopment opportunities within the M50″, including the largely redundant 50-hectare Dublin Industrial Estate at Broombridge.

According to IC 2070, it would assist in realising “the enormous 700-hectare City Edge project now being planned by South Dublin County Council and Dublin City Council in the Inchicore/Bluebell/Walkinstown area, which is predominantly devoted to distribution activities at present [and] is envisaged as being developed as a commercial and substantially car-free residential area … bounded to the north by the Kildare line”.

Furthermore, advances in train technology have led to the development of hybrid commuter trains that can be powered by either overhead wires or on-board batteries, thereby reducing the cost of infrastructure. Indeed, Iarnród Éireann has placed a €270 million order with Alstom for hybrid train sets to extend Dart to Drogheda and is preparing plans for Dart South West from Heuston to Kildare using the same technology.

Referring to the ballpark estimate of €9.5 billion for Metrolink, IC 2070 says: “This sum is comparable with the total investment in the national motorway network to date, in nominal terms [and] it should be transformative, as the motorway network was, to justify that level of expenditure”. And therein lies the rub: on its own, Metrolink simply won’t deliver anything like the transformative impact of the motorways – or Dart+Tunnel.

The group has now published an integrated land use and transportation plan for Dublin as a “better alternative” to the NTA’s strategy which, as Duggan notes, does not show any diagram of a future rail network in its 244 pages, “because there won’t be a network” if current plans are pursued. At IC 2070′s core is Dart+Tunnel, to enable future development of the region along electrified rail lines, as done in Copenhagen.

IC 2070 also proposes a rail spur to Dublin Airport running overground from the northern line at Clongriffin, north of Howth Junction, while proceeding with Metrolink in the longer term. Gerry Duggan also agrees that terminating Metrolink at Charlemont is a mistake and says it should run instead from St Stephen’s Green via Rathmines, Terenure and Templeogue to Oldbawn, as the Metro South West Group has strongly advocated.

But there is a real danger that if the construction cost of Metrolink spirals upwards to €23 billion – a worst case scenario, due to unknown risks – tunnelling for rail transport in Dublin will have consumed so much public money, and acquired such a bad name, that there would be neither the funding nor the appetite to proceed with Dart+Tunnel, the vital missing link needed to knit together commuter rail lines in the capital.

Frank McDonald is a former Environment Editor of The Irish Times