Re: Re: Irish Rail proposes Heuston to Connolly tunnel link
@mickeydocs wrote:
Here’s some anecdotal evidence of why people will continue to use cars. Earlier this year, three work colleagues of mine all started using commuter rail to get to work. They were encouraged by a company initiative and by tax deductions which are available on monthly and annual tickets. One colleague lasted a month. The other two lasted less than three months. The reason to resume commuting by car was a strange one, in that they were all sick of arriving late for work.
How will you convince more and more people to use the trains, when most of my friends and colleagues become frustrated with Irish Rail in a few months and resume travelling by car?
This would be solved by the Interconnector. The bottlenecks in the system would be removed. When the DART opened 20 years ago it worked like clockwork. The problems all started when certain slots in the DART timetable were filled with commuter trains to Maynooth and Drogheda and this wrecked the whole “metro” nature of the original DART and turned Connolly into a station were all kinds of trains were trying to jostle for position at peak times.
The Interconnector tunnel/Dublin Rail Plan will create a situation where the DART will not only be extended to Maynooth, but will return to its original high frequency metro status and will also allow 12 car double-decker RER-type EMUs carrying 2,400 passenger PER TRAIN running at 10 min intervals between Drogheda and Kildare while serving everywhere else in between including Spencer Dock, Pearse, Stephen’s Green, High Street, Heuston and also integrating with Luas and all mainline and suburban rail and a new DART line to Dublin Airport along with commuter services on the Navan line into the bargin. The entire network will be essentially a “one-change” system.
If we got that, your friends would leave the cars at home. It’s all costs €700 million less than the price of one single RPA metro line between Stephen’s Green and Dublin Airport integrated with the LUAS and nothing else.
We have to stop this Ad Hoc approach to rail transport in Dublin by tagging on “a bit of a Luas here, and a bit of an oul Metro there, a few QBCs over there and run a new commuter trains to Mulingar – there that’s grand that’ll do so” mentality which is just causing more problems that it solves.
The Interconnector is the Answer. It really, really is.
