We have once-in-a-generation budget surpluses and we’re still using public-private partnerships that are bad value for tax payers.
For fucks sake.
Not be easier just expand the luas lines.
I worked in a company that done printing for architects, it was easily 19 years ago and remember them printing the drawing & plans for a metro project and here we are nearly 20 years later and still no metro
They are literally pissing our money into the wind!
Talk about mismanagement
Not surprising. Every government sees it as a far off project they only have to prepare for and announce. Not something they actually have to do. So it’s always 5-10 years away and has been for a generation.
*”Am going to need a group of people to look in to this for me, there is two years work in it and good pay, it’s cool we are just probing things, but the pay is good, oh what’s that ?*
*Outcomes ?*
*People get paid is that not a good enough outcome ?*
*It seems like a con you say ?*
*No, no no.”*
Imagine the crime on a metro in Dublin.
My old man worked on the metro plans in his first job back in the early 1980’s. He’s just short of retirement and it has still not been built.
What a laughable country.
The Irish built a couple of other countries undergrounds with nothing but a shovel and a pick.
We don’t need to wait for some German machine, we could build our own digging machine and start digging some holes and have an Underground in every city in Ireland not just a faster route to the Airport.
Take a look at just light rail for Europe, and that doesn’t even list all of them. What a short-sighted shithole we live in really.
Sure we were poor in the past but we’ve been wealthy longer than a lot of the countries on this list.
A list of metros in Europe paints a similar picture
The Irish Times have a blatant agenda against Metro Link, doing their best to get it shelved. It’s continuous negative reporting.
They view it as a ‘northside project’ not worthy of its readership, that’s the reality of it.
300 million spent and not a metro in sight … they’d be better off burning our money
Don’t worry, it will be relaunched again next year with a new start and opening date. It’s never happening. Like all the other false promises. No desire, no public pressure on them to build it. Just a money train for consultants. If they do start, it’ll go full children’s hospital. This country is an Anglo-American business, not a sovereign country.
I’ll be amazed when the Connelly to Heuston station link gets built. That’s a no brainer to connect two major pieces of infrastructure and cut cross city traffic down.
300 million and not a single brick has been laid down taking the piss.
JUST BUILD IT ALREADY
We are definitely getting the metro. It’s already been submitted for planning in parts and the funding is there. It was reasonable enough to pause it during the financial crisis.
My main issue is that we don’t seem to be yet planning the second metro line, or the 3rd, 4th, 5th Luas line. We seem to do everything sequentially, meaning the big new projects are all decades apart.
I remember being in primary school when Metro North was announced. I’m 33 now.
To be fair, that pic of the metro station looks very nice.
300 million well spent in my books!
A Dublin metro system would have been far better than the Luas. At least then it wouldn’t have taken up so much road space in the city centre.
Anyway I wouldn’t trust this government or any other to build a metro system. Since they can’t even build the new children’s hospital on budget and on time.
Id say the next two weeks will tell alot.
Classic holding a clipboard and pen while looking at something strategy.
I mastered this skill myself after many years in Tesco.
I’ve followed infrastructural projects in Ireland for over 20 years and I think lack of progress comes down to 3 issues again and again:
1. Waiting for perfection: an argument that’s something like “Sure, we could’ve sent the DART to the airport decades ago but by the time we might have done that, it would have completely screwed capacity on the Dublin-Belfast route. So isn’t it a good thing we waited?”
To which I’d reply no, it was a bad thing. Imagine in the 90s we sent a bare bones DART service east, just before Portmarnock, across empty fields to a tunnel next to ALSAA, then arrive in the basement of what’s now Terminal 1 (apparently the purpose of that basement all along)? It would have worked.
Capacity on the Dublin-Belfast line could be helped by simply making Dublin Airport a stop on every service, meaning instead of a DART, you’re on an Enterprise or one of those other yokes that go to Dundalk. Of course a Metro would be faster and not eat in to journey times of other services – but at least it would exist! We could then build a Metro but at least there’d have been a stopgap!
Ireland is a case study in letting perfection become the enemy of good. And btw, there’s still practically zilch between Portmarnock and ALSAA, just saying…..
2. Integration is lovely and if and when all these plans come about in the Phibsboro area, it’ll go from having no train station of any description to being both the meeting point of the Maynooth and Dunboyne DARTs as well as the DART from Newbridge and some day, hopefully, the Metrolink. So doesn’t that justify the millions wasted on a plan to send the Metro out to the airport in the late 2000s that had no integration with the DART in Dublin 7?
No, it would’ve been better to just build it then. Even during the crash; in fact *especially* during the crash. It would’ve kept a lot of construction workers and businesses in Ireland. Failing that, it was a gigantic waste not to build it immediately once we were clearly in a growing economy and for us not to at least finance it during negative interest rates was actually a fucking scandal.
Integration is lovely but again, not a good enough reason to hold off building asap.
3. Consultation: I know we have a planning process and people should have a say in what happens where they live. But…should they though? Like if someone objects to a rail line going behind their house (or even replacing their house), is that more important than the transportation needs of an entire city and (arguably) country?
We seem to think it is and as a result, any grouping of neighbours can seemingly block anything happening anywhere near them indefinitely. There’s no sense of urgency, no deadlines. I assumed I’d see the Metro by the time I was finished college. Then by the time I was commuting to work. Then…….well, basically I could be 60 by the time it opens. Entire lives have passed by while governments, civil servants, consultants and anyone else involved just check and check again.
We need a department that delivers infrastructure as its full time job. We shouldn’t need one but we clearly do because if there’s one thing this country needs to get better at, it’s building things.
I lived in an area one of the planned routes would run under like 10 years ago and I received a massive document envelope of plans and maps for the attention of residents. Every house/apartment must have gotten them. The printing cost for something that didn’t happen must have been astronomical
Munich did the same for ages and then finally cancelled their plans in 2008 — they had planned a direct maglev link between the airport and city centre. Would have reduced connection time from 45mins to 10mins.
Given the experience in Frankfurt (I could leave the office less than 2 hours before a flight, take an u-bahn and s-bahn and still make the flight), I can see the benefits but you really need somewhere like London or Frankfurt to satisfy that sort of capital spend.
We built 15 metro system in last 23 years from ground up with another 32 approved and half of them under construction here in India. Surely a small country like Ireland can do it relatively easily as compared to here but world is full of surprises.
27 comments
We have once-in-a-generation budget surpluses and we’re still using public-private partnerships that are bad value for tax payers.
For fucks sake.
Not be easier just expand the luas lines.
I worked in a company that done printing for architects, it was easily 19 years ago and remember them printing the drawing & plans for a metro project and here we are nearly 20 years later and still no metro
They are literally pissing our money into the wind!
Talk about mismanagement
Not surprising. Every government sees it as a far off project they only have to prepare for and announce. Not something they actually have to do. So it’s always 5-10 years away and has been for a generation.
*”Am going to need a group of people to look in to this for me, there is two years work in it and good pay, it’s cool we are just probing things, but the pay is good, oh what’s that ?*
*Outcomes ?*
*People get paid is that not a good enough outcome ?*
*It seems like a con you say ?*
*No, no no.”*
Imagine the crime on a metro in Dublin.
My old man worked on the metro plans in his first job back in the early 1980’s. He’s just short of retirement and it has still not been built.
What a laughable country.
The Irish built a couple of other countries undergrounds with nothing but a shovel and a pick.
We don’t need to wait for some German machine, we could build our own digging machine and start digging some holes and have an Underground in every city in Ireland not just a faster route to the Airport.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tram_and_light_rail_transit_systems
Take a look at just light rail for Europe, and that doesn’t even list all of them. What a short-sighted shithole we live in really.
Sure we were poor in the past but we’ve been wealthy longer than a lot of the countries on this list.
A list of metros in Europe paints a similar picture
The Irish Times have a blatant agenda against Metro Link, doing their best to get it shelved. It’s continuous negative reporting.
They view it as a ‘northside project’ not worthy of its readership, that’s the reality of it.
300 million spent and not a metro in sight … they’d be better off burning our money
Don’t worry, it will be relaunched again next year with a new start and opening date. It’s never happening. Like all the other false promises. No desire, no public pressure on them to build it. Just a money train for consultants. If they do start, it’ll go full children’s hospital. This country is an Anglo-American business, not a sovereign country.
I’ll be amazed when the Connelly to Heuston station link gets built. That’s a no brainer to connect two major pieces of infrastructure and cut cross city traffic down.
300 million and not a single brick has been laid down taking the piss.
JUST BUILD IT ALREADY
We are definitely getting the metro. It’s already been submitted for planning in parts and the funding is there. It was reasonable enough to pause it during the financial crisis.
My main issue is that we don’t seem to be yet planning the second metro line, or the 3rd, 4th, 5th Luas line. We seem to do everything sequentially, meaning the big new projects are all decades apart.
I remember being in primary school when Metro North was announced. I’m 33 now.
To be fair, that pic of the metro station looks very nice.
300 million well spent in my books!
A Dublin metro system would have been far better than the Luas. At least then it wouldn’t have taken up so much road space in the city centre.
Anyway I wouldn’t trust this government or any other to build a metro system. Since they can’t even build the new children’s hospital on budget and on time.
Id say the next two weeks will tell alot.
Classic holding a clipboard and pen while looking at something strategy.
I mastered this skill myself after many years in Tesco.
I’ve followed infrastructural projects in Ireland for over 20 years and I think lack of progress comes down to 3 issues again and again:
1. Waiting for perfection: an argument that’s something like “Sure, we could’ve sent the DART to the airport decades ago but by the time we might have done that, it would have completely screwed capacity on the Dublin-Belfast route. So isn’t it a good thing we waited?”
To which I’d reply no, it was a bad thing. Imagine in the 90s we sent a bare bones DART service east, just before Portmarnock, across empty fields to a tunnel next to ALSAA, then arrive in the basement of what’s now Terminal 1 (apparently the purpose of that basement all along)? It would have worked.
Capacity on the Dublin-Belfast line could be helped by simply making Dublin Airport a stop on every service, meaning instead of a DART, you’re on an Enterprise or one of those other yokes that go to Dundalk. Of course a Metro would be faster and not eat in to journey times of other services – but at least it would exist! We could then build a Metro but at least there’d have been a stopgap!
Ireland is a case study in letting perfection become the enemy of good. And btw, there’s still practically zilch between Portmarnock and ALSAA, just saying…..
2. Integration is lovely and if and when all these plans come about in the Phibsboro area, it’ll go from having no train station of any description to being both the meeting point of the Maynooth and Dunboyne DARTs as well as the DART from Newbridge and some day, hopefully, the Metrolink. So doesn’t that justify the millions wasted on a plan to send the Metro out to the airport in the late 2000s that had no integration with the DART in Dublin 7?
No, it would’ve been better to just build it then. Even during the crash; in fact *especially* during the crash. It would’ve kept a lot of construction workers and businesses in Ireland. Failing that, it was a gigantic waste not to build it immediately once we were clearly in a growing economy and for us not to at least finance it during negative interest rates was actually a fucking scandal.
Integration is lovely but again, not a good enough reason to hold off building asap.
3. Consultation: I know we have a planning process and people should have a say in what happens where they live. But…should they though? Like if someone objects to a rail line going behind their house (or even replacing their house), is that more important than the transportation needs of an entire city and (arguably) country?
We seem to think it is and as a result, any grouping of neighbours can seemingly block anything happening anywhere near them indefinitely. There’s no sense of urgency, no deadlines. I assumed I’d see the Metro by the time I was finished college. Then by the time I was commuting to work. Then…….well, basically I could be 60 by the time it opens. Entire lives have passed by while governments, civil servants, consultants and anyone else involved just check and check again.
We need a department that delivers infrastructure as its full time job. We shouldn’t need one but we clearly do because if there’s one thing this country needs to get better at, it’s building things.
I lived in an area one of the planned routes would run under like 10 years ago and I received a massive document envelope of plans and maps for the attention of residents. Every house/apartment must have gotten them. The printing cost for something that didn’t happen must have been astronomical
Munich did the same for ages and then finally cancelled their plans in 2008 — they had planned a direct maglev link between the airport and city centre. Would have reduced connection time from 45mins to 10mins.
Given the experience in Frankfurt (I could leave the office less than 2 hours before a flight, take an u-bahn and s-bahn and still make the flight), I can see the benefits but you really need somewhere like London or Frankfurt to satisfy that sort of capital spend.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Airport_Terminal_station
We built 15 metro system in last 23 years from ground up with another 32 approved and half of them under construction here in India. Surely a small country like Ireland can do it relatively easily as compared to here but world is full of surprises.
Worlds most expensive metro line incoming