Readers of The Irish Times five years ago may recall articles I wrote about the proposal to build a light rail system in Dublin - Luas. I started to look into it in mid-1995 and my investigations showed that an overground light rail service using the old Harcourt Street line, but running onwards through the centre-city streets to Ballymun, would from early on be incapable of carrying the amount of traffic wanting to use it from Ranelagh inwards.
Moreover, any abortive attempt to meet this capacity deficiency by increasing the frequency of services would eventually congest city streets seriously, holding up buses as well as cars and so worsening the Dublin transport situation for city-dwellers not on the Luas route.
When I approached CIÉ, which was then involved in the project, they appeared to take my point and to be prepared to opt for an underground solution. Accordingly, for a year I refrained from raising the matter publicly, but then I discovered that the capacity issue was still being ignored. And when I met the Luas consultants in the autumn of 1996 I found they were still using traffic projections that had been prepared in 1991!
They were quite unaware that in the interval the growth of employment and car ownership in Dublin had been 2.3 times faster than had been foreseen at the start of the decade.
In fact, as late as January 1997 they were still publishing documents based on this out-of-date 1991 data, ignoring the fact that the number of person trips in Dublin rose by almost 50 per cent between these two years! Peak traffic is now officially projected to double again between 1997 and 2016 - to almost three times it 1991 level. After the election in 1997 the new Government accepted the validity of my argument that the Luas service from Ranelagh inwards would at an early stage in its operation have inadequate capacity. It also accepted that an overground tram system would create congestion in the city centre. But, unhappily, a half-baked compromise was then arrived at, reportedly at the instance of the Progressive Democrats.
Under this new proposal the overground Luas from Sandyford would be quickly completed, but only as far as St Stephens Green. Then later, perhaps by 2010, it would be replaced by an underground route from the airport to Ranelagh, whence the Luas line would be upgraded to metro standard and extended to Cherrywood, near Loughlinstown.
This decision postponed rail access to Dublin Airport for a decade.
Last year, because of increasing concern about this issue, the Government began to re-examine its options. And this has now led to the pre-election announcement on Wednesday of a "metro", of which, and I quote from the official release: "Phase one comprises a line from Dublin Airport to the city centre and Shanganagh near Bray (to link with DART), with a spur to Blanchardstown. The Luas line to Sandyford will be upgraded to metro status. It is hoped to complete this phase by 2007."
Meanwhile completion of the overground Luas line from Sandyford, due to have been finished in the late 1990s, has been allowed to drift to a date described to me as "realistically, early 2004". This means that the part of the line running from south of Ranelagh to St Stephen's Green, will now have a life of only three years!
This soon-to-be-redundant part of the line involves laying 2.25 km of tram-track, the construction of which would for a period block Adelaide Road, Harcourt Street and St Stephen's Green West, and it also involves building two new bridges at Ranelagh, another two across Northbrook Road and Dartmouth Road, and a further long one across Grand Parade and the Grand Canal. All of that for three years of a tram service!
As a Luas-line resident I would, of course, love to have the service operating in two years time, but I could not conceivably justify such a huge investment for a three-year return. Nor could any rational government. However I suppose that because of the election the deferment of this line pending completion of tunnelling from Ranelagh inwards will have to await a post-May announcement.
But that is not the whole of it. For, despite the Government's announcement of this new route as a metro project, and its statement that the Luas line to Sandyford "is to be upgraded to metro status", inquiries have revealed that this is not going to be a metro line. Instead it is being down-graded to an light rail transport (LRT) to operate part of the way in a tunnel!
What is the difference between the two?
The LRT trains for the Luas service are to be at least 30 metres long, and will operate on a narrower gauge than the DART. They are stated to have a maximum capacity of 236 passengers - cramming them in, with seating for only 26 per cent of them. By contrast the DART vehicles, at 20.4 metres long, are stated by Iarnród Éireann to have a passenger capacity of 250 per coach , with 72, or almost 30 per cent, of them seated, and they appear to be more strongly built to take the greater pressure of passenger numbers.
Thus a Luas coach has a maximum capacity of 7.9 passengers per metre of length, whereas the DART coaches can carry 12.25 passengers per metre of length. This means that to carry any given number of passengers, the length of an LRT train will need to be 55 per cent greater than that of a DART train - or, if the train length remains the same, 55 per cent more trains will need to be operated!
The LRT trains are also slower, with a maximum speed of 90 km per hour as against 100 km per hour for the DART. And, frankly, they are unsuitable for a route to an airport, carrying airline passengers with luggage - just as the Piccadilly Line Tube proved inadequate at Heathrow Airport, which is now served by main-line train coaches designed to handle airline passengers and their luggage.
Finally, the decision to operate this so-called metro route with narrower gauge vehicles than the DART means that the two systems will be incompatible: for example, it will never be possible to travel to Bray or Greystones by the metro service from the airport. All such passengers will have to change at Shanganagh Junction, a station in Shanganagh Park, remote from any population centre. This is an arrangement that will certainly remind people who have been to Mayo of its famous Manulla Junction, where passengers to and from Ballina have to change in similar isolation.
Like many other decisions taken in a hurry before an election, this metro announcement will need to be revisited by whatever government is elected in June. And speedily revisited at that, before irretrievable investment decisions are made.
For, due to repeated mishandling by successive governments, this project, which would have been completed before the end of the 1990s if the right decisions had been taken when relevant issues were raised in 1995-1996, is now almost a decade behind schedule.