Orbital, SW lines and Lucan are needed and would be welcomed.
I would have thought a more comprehensive system would already be in active development. The original Green Line and Red Line cost €728m together. I take the Red Line to work, it’s always rammed. It’s popular!
Short term the focus seems to be elsewhere (Dart+, Metrolink and Bus Connects especially). There is half the idea that you could take the Bus Connects CBCs ([compare](https://busconnects.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/12-map.jpg)) and "upgrade" them relatively quickly to tram, you'd have the space (and proof of demand).
I'd be fairly bullish on trams for Dublin. I think a tram network is closer to what a lot of Dubliners really want and that is actually achievable. I want a high density Dublin with an underground metro network, but you don't build metros to service semi-ds.
Unfortunately the Dart underground isn't going to happen or so it seems. It would be a gamechanger to have two interconnecting Dart Lines **plus** the Metrolink.
Yeah it would. In fairness, I don't think we've the appetite to do it properly (i.e. four tracks) and it was being costed at about twice the price of Metro North (1.8bn vs 3bn) back in the 2000s, so one can only imagine what it would look like today (granted, Dart+ electrification and upgrades probably taking some of the costs from that iteration out)
I think the big two really are Swords and the Airport for pushing it into Metro territory over tram. If you were just serving the area within the M50 to Ballymun or so a tram would probably manage (or at least manage in the sense that the Green Line or Red Line are currently) but hard to see how you'd get by with the addition of the airport traffic and especially the Swords traffic, especially given the plans for Swords to grow.
The Glasnevin Interchange is going to be transformative. You can come from the airport and change for trains to the south and west without having to travel to the city centre. It’s going to be a huge part of the joined up thinking around public transport.
The airport on its own would never support metrolink. At peak, the airport does about 100k people per day. Metrolink is scaled to carry 20k people per _hour_, _each way_ (so 40k total). So even if everyone using the airport is going to and from Dublin and uses the metro (implausible) you’re still only using a small amount of the capacity.
Metrolink is supposed to do 40k per hour?
Crossrail, the new space aged gigantic metro in London has cost £24bn, and it does about 700k pax per day, on an 18 hour day that's about 38,000 per hour.
There is no way Metrolink is ever going to cover that many people.
There aren't enough people to do the 244 million journeys per year that you're talking about. The Luas lines, combined, do 48 million journeys per year.
To be clear, 40k is the peak time bidirectional capacity for metrolink (crossrail’s is about 80k, green luas is about 18k). It won’t operate at that capacity 18 hours a day. However, it should swallow the airport traffic without a trace.
No, the Luas already goes too far out. The focus for such a mode should be the city centre and inner suburbs. Outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for.
I think the luas does a pretty good job of long distance journeys. It’s more “light rail” than tram.
Outside the city centre the luas rarely shares its track with cars and can hit 70km/h.
Passenger capacity is its Achilles heel though. Both the red and green are at absolute capacity.
The LUAS is one of the few successes for public transport, and people from all walks of life like it (if not love it). I don't know why there is so much faffing around for what is a relatively small cost in comparison to other systems - they should get on with building LUAS lines across Dublin, and one or two for Cork, Limerick and Galway.
One or two lines in Cork? I think you mean a full network, like in other cities of ~200k.
And we need _metro_ lines across Dublin. Luas should be primarily for shorter journeys.
We don't really have the density for Metro in Dublin. The highest density areas are being developed on the edges of the city - taking a LUAS from one end of the line to the other, you start by passing through high density apartment areas, then big houses with huge gardens, then rows of semi-Ds, and finally commercial buildings in the city centre. So yes LUAS is slow and Metro would be ideal for speed, but a low-density doughnut city is the way our planners have clearly encouraged the city to develop.
Wrong. Dublin is dense enough for metro, and even if it wasn't at the moment, infrastructure is meant to come first, with development and density coming later.
Subsidising landlords seems to be more important than building the kind of infrastructure that'll make Dublin a livable city. So many friends are leaving. All pretty successful. Dublin is apparently now mainly for people at the extreme ends of the income distribution.
Dublin always had crap transport, in the noughties most of us moved out to the surrounding counties in order to buy. The big difference between then and now is the rents, back then you could rent in dublin. But the abolition of the bed sits plus the increases in hab have changed all that. So the exodus has been going on since the bacon report back in 2000. I have no hope that anyone can turn that around in less than a decade.
Is that all they cost?
Jesus they're terrific value for money, I imagine Dublin would be a complete joke without them.
140,000 journeys made on the Luas each day, and that's with working from home, and Covid, etc.
That's pretty great.
In perhaps a lesson on how we see public infrastructure projects, people at the time thought it was [delayed and too expensive](https://www.rte.ie/archives/2023/0815/1399911-luas-off-track/)
Nimbys tend to mysteriously disappear when the thing actually gets built and is a net positive.
It’s hilarious to see people today complain that public transport investment will make traffic worse (bus lanes and closing level crossings), despite the same arguments being rolled out (and thoroughly disproven) by the luas 20 years ago.
That’s what they cost when they were built. Construction inflation means you would probably triple it. Plus, most of the green line was on an existing rail track.
No, you're right, Dublin is unlivable for many people.
It's basically terrible unless you're stinking rich.
They need to build a fuck load of public transport, in fairness
Even if you are stinking rich it isn't necessarily fantastic. It still lacks a lot of things that are a given in other similarly sized cities, and even some smaller ones.
Don't be daft, Cork Galway and Limerick don't exist in the world of infrastructure planning 😁.
Galway got an expensive Luas consultation and an artists impression a few years back, that's about all we'll ever get.
Don’t underestimate Cork City Council’s ability to delay and decimate public transport plans.
We were meant to have achieved a preferred route in 2022 and it’s still delayed over deciding between which of TWO STREETS it should run down in the city centre.
[https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41402584.html#:~:text=The%20emerging%20preferred%20route%20had,for%20public%20consultation%20this%20year](https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41402584.html#:~:text=The%20emerging%20preferred%20route%20had,for%20public%20consultation%20this%20year)
I think it is criminal that planned orbital does not extend to the airport.
I mean they are talking about taking unnecessary traffic out of Dublin city, yet in 30+ years whole west Dublin area either takes a bus through the city center or a car via m50, crazy.
Every single one of these should be a metro line. Light rail is meant for journeys within city centres and inner suburbs. Outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for.
Exactly. This is nearly as bad as building only a 2.1km runway and refusing to extend it at an airport that serves millions of passengers a year and is pushing hard to get longer routes that are far more viable with a proper length runway.
The luas is arguably a hybrid anyway. The green luas in particular does a lot of its mileage on segregated lines, and had a pretty high hourly capacity for a tram system (almost 9000 people per direction per hour at peak, nearly half the planned capacity of metrolink).
Trams arent generally used for such long journeys though, they are infrastructure for shorter hops. Mainly because the further the distance the tram goes then more and more of the cities population are within the lines catchment area and you need more and more capacity on board. For longer distances thats why heavy rail (either under or over ground) is the infrastructure of choice because you can fit almost 1,000 people on a train whereas a tram is full up at 300.
Its genuinely baffling how unambitious the plans are for the next few years. We should just be laying a new section of track every day until the city is nothing but tracks (genuinely).
Wait tlil you hear these are actually the plans for the next few DECADES. That's how incredibly unambitious and apathetic this country is about infrastructure.
I would still expect a futureama style version of Michael McDowells head to be objecting to each of these extensions.
The dipshit is objecting to the charlemont metro on the grounds that it won’t have adequate car parking.
Like how far off the mark do you need to be that you can’t envisage how people will manage to use an central transit hub unless they can drive.
Can you imagine Piccadilly Circus or Leister Square underground lines being shuttered because of a lack of parking.
It beggars belief.
Sure look, a lot can happen in 25 years.
Man will land on Mars, we'll have a new space station orbiting the moon, nuclear fusion will be only 10 more years away and Ireland will have finally dusted off these old plans from 2024 and might then decide to give one of the lines a go, what the heck, never too late.
So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line? Everything else is open ended from 2040 until Pangaea reforms. Is the second route from Sandyford to Stephen's Green just so the poshos don't feel left out? While I'm clearly taking out my bad day at work on these designs, it does look like a good network. Perhaps I'm showing my lack of local knowledge but why not extend the Balgriffin route to the airport?
>Is the second route from Sandyford to Stephen's Green just so the poshos don't feel left out?
It's the fall back since the green line upgrade to Metro standard seems to be proving too awkward. We need extra capacity if we're going to extend to Bray and continue building the likes of Cherrywood.
>So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line?
And Metrolink and Dart+. And Poolbeg (although that really is a tiny extension that should already be being built).
Showing your age there son.
I would be amazed if one single Luas extension was delivered by 2040. No chance of Metro and the DART+ will surely get killed too.
I mean it is completely beyond the imagination, ambition or competence of the entire Irish state to
1. Open a DART station in Cabra
2. Expand the size of the Phoenix park tunnel
on EXISTING FUCKING INFRASTRUTURE
You think they will deliver Lucan, Finglas and Swords ?
They will deliver one of those at most.
Mark my words, as soon as the Greens are out - it'll be back to "reviews" "pauses" "shelving" and fucking cars everywhere as before.
> So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line?
It took 5 years of "planning" before we even started getting shovels in dirt on DART+ west so yeah. It's gonna take for fucking ever to do anything.
Just to put it in to perspective it took 6 years for Americans in the 1800s to build the first transcontinental railroad.
Orbital should be a continuous line along the M50, all the way to the airport. It makes no sense to have to go to the city center to get to the airport if you live in Blanchardstown.
Kind of interesting to go for "*Inner* North/South Circle", implies an outer one, but they've opted for Orbital West instead of say, Outer West Circle, but then this is the first time those have appeared on an official map and they're not so much a plan here as an aspiration. Like, it would surely also be weird not to run the North one to at least the Blanch line? Dunsink/Scribblestown is in theory up for redevelopment in the timescale involved here.
Unless there's an idea that you'd run a circular service on a selection of the inner lines (portions of the Lucan+Red+Green?).
I remember in ~2002 in Liffey Valley there was a huge 3d model mockup of the shopping centre and the surrounding area and it had the plans for public transport on it. It had a LUAS line on there scheduled to open in 2010 with the line extended out to Lucan by 2015… if only!
This reminds me of all the times I've seen renders for a new office or student accommodation block that show shops on the ground floor but then when they eventually go and build it, there's nothing.
The luas was a great success when it opened, but now it's over subscribed to the point of it being abused.
If they are bringing in a tunnel boring machine they may as well get their monies worth out of it and bore a comprehensive, future proofed metro network. Even if they can't get all lines up and running immediately, they would have the tunnels ready to go.
Rather than building one line and abandoning the machine under ground for all eternity.
The Rail Review has targets to open up rail lines by 2050 too.
I'm in my 20s now, but when we get to the 2050s, I'll be in my mid-50s. It's so hard to not give up hope and move to a country that actually has functioning rail and tram lines today.
Most of the land on the outside edge of the M50 is either fields or industrial. Build an orbital rail there and put high density apartments at each station, like they did at Pelletstown. Mark where Dublin will expand too in the next 50 years and plan a rail network around it with high density apartments at the stations. The Appartments could fund the rail building.
Ah the proposed Bray extension. Still talking about it nearly 20 years later. The proposed development infront of my parents is still waiting for it to get permission
Ah come on, let's be honest. This would be incredible in 10 years. That's 14 lines I am counting here. It would being the entire city to a standstill if more than a 2 or 3 of these are done together, not to mention the overhead in planning, project execution, the sheer manpower and resources required. Yes the city needs this in 10 years (or arguably, even now), but we're not gonna get it even with the most ambitious plans and government.
We fucked up our infrastructure planning and development for the last 10-15 years or so (and probably even earlier) and it's not gonna be possible to catch-up on the short term. We just have to dream about better public transport and live with what we have, while improving as much as we can and hope future generations have it better. I've just learned to accept that now.
It wouldn't be incredible, it would be an achievement, yes, but also a mistake.
Long cross-city journeys to and from outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for, not trams!
That bit I agree with. I'm just saying the amount of work and overheads involved in getting this done in 10 years.
I personally think anything beyond the m50 needs a heavy rail/dart or metro.
Will be interesting to see how all of those lines manage to cross the city centre, particularly if they are the extra long trams. I really hope that the plan is to put them underground.
This might be a stupid question but would it be quicker to build and cheaper to start the metro at the end of the finglas or balgriffin line and just have more trams on those lines. Or extend them both to meet at some point where you then start the metro?
> and just have more trams on those lines
That’s a _huge_ ‘just’, tho. At peak times green luas tram frequencies are as low as 3 minutes. Without a fully segregated system (that’s the key difference between a metro and something like the luas; the metro doesn’t have to interact with other traffic), you’re not going to push it much further than that.
Fair enough I did say I could have been a stupid idea. I would have been up in Dublin weekly before the Luas but It's been years since I was in Dublin so I wouldn't have much experience in how frequently it goes
With all this extra fucking cash we have, can't we expedite these orbital and auxiliary lines? It's a bit of a joke as these lines are needed today for the existing infrastructure, let alone these reports that we need to construct 50,000 dwellings a year. Get on with it for fuck sake.
Is the green and red lines not running near maximum already? Would it be better to have new lines for the likes of Lucan, Finglas and such. Also extending to Bray doesn't make sense when they already have the dart and a good bus service.
Not that it matters much, we'll all be cold in the grave before this gets off the ground
In my nearly 40 years of life in this country I can't begin to count how many maps identical to this one that I've seen of potential planned transport systems for Dublin. We still have just one Dart, two Luas and a half-assed bus network.
Every one of these Luas lines should currently be in planning and roll out one after the other. Using the same planners and builders to move onto the next project without stopping. Build economies of scale and efficiency.
There is a lack of alternative routes in the city. In Melbourne the through city teams had several route options in the event of an accident.
In this plan everything is running down the abbey st line.
Pretty depressing to be honest - by the time this comes onboard I'll be too old to enjoy it in any meaningful capacity. This honestly want me to just spend the next 25 years living in an actually well-designed city right now rather than just...kinda wait for it.
Visions from smoking crack.
FF, FG, and SF are not for public transport and will continue to shaft the capital. Expect alot of talk but fuck all delivery.
Lazy, useless cunts.
If you are voting for parties other than the Green party then you should realise, you are in effect voting against public transport because, even Labour and the SocDems are wobbly.
Honestly if you want public transport, move to Paris, us pig ignorant paddies are too in love with our Qashqais to do anything else.
Sure the entitled High Court soutside set have taken High Court action against Bus connects and the thing is, they will probably win too !
It serves a good area. Swords is the biggest town in Ireland without a rail line. The airport should have a good connection with the city and a tram would be quite slow.
The Luas was relatively cheap because it was built on existing rail lines and roads. The metro link route isn't as easy to get tram tracks in
That diagram doesn’t show Metrolink’s full extent. People tend to think of it as an airport link, but the airport is actually only a little bit more than half way along it.
Extending the green line Finglas -> IKEA -> Dublin Airport seems like an obvious choice over the doomed Metrolink.
Also planning an orbital along the canals seems the obvious choice. There is an existing rail line along the royal canal.
Whoa whoa hold on. I recently saw the nepo baby of nepo babies finance minister on RTE saying how all Irelands money is going into a 'fund'. We don't have money for this lads. Put it away
Why the heck would you do that? The Royal canal has a railway that will be converted to Dart as far as Maynooth. the canals are a corridor for nature and amenity.
More public transport is good. useless antediluvian canals bad. The canal on the southside that is roughly equivalent to the inner south circle above would be perfect.
Nah, not necessary.
Canals are an amenity now as I said, would be crazy taking away a huge amount green space for transport.
Was something that was talked about way back in the day and is as crazy an idea now as then.
Orbital, SW lines and Lucan are needed and would be welcomed. I would have thought a more comprehensive system would already be in active development. The original Green Line and Red Line cost €728m together. I take the Red Line to work, it’s always rammed. It’s popular!
Short term the focus seems to be elsewhere (Dart+, Metrolink and Bus Connects especially). There is half the idea that you could take the Bus Connects CBCs ([compare](https://busconnects.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/12-map.jpg)) and "upgrade" them relatively quickly to tram, you'd have the space (and proof of demand). I'd be fairly bullish on trams for Dublin. I think a tram network is closer to what a lot of Dubliners really want and that is actually achievable. I want a high density Dublin with an underground metro network, but you don't build metros to service semi-ds.
Unfortunately the Dart underground isn't going to happen or so it seems. It would be a gamechanger to have two interconnecting Dart Lines **plus** the Metrolink.
Yeah it would. In fairness, I don't think we've the appetite to do it properly (i.e. four tracks) and it was being costed at about twice the price of Metro North (1.8bn vs 3bn) back in the 2000s, so one can only imagine what it would look like today (granted, Dart+ electrification and upgrades probably taking some of the costs from that iteration out)
That's not even the bare minimum, let alone a game changer.
Ah, never copped that about the Connects CBCs. Thanks.
That's it, the metro will remain busy because of the airport, otherwise, the Luas is where it's at.
Swords, DCU, Mater, Glasnevin interchange, Tara St. - not just the airport.
I think the big two really are Swords and the Airport for pushing it into Metro territory over tram. If you were just serving the area within the M50 to Ballymun or so a tram would probably manage (or at least manage in the sense that the Green Line or Red Line are currently) but hard to see how you'd get by with the addition of the airport traffic and especially the Swords traffic, especially given the plans for Swords to grow.
The Glasnevin Interchange is going to be transformative. You can come from the airport and change for trains to the south and west without having to travel to the city centre. It’s going to be a huge part of the joined up thinking around public transport.
The airport on its own would never support metrolink. At peak, the airport does about 100k people per day. Metrolink is scaled to carry 20k people per _hour_, _each way_ (so 40k total). So even if everyone using the airport is going to and from Dublin and uses the metro (implausible) you’re still only using a small amount of the capacity.
Metrolink is supposed to do 40k per hour? Crossrail, the new space aged gigantic metro in London has cost £24bn, and it does about 700k pax per day, on an 18 hour day that's about 38,000 per hour. There is no way Metrolink is ever going to cover that many people. There aren't enough people to do the 244 million journeys per year that you're talking about. The Luas lines, combined, do 48 million journeys per year.
To be clear, 40k is the peak time bidirectional capacity for metrolink (crossrail’s is about 80k, green luas is about 18k). It won’t operate at that capacity 18 hours a day. However, it should swallow the airport traffic without a trace.
Brilliant news, then build high density housing along the Metrolink line, and you might have a city that can support 2 million some day.
No, the Luas already goes too far out. The focus for such a mode should be the city centre and inner suburbs. Outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for.
I think the luas does a pretty good job of long distance journeys. It’s more “light rail” than tram. Outside the city centre the luas rarely shares its track with cars and can hit 70km/h. Passenger capacity is its Achilles heel though. Both the red and green are at absolute capacity.
The LUAS is one of the few successes for public transport, and people from all walks of life like it (if not love it). I don't know why there is so much faffing around for what is a relatively small cost in comparison to other systems - they should get on with building LUAS lines across Dublin, and one or two for Cork, Limerick and Galway.
One or two lines in Cork? I think you mean a full network, like in other cities of ~200k. And we need _metro_ lines across Dublin. Luas should be primarily for shorter journeys.
We don't really have the density for Metro in Dublin. The highest density areas are being developed on the edges of the city - taking a LUAS from one end of the line to the other, you start by passing through high density apartment areas, then big houses with huge gardens, then rows of semi-Ds, and finally commercial buildings in the city centre. So yes LUAS is slow and Metro would be ideal for speed, but a low-density doughnut city is the way our planners have clearly encouraged the city to develop.
Wrong. Dublin is dense enough for metro, and even if it wasn't at the moment, infrastructure is meant to come first, with development and density coming later.
Cos ireland is spending billions every year on housing at the moment. 7 billion allocated to depth of housing in budget 2024.
Subsidising landlords seems to be more important than building the kind of infrastructure that'll make Dublin a livable city. So many friends are leaving. All pretty successful. Dublin is apparently now mainly for people at the extreme ends of the income distribution.
Dublin always had crap transport, in the noughties most of us moved out to the surrounding counties in order to buy. The big difference between then and now is the rents, back then you could rent in dublin. But the abolition of the bed sits plus the increases in hab have changed all that. So the exodus has been going on since the bacon report back in 2000. I have no hope that anyone can turn that around in less than a decade.
Is that all they cost? Jesus they're terrific value for money, I imagine Dublin would be a complete joke without them. 140,000 journeys made on the Luas each day, and that's with working from home, and Covid, etc. That's pretty great.
In perhaps a lesson on how we see public infrastructure projects, people at the time thought it was [delayed and too expensive](https://www.rte.ie/archives/2023/0815/1399911-luas-off-track/) Nimbys tend to mysteriously disappear when the thing actually gets built and is a net positive.
It’s hilarious to see people today complain that public transport investment will make traffic worse (bus lanes and closing level crossings), despite the same arguments being rolled out (and thoroughly disproven) by the luas 20 years ago.
That’s what they cost when they were built. Construction inflation means you would probably triple it. Plus, most of the green line was on an existing rail track.
And it'd still pay for itself and then some. They are terrific value for money.
Your comment implies Dublin isn't a compelete joke (and that's being generous) today...
No, you're right, Dublin is unlivable for many people. It's basically terrible unless you're stinking rich. They need to build a fuck load of public transport, in fairness
Even if you are stinking rich it isn't necessarily fantastic. It still lacks a lot of things that are a given in other similarly sized cities, and even some smaller ones.
You'd think with a cheap price tag like that they'd pull the finger out and get this done ASAP along with systems in Cork, Galway and Limerick.
Don't be daft, Cork Galway and Limerick don't exist in the world of infrastructure planning 😁. Galway got an expensive Luas consultation and an artists impression a few years back, that's about all we'll ever get.
Exactly. And by systems, we mean systems, not single lines!
Don’t underestimate Cork City Council’s ability to delay and decimate public transport plans. We were meant to have achieved a preferred route in 2022 and it’s still delayed over deciding between which of TWO STREETS it should run down in the city centre. [https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41402584.html#:~:text=The%20emerging%20preferred%20route%20had,for%20public%20consultation%20this%20year](https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41402584.html#:~:text=The%20emerging%20preferred%20route%20had,for%20public%20consultation%20this%20year)
All the capital in the budget is going to providing social and 'affordable' housing.
Housing without amenities like transport and other services is how you create unlivable shitholes though.
Don't be silly, that's just what happens when you build above 4 storeys /s
I don't disagree but the voter pressure is for houses not for water systems, rail or even schools. It's all housing, housing, housing
I think it is criminal that planned orbital does not extend to the airport. I mean they are talking about taking unnecessary traffic out of Dublin city, yet in 30+ years whole west Dublin area either takes a bus through the city center or a car via m50, crazy.
“Post 2040” doing a lot of lifting
Maybe theyre hoping that the worst of the Nimbys will be dead by then and have finally shut up
And that's ignoring that it would be unambitious if it was for 2030.
Yeah I don't see this being finished till 2540.
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It's post 2040, not 2040. Technically 40,000AD is post 2040, maybe the plan is to let Roboute Guilliman handle this.
Trams for the Tram Line!
Every single one of these should be a metro line. Light rail is meant for journeys within city centres and inner suburbs. Outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for.
Glad somebody mentioned it. Some of these lines are total overkill for light rail, no way Lucan should be a Luas, it needs to be a subway.
Exactly. This is nearly as bad as building only a 2.1km runway and refusing to extend it at an airport that serves millions of passengers a year and is pushing hard to get longer routes that are far more viable with a proper length runway.
The luas is arguably a hybrid anyway. The green luas in particular does a lot of its mileage on segregated lines, and had a pretty high hourly capacity for a tram system (almost 9000 people per direction per hour at peak, nearly half the planned capacity of metrolink).
It's not a hybrid in the slightest. It's light rail, plain and simple.
Meto is also just light rail... Its short for metropolitan railway.
Luas is great for short hops, too many stops for long journeys though. Maybe the orbital routes will have more distance between stops.
Exactly. It's absolutely laughable that we're relying on buses and trams to take people to/from outer suburbs.
They do it in Amsterdam , think the longest tram ride from central station is 26km to the outskirts of Amstelveen
Trams arent generally used for such long journeys though, they are infrastructure for shorter hops. Mainly because the further the distance the tram goes then more and more of the cities population are within the lines catchment area and you need more and more capacity on board. For longer distances thats why heavy rail (either under or over ground) is the infrastructure of choice because you can fit almost 1,000 people on a train whereas a tram is full up at 300.
We could also just run more trams. The luas only arroves every 5 to 7 minutes. We could double the amount of vehicles
Its genuinely baffling how unambitious the plans are for the next few years. We should just be laying a new section of track every day until the city is nothing but tracks (genuinely).
Wait tlil you hear these are actually the plans for the next few DECADES. That's how incredibly unambitious and apathetic this country is about infrastructure.
The budget is focused on building houses, as that's what the votes 'want', in the late 90s early naughties it was motorways across the country.
I would still expect a futureama style version of Michael McDowells head to be objecting to each of these extensions. The dipshit is objecting to the charlemont metro on the grounds that it won’t have adequate car parking. Like how far off the mark do you need to be that you can’t envisage how people will manage to use an central transit hub unless they can drive. Can you imagine Piccadilly Circus or Leister Square underground lines being shuttered because of a lack of parking. It beggars belief.
Sure look, a lot can happen in 25 years. Man will land on Mars, we'll have a new space station orbiting the moon, nuclear fusion will be only 10 more years away and Ireland will have finally dusted off these old plans from 2024 and might then decide to give one of the lines a go, what the heck, never too late.
How about an undersea one connecting Dun Laoghaire and Howth.
By the time they'll build the "2050" Luas, it'll be all under water anyway.
2050!?! man I gotta emigrate to a functioning country asap
And this would be a joke if was for 2030, let alone 2050.
This would be a joke if this was built in 6 years??
The joke would only be using trams for journeys that are decades overdue metro and/or heavy rail.
Like a joke in the sense it'd be utterly unachievable given where we're starting from?
So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line? Everything else is open ended from 2040 until Pangaea reforms. Is the second route from Sandyford to Stephen's Green just so the poshos don't feel left out? While I'm clearly taking out my bad day at work on these designs, it does look like a good network. Perhaps I'm showing my lack of local knowledge but why not extend the Balgriffin route to the airport?
>Is the second route from Sandyford to Stephen's Green just so the poshos don't feel left out? It's the fall back since the green line upgrade to Metro standard seems to be proving too awkward. We need extra capacity if we're going to extend to Bray and continue building the likes of Cherrywood. >So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line? And Metrolink and Dart+. And Poolbeg (although that really is a tiny extension that should already be being built).
I remember seeing a twitter post ages ago where somebody proposed a Ringsend Poolbeg line that went from the Point all the way to College Green!
Showing your age there son. I would be amazed if one single Luas extension was delivered by 2040. No chance of Metro and the DART+ will surely get killed too. I mean it is completely beyond the imagination, ambition or competence of the entire Irish state to 1. Open a DART station in Cabra 2. Expand the size of the Phoenix park tunnel on EXISTING FUCKING INFRASTRUTURE You think they will deliver Lucan, Finglas and Swords ? They will deliver one of those at most. Mark my words, as soon as the Greens are out - it'll be back to "reviews" "pauses" "shelving" and fucking cars everywhere as before.
Yep sadly I think we're right to be very skeptical here
Bit moronic to label everyone on that end poshos
Yeh it is, I was in a shit mood but no excuse
> So in the next 16 years we should expect a tiny extension to Finglas and a Lucan line? It took 5 years of "planning" before we even started getting shovels in dirt on DART+ west so yeah. It's gonna take for fucking ever to do anything. Just to put it in to perspective it took 6 years for Americans in the 1800s to build the first transcontinental railroad.
I think it's badly designed too tbh.
The pace of change is a joke. We need to ramp this up big time.
Orbital should be a continuous line along the M50, all the way to the airport. It makes no sense to have to go to the city center to get to the airport if you live in Blanchardstown.
Kind of interesting to go for "*Inner* North/South Circle", implies an outer one, but they've opted for Orbital West instead of say, Outer West Circle, but then this is the first time those have appeared on an official map and they're not so much a plan here as an aspiration. Like, it would surely also be weird not to run the North one to at least the Blanch line? Dunsink/Scribblestown is in theory up for redevelopment in the timescale involved here. Unless there's an idea that you'd run a circular service on a selection of the inner lines (portions of the Lucan+Red+Green?).
I remember in ~2002 in Liffey Valley there was a huge 3d model mockup of the shopping centre and the surrounding area and it had the plans for public transport on it. It had a LUAS line on there scheduled to open in 2010 with the line extended out to Lucan by 2015… if only!
This reminds me of all the times I've seen renders for a new office or student accommodation block that show shops on the ground floor but then when they eventually go and build it, there's nothing.
Source: https://www.tii.ie/media/ovolpteo/luas-benefits_2024.pdf
As close to being real as my vision of winning Euro millions
Kept the map designer in a job anyway, can do a new one after the election.
2050? Lads at least try be ambitious 😂
This wouldn't be ambitious if it was for 2030!
The luas was a great success when it opened, but now it's over subscribed to the point of it being abused. If they are bringing in a tunnel boring machine they may as well get their monies worth out of it and bore a comprehensive, future proofed metro network. Even if they can't get all lines up and running immediately, they would have the tunnels ready to go. Rather than building one line and abandoning the machine under ground for all eternity.
TWENTY FIFTY. This should be the 2030 plan.
2050 ffs. Took them 9 years to complete the M50 upgrade. Not a hope they complete that by 2050.
And that's ignoring that this would be unambitious if it was for 2030.
The Rail Review has targets to open up rail lines by 2050 too. I'm in my 20s now, but when we get to the 2050s, I'll be in my mid-50s. It's so hard to not give up hope and move to a country that actually has functioning rail and tram lines today.
Was this found in the science fiction & fantasy section?
Expand the LUAS lines to Cork by 2150
Most of the land on the outside edge of the M50 is either fields or industrial. Build an orbital rail there and put high density apartments at each station, like they did at Pelletstown. Mark where Dublin will expand too in the next 50 years and plan a rail network around it with high density apartments at the stations. The Appartments could fund the rail building.
Put it in the box with children’s hospital and metro
The consultants for the Luas will be living on the Moon with holidays to Mars before this is complete.
Wow, on my 60th Birthday I’ll be able to get the luas from Clondalkin *all the way* to Clongriffin! - the futures looking bright lads😎
Seeing as how this is the 2050 vision, I'd be surprised if I see it come to fruition before I die of old age sometime around 2080.
Exactly. And that's even though it would be a unambitious if it was for 2030.
Ah the proposed Bray extension. Still talking about it nearly 20 years later. The proposed development infront of my parents is still waiting for it to get permission
I think they actually bought a lot of land in the area for it and measured it out but the plan never went ahead.
For the love of God incorporate an orbital track when the inevitable widening of the M50 happens.
........LOL!
They should be getting this done in 15 years, not 25.
I'd expect a lot more than just this in 15 years. It wouldn't even be ambitious if it was for the next 10 years ffs.
Ah come on, let's be honest. This would be incredible in 10 years. That's 14 lines I am counting here. It would being the entire city to a standstill if more than a 2 or 3 of these are done together, not to mention the overhead in planning, project execution, the sheer manpower and resources required. Yes the city needs this in 10 years (or arguably, even now), but we're not gonna get it even with the most ambitious plans and government. We fucked up our infrastructure planning and development for the last 10-15 years or so (and probably even earlier) and it's not gonna be possible to catch-up on the short term. We just have to dream about better public transport and live with what we have, while improving as much as we can and hope future generations have it better. I've just learned to accept that now.
It wouldn't be incredible, it would be an achievement, yes, but also a mistake. Long cross-city journeys to and from outer suburbs are what metro and heavy rail are for, not trams!
That bit I agree with. I'm just saying the amount of work and overheads involved in getting this done in 10 years. I personally think anything beyond the m50 needs a heavy rail/dart or metro.
5 years
Will be interesting to see how all of those lines manage to cross the city centre, particularly if they are the extra long trams. I really hope that the plan is to put them underground.
This might be a stupid question but would it be quicker to build and cheaper to start the metro at the end of the finglas or balgriffin line and just have more trams on those lines. Or extend them both to meet at some point where you then start the metro?
> and just have more trams on those lines That’s a _huge_ ‘just’, tho. At peak times green luas tram frequencies are as low as 3 minutes. Without a fully segregated system (that’s the key difference between a metro and something like the luas; the metro doesn’t have to interact with other traffic), you’re not going to push it much further than that.
Fair enough I did say I could have been a stupid idea. I would have been up in Dublin weekly before the Luas but It's been years since I was in Dublin so I wouldn't have much experience in how frequently it goes
Actually the metro should start at the ends of every proposed Luas line, and run along them to the other end of each line.
Sea level rise will disrupt this
We need this and a proper metro linking all parts of the city. Dublin is so fucked when anything goes wrong.
Smoke along!
With all this extra fucking cash we have, can't we expedite these orbital and auxiliary lines? It's a bit of a joke as these lines are needed today for the existing infrastructure, let alone these reports that we need to construct 50,000 dwellings a year. Get on with it for fuck sake.
Wasn't there supposed to be a DART line going all the way to Kilcock? What happened to that?
This is only considering the LUAS and other light rail or metro standard. Heavy rail is not included.
That’s Dart+ West; totally unrelated to the Luas plans.
The Chinese build entire motorways stretching hundreds of miles all the time non stop and it'll take us 25 years to lay a bit of track. What the fuck.
Is the green and red lines not running near maximum already? Would it be better to have new lines for the likes of Lucan, Finglas and such. Also extending to Bray doesn't make sense when they already have the dart and a good bus service. Not that it matters much, we'll all be cold in the grave before this gets off the ground
In my nearly 40 years of life in this country I can't begin to count how many maps identical to this one that I've seen of potential planned transport systems for Dublin. We still have just one Dart, two Luas and a half-assed bus network.
Lol... that's more like 2150, 10x over budget and 1/3 of the proposed lines.
Every one of these Luas lines should currently be in planning and roll out one after the other. Using the same planners and builders to move onto the next project without stopping. Build economies of scale and efficiency.
There is a lack of alternative routes in the city. In Melbourne the through city teams had several route options in the event of an accident. In this plan everything is running down the abbey st line.
Obviously an election coming....what about the fucking metro? Not even started yet. What is this bullshit? We Irish are gullible as fuck
Pretty depressing to be honest - by the time this comes onboard I'll be too old to enjoy it in any meaningful capacity. This honestly want me to just spend the next 25 years living in an actually well-designed city right now rather than just...kinda wait for it.
If you're Irish, then you are an EU citizen. This may be an opportunity to take advantage of that fact.
Build an underground first.
2050 means 2100.
Yes, and that's despite these plans being unambitious if they were just for 2030.
Visions from smoking crack. FF, FG, and SF are not for public transport and will continue to shaft the capital. Expect alot of talk but fuck all delivery. Lazy, useless cunts. If you are voting for parties other than the Green party then you should realise, you are in effect voting against public transport because, even Labour and the SocDems are wobbly. Honestly if you want public transport, move to Paris, us pig ignorant paddies are too in love with our Qashqais to do anything else. Sure the entitled High Court soutside set have taken High Court action against Bus connects and the thing is, they will probably win too !
Still no stop at the airport. What a joke
Looks good.
It's a good sign when the troll account is saying the plans are good... ...because it means even he knows they're pathetically unambitious.
I give it to 3050 to actually get done
Metrolink seems to service a very small area for the billions it's going to cost, would it not be better and cheaper to expand the Luas even more?
It serves a good area. Swords is the biggest town in Ireland without a rail line. The airport should have a good connection with the city and a tram would be quite slow. The Luas was relatively cheap because it was built on existing rail lines and roads. The metro link route isn't as easy to get tram tracks in
It's hardly a small area
No. It would not be better. In fact, we need a hell of a lot more metro lines planned, not fucking less!
That diagram doesn’t show Metrolink’s full extent. People tend to think of it as an airport link, but the airport is actually only a little bit more than half way along it.
that sounds like a good idea but i think the issue is it wouldn't be able to handle the volume?
You'll get 3 extra stops on the redline and you'll be happy you got anything
I will take "Things that will never happen" for €1000
Worst Bladerunner sequel ever.
Stupid question but are they looking to connect the airport to the city centre with a Luas line? I would assume yes, but it isn't explicitly stated.
That’s what Metrolink is for
Interesting, thank you!
Metro is also meant to sevre longer journeys in general. We should not be reliant on trams to serve outer suburbs.
Just build the fucking LUAS to the airport for fuck sake you fucking morons
No. We're already too reliant on the LUAS for long journeys that should be metro and/or heavy rail as it is!
We already have a road network, so why bother with this at all? Does the bus network not already provide this?
Extending the green line Finglas -> IKEA -> Dublin Airport seems like an obvious choice over the doomed Metrolink. Also planning an orbital along the canals seems the obvious choice. There is an existing rail line along the royal canal.
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We need transport police. 100% … but we have major issues with lack of traffic corps and Garda in general
Whoa whoa hold on. I recently saw the nepo baby of nepo babies finance minister on RTE saying how all Irelands money is going into a 'fund'. We don't have money for this lads. Put it away
20 fucking 50 and still no airport link 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
‘Metrolink’ on the diagram will go through the airport.
drain the canals and put luas lines in.
Why the heck would you do that? The Royal canal has a railway that will be converted to Dart as far as Maynooth. the canals are a corridor for nature and amenity.
More public transport is good. useless antediluvian canals bad. The canal on the southside that is roughly equivalent to the inner south circle above would be perfect.
Nah, not necessary. Canals are an amenity now as I said, would be crazy taking away a huge amount green space for transport. Was something that was talked about way back in the day and is as crazy an idea now as then.
Mad there’s places in Ireland without a bus route & they’re expanding the Luas instead of