On the face of it, this week’s announcement that Irish Rail has received approval from An Bord Pleanála for its plans for a Dart+ service from Dublin Docklands to Maynooth is good news for commuters in the western parts of the greater Dublin conurbation. The new electrified line will increase capacity three-fold and will connect at Glasnevin with the proposed Metrolink to Dublin airport
But those commuters might be forgiven for being sceptical. Urban and suburban Ireland has been ill-served for generations by the failure, despite plans aplenty, to provide it with the public transport infrastructure it so badly needs. The result has been over-reliance on a bus network whose reliability and speed is hampered by roads clogged with private cars. The solution, as has been acknowledged in innumerable reports over the last 50 years,lies in investment in light and heavy rail. Depressingly, though, it is now seven years since completion of the last significant commuter rail project, the 6km Luas Cross City. While countries across Europe roll out impressive new networks serving small and medium-sized cities, the people of Dublin – and of Cork, Limerick and Galway – must wait.
It is now 40 years since the original and still only Dart line was opened. As the acronym suggests, that coastal line was supposed to be merely the beginning of an integrated cross-city rapid transit system, plans for which had been under way since the mid-1970s. That never happened.
Dart+ West is now the first phase of Irish Rail’s plans for an expansion of services which includes full electrification of lines to Drogheda and Celbridge, and an upgrade in capacity to Greystones. If the timeline laid out in this week’s announcement of completion of the Maynooth project by the end of the decade proves to be correct, that will in itself represent a significant improvement on a record of decades of undelivered plans. Even then, passengers who were entitled to free travel as infants when some of these extensions were first proposed may be eligible for free travel as pensioners by the time they finally arrive.