Madam, - Garret FitzGerald pointed out in his column some time ago that the reason the tram lines were removed from College Green in the 1950s was that they obstructed the buses. As we know, there is a plan to run the Luas down College Green. To test the impact of this, I decided to count the buses one Friday morning travelling in both directions outside the the Bank of Ireland. The results were interesting. Between 8:40 and 9:00, 98 buses passed going south and 80 passed going North. The southbound tally was one every 12 seconds or so.
Naturally, the buses were a mixture of types, ranging from three-axle 46As to single-deckers. However, if you take the standard Dublin bus, with a capacity of 80 people, this represents of 26,000 passengers an hour southbound and 22,000 or so northbound. The capacity of a 40metre Luas system with a tram every five minutes is 3,360 an hour.
The impact on the buses of putting the Luas through College Green is a subject of dispute. However, if we assume that it would reduce the bus traffic by 25 per cent, we would be reducing the bus capacity by 6,500 in order to introduce Luas capacity of 3,360. And of course we would be paying €100 million or so to achieve this result. This does not make sense.
The question then is what should be done to connect the two Luas lines. I would recommend the following. Build a Luas line alongside the Grand Canal from Charlemont Avenue down to Grand Canal Dock, where it would integrate with the Dart. From there the Luas could follow the canal and cross the river on a high bridge into Dublin Port, where it could link up with the northside Luas line extension at the Point. From there it could run along existing tracks to a new station, that we will call Connolly North, where it would integrate with the Dart and the Maynooth and Docklands line.
The line from Sandyford to Connolly North could then be upgraded to a full metro. - Yours, etc,
SHANE HAYES, Shankill, Co Dublin.