There is a suspicion, at least in Vincent Browne's mind, that the people running Cabin Fever have been running Dublin transport for the last decade. This is unfair. In Cabin Fever the ship has gone on the rocks only once (so far).
Garret FitzGerald has recently drawn attention again to the stark raving lunacy that the Luas project represents: 2½ kilometres of the Tallaght line runs through fields instead of running through densely populated areas; the planning of the project failed to take account of the dramatic rise in the Dublin workforce and car ownership; the volume of peak traffic was seriously underestimated because of an obvious mistake; because of other initial blunders, the idea of running a Luas line from Stillorgan to the airport has had to be abandoned; the metro project when it gets under way will cause the closure of a major part of one of the Luas lines for years; the Luas lines are being built to a gauge width different to the existing rail width, which means it will be impossible to link the system to the existing rail network.
But I think the lunacy goes further. Why was this vastly expensive project undertaken in the first place? By the way, in 1994 the projected cost of three lines linking the city centre with Tallaght, Ballymun and Cabinteely was £300 million (i.e. €381 million). Now the projected cost of two lines linking the city centre with Tallaght and Sandyford (several miles short of Cabinteely) is €675 million.
What is so special about buses that run on railway lines, as compared with buses that run on roads? At one fell stroke, we could vastly increase the number of people using public transport here if we simply provided more bus lanes, thereby enabling the existing bus fleet to undertake more trips per day.
At a few fell strokes, we could have provided all the area now being given over to Luas to buses.
There would have been no need to tear up the roads, no need for tracks and overhead wires and it could have been done at a fraction of the cost.
Luas trams will each carry about 280 passengers, compared with about 65 on buses, but four buses could carry almost as many as a tram and would be far cheaper. And, incidentally, everyone of these 65 passengers on the buses would have a place to sit down, whereas on the trams about 80 per cent of the passengers will have to stand at peak times.
The light-rail madness has not stopped. The plan to link the city centre with the airport is still alive.
The coach service that links the airport with Ballsbridge and Donnybrook shows how effective a bus service can be, so why spend some more hundreds of millions of euros on a rail service that won't even link with the light-rail lines now under construction?
The commuter rail service has become a major part of the public transport system but one of the problems with it is the fact that we have three main railway stations in the city, one of them (Hueston) a few miles from the centre of the city. Wouldn't you think that a central part of transportation plans would be to provide a single terminus in the entire of the city, linked to bus, DART and light rail services?
I understand there is a plan to provide what is called an "underground interconnector" between Heuston station and Connolly station, but why was it not planned to get rid of Heuston altogether and have just a single terminus at Connolly, which would allow the commuters from Kildare and the western suburbs of Dublin to be brought right into the centre of the city?
And now there are plans to widen the M50 at the cost of almost another €1 billion.
Do we not know by now that providing more motorways around Dublin will simply cause there to be more cars around Dublin and the same congestion or worse? Why not opt to do the reverse: provide bus lanes on the M50, cutting down the space available for cars, thereby encouraging people to use public transport?
Of all the innovations of the last century and beyond, the emergence of the motor car as the primary means of transport has proved the most deleterious.
The cost of private transportation has been gigantic - the cost of the cars themselves, insurance, fuel, roads, the cost of accidents, the huge loss of life and injury.
If we vastly curtailed private transport as a society we could afford the infrastructure and services to solve most of our social problems. But cars have had another effect as well. They have heightened the sense of "individuation", the sense of us being private separate beings, rather than as social beings whose identity is rooted in society. How else can one interpret the almost uniquely anti-social behaviour of people in cars?
Perhaps too much private motoring has done it to the planners of our transportation system.