As the debate intensifies over the best rail link between Dublin Airport and the city centre, Dr Garret FitzGerald and James Nix believe there is a compelling case for serving the airport by DART.
On August 7th, the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, asked the Railway Procurement Agency to identify "the speediest, cheapest, quickest option" for serving Dublin Airport.
The route will "not necessarily be underground" and may possibly "involve a spur from the Dublin-Maynooth rail line", he said.
In the light of this ministerial statement, last Thursday's assertion in The Irish Times by Mr John Henry, chief executive of the Dublin Transportation Office, "that there's been no change in [the Government's] position", while no doubt technically correct, obscured what looks like a threatened policy shift away from the airport metro project for which the Government decided on January 16th to seek "expressions of interest".
The exclusively overground route to the airport which the Minister now appears to be contemplating would branch off the Maynooth line (perhaps near Ashtown) and then travel through open country to the west of Finglas, before turning north-east for the airport at Dunsink.
The trouble with such a route is that the journey would be rather long. Moreover, by going through open country for most of the route, there would be virtually no catchment area and the line would contribute nothing to solving Dublin's traffic problem.
A further problem is that an airport rail line terminating for the time being at Connolly and serving no part of the south city might have a limited attraction for airport traffic, especially as it would have to compete with liberalised coach services travelling rapidly non-stop through the new tunnel to serve both the city centre and south side.
An Aircoach bus service terminating at the IFSC, beside Connolly, has already had to be withdrawn because of lack of demand: it is the Aircoach service through the city that has been successful.
An airport line via Finglas is another alternative likely to be considered by the Minister. While such a route would not involve a great deal of tunnel, by serving only a single suburb, it would attract limited traffic. A much more viable route, which would serve important commuter needs, would be one that left the Maynooth line at Prospect Bridge, just beyond Phibsboro, and travelled north through Glasnevin, past DCU and on through Ballymun directly to the airport.
This would be about 30 per cent shorter than the suggested all-overground line via Dunsink, and would have the advantage of attracting a lot of traffic away from the very congested road system north and south of Phibsboro.
Such a route would require tunnelling for up to two kilometres from Prospect Bridge to DCU, and possibly a cut-and-cover section from there to north of Ballymun. However, this should be more than justified by the greatly increased traffic flow and congestion relief. (The question of an underground segment at the airport depends, among other things, on the location of the station).
The most logical thing to do, pending the construction of a city centre tunnel, would be to integrate the airport link into the DART system.
The proposed resignalling of the "Loop Line", if implemented, could enable a number of trains from the airport to continue to a station considerably south of Connolly, at least Dún Laoghaire - though such issues can only be finalised when the capacity of the proposed new signalling system is known.
The Minister's new suggestion of using an existing rail line running across the north city for access from Dublin Airport would involve retaining the 5ft 3in Irish gauge, while the track from St Stephen's Green to Sandyford (to which it is proposed eventually to link this airport line) has unfortunately been designed for the European gauge of 4ft 8.5in.
This highlights the foolishness of the decision in 2000 to burden the Dublin rail system with two different gauges, a decision which should certainly be reviewed before more high-frequency lines are built.
The apparent reluctance to proceed now with any tunnel may reflect a failure to appreciate the financial offset which can be secured through cashing in on what is termed a "land rights" component - an element also referred to by John Henry in his Thursday article.
Two years ago, a proposal to serve Dublin Airport was presented to government by a Japanese-Irish consortium led by Mitsui, a company with a great deal of experience in urban rail construction worldwide. Mitsui proposed a 20km line from Sandyford to the airport, to be financed by a very modest £100 million seed capital from the Exchequer, a 25-year operating concession, and land rights that would have enabled it to purchase State and private lands.
As in many other cities in Europe, much of the return would have been derived from building above stations on the line, which both yields a direct financial return and generates traffic for the rail service.
For reasons that have never been explained, but which may partly have reflected reluctance on the part of the government to concede land rights, this attractive proposal was turned down. Yet the exploitation of land rights above stations is the most effective way to attract private capital to urban rail projects.
As economists have repeatedly warned the Government the alternative of merely substituting private for public capital in order to facilitate current spending while limiting the overall budget deficit, imposes a heavy long-term burden on public finances. This is because private enterprise requires a financial return over twice the rate at which governments can borrow. It is far from clear that the Government has yet grasped this fact.
The truncated LUAS line from Sandyford to St Stephen's Green goes only half as far as, and has only a fraction of the capacity of, the Mitsui proposal yet is costing twice as much as that project. The taxpayer is paying very dearly for the government's unwillingness to enter into that kind of public/private partnership in 2000.
The other reason why the Mitsui project may have been turned down could be the fact that the consortium acknowledged that completion of their 20km airport line would take until 2007 or 2008 - with the result that the entire project was brushed off for "delivering too late". But it would have been completed just as soon as the airport line now being further reviewed by the Government for the Nth time.
In 1997, in an attempt to be seen to do something about congestion, the government started LUAS in full knowledge that the plans for it had been rendered hopelessly obsolete by the Celtic Tiger boom. The result is a low-capacity tram "network" of just two lines which doesn't connect with itself and cannot be linked into the rest of the urban rail system without expensive variable gauge trains.
Employment and car ownership have in fact grown at a rate well over twice that upon which the plans for LUAS were based. (It appears the team of administrators and engineers responsible for the project included no economist.)
The decision to terminate the line at St Stephen's Green was in belated recognition of the congestion which it had been demonstrated would be created if, instead of a tunnelled DART, a high-frequency, on-street light rail system was extended throughout the congested city centre.
The whole Dublin commuter rail project has become an appalling mess - a classic example of bureaucratic and political mismanagement.
James Nix is a transport researcher at the Dublin Institute of Technology