The new Minister for Transport should scrap plans for a metro line to Dublin Airport, argues Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
It is now four years since the Dublin metro plan was launched with some fanfare by a team of ministers and senior officials headed by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and the Tánaiste, Mary Harney. Yet the Cabinet has yet to approve even the first phase of this "grand plan" - a line linking Dublin Airport to the city centre.
That is probably a good thing because this very expensive project, which the former minister for transport, Seamus Brennan, kept saying he was about to bring to Cabinet, doesn't stand up and should not be given priority ahead of more sensible plans to provide the capital with an integrated rail network.
For a start, there is the cost. In March 2003, the Rail Procurement Agency (RPA) shocked the political establishment by estimating it at €4.8 billion, though it later reduced this to €3.4 billion after making "changes in scope", such as reducing the number of intermediate stations on the 12-kilometre route.
Last July, Brennan quoted an even lower figure of €1.2 billion, though this was for "direct capital construction cost in 2002 prices". If the project was to be procured by public-private partnership (PPP), the cost would be much higher, involving phased payments over, say, a 20-year period.
The proposed metro line from St Stephen's Green to Dublin Airport, running underground as far as Broadstone and going into a tunnel again at the airport, is seen as the first phase of a much larger project to provide an extensive metro for the city, as the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) proposed in 2000.
Though Brennan continued to insist that the line to the airport (preferably extended northwards to Swords) was merely the first phase of this wider network, management consultants KPMG estimated in mid-2002 that the DTO's metro plan would cost taxpayers €1 billion a year over 20 years.
That is what the former minister for finance, Charlie McCreevy, had in mind when he upbraided Brennan for "sponsoring proposals in the area of public transport . . . which are totally unrealistic" in the context of budgetary constraints. There is no reason to believe that McCreevy's successor, Brian Cowen, will take a different view.
Any decision to proceed with the airport line as proposed would only make economic sense if it was extended southwards to Sandyford and ultimately Shanganagh, running underground between St Stephen's Green and Ranelagh, in order to maximise passenger numbers. And that, in turn, would render redundant the city-centre stretch of the Luas Green Line.
Brennan said in July that he was examining the RPA's business case for the airport line "in the context of the wider transport needs of the greater Dublin area". However, if no firm Government commitment can be secured for the metro, what is the point of building a line that connects with nothing apart from one of the Luas lines?
THE NEW MINISTER, Martin Cullen, has another plan on his desk that is more sensible precisely because it is both incremental and realistic. Apart from the DART upgrade and much-improved services on other suburban lines, its centrepiece is an underground rail link between Heuston Station and Spencer Dock, which Iarnród Éireann says would cost €1.3 billion.
The interconnector's 5.3-kilometre route would run via Pearse Station (where it would interchange with the DART), St Stephen's Green (Sandyford Luas line), the Liberties and Heuston (Tallaght Luas line and Kildare Arrow service). It would also relieve severe congestion at Connolly Station, which has hampered the provision of a more frequent DART service.
The Dublin Rail Plan, as Iarnród Éireann calls it, had its first public airing at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport last February. It was described as offering a "fantastic integrated system for the city \ would really make a huge difference to maximising the public use of the rail network" by the committee's then chairman, Eoin Ryan, now an MEP.
The plan, including the rail interconnector, is known to have the support of senior officials in the Department of Transport, who can see that it makes perfect sense. But Brennan became so fixated by the airport-Shanganagh metro line that he was unable to bring himself to consider other ways of serving Dublin Airport and the wider city by rail.
Options put forward in the Dublin Rail Plan are either a spur branching off the Malahide DART line to the airport, which is costed at €444 million, or a spur off the Maynooth line, costed at €525 million. The first of these options would be better as the route would serve the higher-density suburbs planned for the city's "north fringe", from Baldoyle to Ballymun.
The plan offers other intriguing prospects. For example, Swords could become a new northern terminus for DART services from Greystones. Or Arrow commuter trains from Kildare could run through to Spencer Dock, where a huge scheme of offices, apartments, retail and leisure facilities is planned for the 51-acre North Wall rail freight depot.
Dick Fearn, Iarnród Éireann's new chief operations manager, said the interconnector would come at the end of a series of "building-block" projects, all substantial in themselves. These include the proposed double-tracking of the Kildare line, at least as far as Hazelhatch, to serve rapidly developing areas such as Adamstown, Balgaddy and Clondalkin.
New stations are also to be opened and signalling upgraded on the Maynooth line, again with the aim of serving high-density developments under way at Ashtown, Pelletstown and the old Phoenix Park racecourse. As an interim measure, Kildare Arrow services might be routed into Spencer Dock, using the line that connects it to Heuston Station via the Phoenix Park tunnel.
THE PLATFORM 11 group, which bills itself as Ireland's National Rail Users Organisation, has identified the rail interconnector as "the single most important public transport project in the history of the State" and is now campaigning to have it adopted because of its value in linking up disparate rail services - something the line via the Phoenix Park tunnel could never do.
Having started by simply calling for this line to be reopened, Platform 11 now backs the rail interconnector proposal because "it offers the widest benefit to the most people and the best value for money by making use of Dublin's existing rail infrastructure . . . In almost all cases not more than one change is required to reach any other suburban station".
The plan was also endorsed by the Strategic Rail Review in 2003 as a project well worth pursuing, although Iarnród Éireann's managing director, Joe Meagher, has been careful to stress that it is not being put forward as an alternative to the proposed airport metro line.
"It's not an either/or option," he told TDs and senators in February.
Realistically, however, it is. And Platform 11 wants action on it, saying the Dublin Rail Plan could be implemented by 2010 if Cullen was to approve it now.
There is public money available under a multi-annual funding package for public transport announced last March, which will provide a total of €1.9 billion over the next five years, primarily for rail investment. A further €575 million is expected to come from the private sector through public-private partnerships.
Apart from costing less than the airport metro line, Platform 11 says the plan would deliver four times more passengers to public transport per million euro spent and finally give Dublin an integrated rail network.
Platform 11's website address is www.extendthedart.com