Luas Line F

This is also important because it will finally start to undo some of the damage done by the Frank Feely Motorway (Patrick St/High St). There’s an obscene amount of traffic going through the area. Air quality is appalling etc. Anyone who works in or frequents the area knows how pulverised it is by traffic and what a complete write off it is in terms of good quality civic life.

Agree about the benefits to Thomas Street / High Street / Dame Street, but for a tram route to the city centre from Lucan to find itself traveling piggy back on the Tallaght Red Line at Davit Road, instead of serving (and helping to kick start the regeneration of) Inchicore Village and Old Kilmainham, or alternatively continuing directly east through Lower Ballyfermot and serving Inchicore and Kilmainham from the north, is another example of the apparent inability of the RPA (and DCC) to plan Luas properly as a network fanning out to serve the whole city.

From the start of the first Luas debate a decade ago, the RPA seem to be terrified of entering Inchicore! Do they think we’re goin’ to nick their hub-caps?

Luas planning always seems to be about choosing the line of least resistance, instead of finding the route of greatest benefit. No matter where you try and lay a track in this city (where we mightn’t have seen any in sixty years) you’re going to get people moaning about trees having to be replaced, or on-street car parking spaces that have to disappear, but surely the job of the tram planners (and their partners in the local authority) is to cut through all this crap and deliver a public transport system that benefits the most number of people in the most direct and logical manner.

The way the RPA are going about it, if you took a blank piece of paper and traced on it the various Luas lines, (existing and proposed) you’d end up with something almost as random and incoherent as a ctesiphon cycle map.

*no offence intended*

Don’t make me quote Sebald at you again! 🙂

Also:
@gunter wrote:

Luas planning always seems to be about choosing the line of least resistance, instead of finding the route of greatest benefit.

Bingo.

i always thought the problem with inchicore and the luas was that the locals campaigned against it the first time around, in despite of their history, when the case for the luas as a local convenience hadn’t been so clearly demonstrated, and the rpa have a grudge as a consequence.

Gunter said….”cut through all this crap and deliver a public transport system that benefits the most number of people in the most direct and logical manner.”

Bingo !!…..The single most essential element in correcting the ill`s of our highly skewed society…..”The Greater Good”.

Sadly Gunter,we don`t do that here…. 😀

ctesephon: you have a sebald quote about trams?

@ctesiphon wrote:

Don’t make me quote Sebald at you again! 🙂

Dogs notjim.
Understood, but these guys aren’t sniffing out a buried bone, they’re supposed to be laying down a state-of-the-art urban transportation network.

@notjim wrote:

i always thought the problem with inchicore and the luas was that the locals campaigned against it the first time around . . . and the rpa have a grudge as a consequence.

Some of those meetings have gone down in folklore right enough. I remember the general theme of one meeting was that these things would ‘kill you stone dead’ whether it was the megawatts in the over head cables, or the breaking distance if you wandered in front of one. The guys they sent from the RPA are probably still in therapy.

Having said that, after the Luas people had decided to switch the route to the Canal, and under pressure from some people who had campaigned in favour of the original route, they eventually agreed to hold a plebiscite, the results of which were suppressed, or at least not published, suggesting to me that the silent majority had been in favour of the Inchicore route all along.

Grudge or not, none of this excuses the current proposed meanderings of F Line.

Agreed: it was an explanation, not an excuse.

@notjim wrote:

ctesephon: you have a sebald quote about trams?

@gunter wrote:

Dogs notjim.
Understood, but these guys aren’t sniffing out a buried bone, they’re supposed to be laying down a state-of-the-art urban transportation network.

notjim- to clarify: https://archiseek.com/content/showpost.php?p=81715&postcount=501

(He did have some interesting things to say about mills, though.)

gunter- I couldn’t agree more.

One other thing not mentioned is that this duplictes not just part of the Red Line but the Interconnector too.

This nonsense of terminating luas lines in the city centre has to stop.

If the RPA insist on running line F down Dame Street where it can have great craic with all the cars & buses to some crazy terminus at College Green – which I absolutely disagree with – does it not make sense to allow the green line & line F connect directly and thereby at least spare the city this elaborate mess that is the bx proposal ?

So in effect line F, whenever it eventually reaches college green at a staggering 20k per hour, would turn to head up nassau & dawson streets and on to the green to directly connect with the green line – a single line running from Sandyford to Lucan.

I’m aware of future proposals to increase the length of the green line trams to 53m & that this is not posssible on the red line due to the severity of the turns in places, james’ hospital for example, however the section of the red line that they propose to utilise as part of line F, davitt & tyrconnell etc. is the straightest section so there is no issue.

At least in that instance we would have two luas lines that pass through the city centre; Tallaght to the Point Village & Sandyford to Lucan.

Of course a 53m silver juggernaut would to my mind severly impact on College Green as a space and more importantly completely damage its potential, but given that the RPA don’t give a shite and College Green is on their must have list, at least this way we would have a single line, infinitely more useful than the bx proposal while sparing O’Connell Street, Marlborough Street and rendering the Hawkins to Marlborough bridge useless.

I like the idea of connecting it to the green line, but why go through college green at all? Why not bring it to Stephen’s green a different route? God knows college green is congested enough with buses.

I would prefer to see line F continued to the south docks. Also I was dissapointed to see that the Line terminates a good distance away from Lucan Villiage center. Instead it terminates in the mess of suburban housing estates. Due to the fact that that the red line is already at it’s max capacity at peak time, is it the smartest idea to have the new line share track space with it? Will it be possible to run services from Lucan to the point or Tallaght to Trinity?

Why is it called Line F anyway?

Based on the existing two lines, shouldn’t it be called line C?

Line C was from Busaras to Connolly, C1 from Connolly to the Point, D is from Town to Broombridge (BX extn.), E is the Rathfarnham line

From an Archiseek point of view, this will be the rejuvenation of Dame St. and College Green.

Dame, Morland and O’Connell Streets have been divided for so long now, it’s about time that Dame and Morland are given the auld HARP treatment. Man, what a wasted corridor. O’Connell St is impressive, but Morland and Dame are such a let down.

Lucan line looks great, but where does it terminate? They say “Trinity” and “somewhere in the vicinity of College Green”.

Line BX, a hated project, will and must go through College Green.

Duplication, they say, will be BX’s killing. Sure, I can get a Luas to Stephen’s Green and hop on the Metro to connect with the Red line, wasting 15mins in the process.

I don’t buy the whole “duplication” argument. I want to get a tram direct from Sandyford to O’Connell St.

I’ve done up a map of College Green, the only way I think it would work. Comments?

[/IMG]

Luas line F, like the crazy “preferred” Bx route will never see the light of day.

It’s just too ludicrous.

It is quite likely that buses using the upgraded QBC from Lucan will offer faster journeys into town. Given current cost/km for Luas construction, this could cost over €800 million, which is a lot to waste to provide such a slow, low-capacity public transport option.

That’s before you consider that it meanders within a km or 2 of the route of one of the two survivors of T21, the Interconnector (the other is Metro north) effectively duplicating it. The only difference is that the Interconnector will be expected to do most of the journeys in less than half the time as well as offering at least 5 times the capacity and provide far superiour connections.

I suspect political meddling behind this plan as it doesn’t stack up under any sort of sane evaluation. It will allow politicians when knocking at doors during the next election to say “we got you a Luas!” even though the plan will never be realised.

I want to see Luas all over Dublin. Unfortunately plans like this, Metrowest and the Green line extension to Cherrywood are precisely NOT the way to develop a tram system; instead such plans are driven by political meddling or the expectation of being able to extract levies from developers by running long slow meandering “rail” lines through as many green fields as possible to justify and facilitate rezonings. Trams and light rail in general excel in urban environments; they do very poorly as substitutes for suburban buses or proper suburban rail lines in terms of costs versus benefits.

there is nothing wrong with a luas network within the cannals but after that whats the point???

When the transport authority actually make tickets valid for 2 hr or so it will make sense for the luas to be the second free inbound hop… with all the public space improvements

many people may look to such cities as melbourne however trams are very slow we have the same issues you have with to many buses down one particular route… metro north should fix this if done correctly… but that involves dublin bus scaling back… or taking over the metro

I think stephan platz should be considered as well as a underground red cow + car park + transfer underground with metro north… I dont have a problem with duplication I do have a problem with destroying spaces with massive potential trinity college being the one…

there is nothing wrong with luas down heuston – thomas st- dame – dock…

but we still dont know the intergated ticket price or fare structure so it means nothing…

what this space is crying out for is a urban design competion with a very loose brief to some extent…but it must include poles cables/intergated economical tickets/ lighting and a open an mind

whatever about the combinations and routings to have Ciaran Cuffe on another join the dots campaign in the future would be farcical; unless he shows some consistency and acts inside government this time and stops these morons from botching yet another project.

If you con me once shame on you if you con me twice shame on me

Ken Livingston got his P45 in May he should seriously be considered for a consultancy role in delivering projects in Dublin because as he as shown you have to focus on the goal and not short term public opinion and act like a steamroller to get long term projects delivered.

The really annoying thing is that resources were put into serious analysis of the Dublin transport problem and an excellent strategy and plan was developed by the DTO. The plan was realistic enough to suggest a piecemeal implementation spanning years but one driven by an intelligent strategy, an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of ALL transport modes, a proper scientific approach and an ultimate vision and goal. Unfortunately too many sectional interests (RPA versus IE versus Dublin Bus versus NRA versus DCC) overseen by shallow ignorant political meddling has f*cked everything up.

A lot of these proposals seem to make no sense outside of the context of the original plan.

Take this dog’s dinner, line F, which complements nothing and solves a non-existing problem at great expense. The original DTO strategy saw the Kildare line/Interconnector as the high-speed high-capacity (20k+ an hour) back-bone for getting people in and out of the city centre from that side of Dublin and naively envisaged that other modes would complement this by feeding into it. The idea of complementing a service run by IE obviously is so repugnant to the RPA that they insist on proposing to bring the passengers all the way into town themselves even if it takes 30 minutes longer and involves huge expense.

Or for example, Metro North which was always intended to continue south – by re-using the Green Luas line which was to be extended using the old heavy rail alignment to connect to the south side DART north of Bray. Instead Metro North will terminate at Stephen’s Green. Worse, the Cherrywood extension to the Green line scuppers this plan as it will never be able to support metro as it takes a meandering course, intersects at grade with roads and goes through green fields (developers’ levies, yay!) before stopping a couple of km SHORT of the DART. Nuts.

Or the the idea that the bits of the Green Luas line that would be left over (between Ranelagh and Stephen’s Green) would be re-used and extended North on-street to Finglas intersecting with the Red line and with the future DART near Phibsboro. Instead the DCC and DB conspired together and with some horse trading forced (I assume) the RPA to propose a convoluted “loopy” route giving the traffic engineers in DCC their long wished for justification for a new Liffey bridge just east of O’Connell bridge.

The new DTA is supposed to sort this out but I’ll believe it when I see it. The forces arrayed against them are just too great which will mean we will continue to get farcical bits and pieces of public transport infrastructure.

@Morlan wrote:

I don’t buy the whole “duplication” argument. I want to get a tram direct from Sandyford to O’Connell St.

Morlan, why not connect the green line with line F and save the city from the bx mess ? the walk from College Green to O’Connell St. wont kill you 😉

Absolutely agree with jimg, though never bought in to the notion of continuing metro north on the harcourt line axis, given the derth of public transport options elsewhere in the city, dubs in the south east of the city can get by with their luas & dart.

For now, metro north should continue to portobello/grand canal area & utilise one of several green or state sites in the area so that the inevitable calls for it to be extended can be facilitated with minimal disruption, imo from there it should continue on to serve rathmines, harolds cross, terenure, tempelogue, knocklyon, old bawn & terminate at tallaght. Population density along such a route would far exceed that of the harcourt option.

Terminating metro north at the green, and lets face it this is what is going to happen, will proove to be a massive mistake – we’ll just have the green back and they’ll have to plough it all up again, madness.

If it ever gets built; in a boom you could ignore that the cost of €6bn for a 15kms light rail line and it could be justified by the sheer insantiy of the amount of tax being generated year on year and the lack of any meaningful non-private car connection to the airport. Given the new fiscal backdrop it is time to review all infrastructure investment with a pricetag exceeding €250m and subject all of them to a thorough cost benefit analysis.

The more you look at it building 5 or 6 light rail lines each at a cost of €200-400m each and doubling track capacity between Connolly and Malahide with a view to building mainline services to Dublin Airport and extending it to Swords (and down the line further into North County Dublin or even Ashbourne) would deliver a far superior return on investment and open up North County Dublin to develop at far more sustainable densities and cost half what a single Metro would cost.

What progress has been made on integrated ticketing?

the last thing i heard on integated ticketing was that the dept of transport intends to merge dublin bus, Dart, luas, metro, the DTO and suburban rail into a single entity the DTA Dublin Transport Authority by January 2009

Thats great news when it happens; thanks for clarifying.

The turf wars between the various state transport agencies have been the single largest impediment to the development of a functional transport system in Dublin. Finally cost benefit analysis may trump organisational rivalary not to mention commuters making the sustainable choice may no longer get hit with multiple charges for making the most efficient journey assuming a single operator.

@Missrachi wrote:

there is nothing wrong with a luas network within the cannals but after that whats the point???

Couldnt agree more. This point strikes at the nub of the issues surrounding luas. The luas concept – with its heavy reliance on on-street running – is only suitable, and only represents value for money, if built as a short hop service to get around the city centre. It is not, cannot, will never be anything other than a very inadequate means of addressing Dublin’s commuter crisis.

As it happens, the Luas Line F, B2, BX/D and Metro (really Luas) West projects seem destined to sit gathering dust on a shelf in the Dept of Transport well into the next decade. With a bit of luck, one good thing will come from the recession and they will be torn up and tossed away.

The focus needs to be on providing public transport solutions that offer journey times that beat the shite out of those achievable in the private car. That is the only way of enticing people to leave their comfy 08D at home and squeeze onto a tram/train. Luas – due to its meandering path and copious at-grade interactions with traffic and junctions – is never going to be capable of doing this.

That is why government policy must abandon the Luas concept as the panacea to Dublin’s transportation woes. Complete segregation (or at least to the fullest extent possible) should be a prerequiste for any new rail projects in the Dublin area.

The money earmarked for T21’s luas projects would be far better spent upgrading the existing Luas lines to a metro standard. After the M50 upgrade work at the Red Cow, the red line is pretty close to metro standard from the Fatima stop out. This line should be brought underground from fatima through to stephens green, and leave the luas to operate on the shorter route from the point out to fatima (recall Missrachi’s point RE: usefulness of Luas within the canals!).

@Peter Fitz wrote:

…never bought in to the notion of continuing metro north on the harcourt line axis, given the derth of public transport options elsewhere in the city, dubs in the south east of the city can get by with their luas & dart.

For now, metro north should continue to portobello/grand canal area & utilise one of several green or state sites in the area so that the inevitable calls for it to be extended can be facilitated with minimal disruption, imo from there it should continue on to serve rathmines, harolds cross, terenure, tempelogue, knocklyon, old bawn & terminate at tallaght. Population density along such a route would far exceed that of the harcourt option.

Terminating metro north at the green, and lets face it this is what is going to happen, will proove to be a massive mistake – we’ll just have the green back and they’ll have to plough it all up again, madness.

Also agree here. Best option is to allow for extension of Metro North along the route envisaged by Platform For Change… out underneath Harolds Cross, Kimmage and on to Tallaght. The Green Metro Line should be connected to the Broadstone alignment, going underground from ranelagh before coming to the surface to zoom out to liffey junction