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Four consortiums battle it out for DART contract
Macquarie and Balfour Beatty in running for €2.5bn underground deal
By Emmet Oliver Deputy Business EditorTuesday August 03 2010
Some of the world’s largest construction, engineering and investment banking groups — including Macquarie and Balfour Beatty — are believed to be on the shortlist for the DART Underground project, with an official announcement expected today.
Irish Rail will announce today that four consortiums have reached the pre-qualification phase for the DART Underground, a public-private partnership (PPP) contract believed to be worth €2.5bn.
The exact make-up of the consortiums will be disclosed in a statement later, but the Irish Independent understands Balfour Beatty Capital Ltd, Macquarie Capital Group and Bombardier Transportation UK are involved in three of the four consortiums as key partners.
Interest from international banking and engineering groups has been considerable but due to the scale of the work involved and the financing needs few Irish firms were in a position to express an interest.
Last week, the Government gave the project a boost when Taoiseach Brian Cowen said it would form part of its capital investment programme.
Construction
The statement today is expected to outline the contribution the project will make on the employment front, with 7,000 jobs created during each year of construction.
Irish Rail, the state partner in the project, claims indirect employment will also be created by improving access to certain parts of the city.
The DART Underground will effectively be a 7.6km tunnel connecting the Northern and Kildare rail lines, with new underground stations at Spencer Dock, Pearse Street, St Stephen’s Green, Christchurch and Heuston.
There will also be a new surface station at Inchicore.
It is hoped DART Underground will be used by 64,000 commuters per hour.
Rail bosses have said that the new line will dramatically increase frequency and capacity for commuters on DART Northern, Maynooth and Kildare lines — the three fastest-growing population corridors in the country — and relieve congestion at Connolly Station.
A cost-benefit analysis of the project has been done and Irish Rail said this showed that the project would ultimately be self-financing.
Benefit
“It forecasts that DART Underground will generate almost 2.5 times more benefit than it will cost to build and will deliver significant wider economic benefits,” said the company recently.
Under the contract, the successful private partner will be responsible for the design, construction, financing, commissioning and maintenance of the tunnel, stations and other facilities over the period of the PPP contract.
At this stage, the contract is envisaged to last for between 25 and 35 years, including the design and construction stages.
In return, the private partner will receive an annual “availability and performance-based” payment.
Irish Rail will at all times retain responsibility for the operation of DART services through the tunnel.
A contract is expected to be awarded by mid-2012 with construction completed and services starting by the end of 2018.
– Emmet Oliver Deputy Business Editor
Good working knoweldge of this type of project could lead to significant opportunities in the UK for project work; many institutional landlords who often apply at least some of a dilapidations settlement towards making the units more marketable.
I am a very clear believer that those that can convert spartan former industrial into trade park spec on a budget will prosper with large demand opening up from e-commerce driven merchandisers etc.
Certainly wouldn’t buy that type of stock unless well into double digits but for those that inherited it through previous personel there are very clear angles.
I agree on an outer M50 being a very bad idea; however you can’t see it being on the agenda as a serious runner for a very very long time. What has led to a lot of the sprawl is local authorities granting inapropriate permissions for vastly over-scaled schemes on the borders of their functional areas knowing that they get to retain the rating income whilst not having to provide much of the infrastructure; i.e. loading the costs of servicing and maintaining specific developments onto neighbouring local authorities through which the transportation links etc are routed.
It is felt that only by letting national government collect commercial rates will local authorities begin to behave in a sustainable fashion. Only a block by block approach can truely answer what is sustainable and what would constitute an appropriate intervention to the existing amenity of the city.
I think if I remember rightly a Chinese company wanted to construct the entire Dublin Metro ‘free-of-charge,’ as long as they built it with Chinese laborers and received all cash flow into it afterwards.
It was Mitsui & Co Ltd if I remember correctly who would have completed what is now the Luas Green Line and a link to the Airport as a private enterprise; i.e. the then government would have signed over the track bed of the former Harcourt St to Bray Railway and then the operator would have delivered a service to the public at no cost to the exchequer but would have had complete pricing freedom. Sadly this was rejected by the 1997-2002 administration; no other similar proposal has ever emerged.
What would the likelihood of (any) private investor building such lines and reaping the benefits? (like Virgin Rail in the UK).
In typical Bransonesque fashion Virgin Rail never built any new lines but simply leased trains and levy fares like £220 return from London to Manchester i.e. an identical distance from Cork to Dublin. The Sky Court proposal offered to build free of charge a rail link from Shannon to the Ennis/Limerick Rail line. The centre appeared but their pr spin of a free a rail line dissapeared just as quickly as the presumption that the centre would fully let.
Interesting point about having a surplus in diesel trains in the near future; do you really think the lads at Iarnród Éireann though would see the benefit of spending money by creating new lines and stations to provide use for these trains?
Perhaps they would, they do seem to be getting more pro-active by the year.If that splits into two parts there may be a viable way forward; firstly build stations at say Parkway, Moyross, Cratloe etc and deliver a viable commuter service, that could also do really well on match days for both the Gaelic Grounds and Thomond Park ; then talk about a potential spur if say 45 minute frequencies are viable; the existing timetable on Limerick Ennisdoes not offer a good service; if you miss a train by 2 minutes you wait 2 hours for the next one.
There were proposals a few years ago by the developers of the Sky town/centre or some other similarly named project to completely fund and deliver a spur from the Limerick – Ennis line as a planning condition / carrott.
If one were looking at this one would need to look at connecting Limerick / Ennis / Shannon in a triangular fashion; i.e. building a branch line from the Limerick / Ennis line to Shannon / Airport to an intermediate point where trains to both Limerick and Ennis would each stop at the same time allowing the Shannon service to pick up passengers from both urban centres which are the principal urban connections of Shannon.
My fear would be that there may not be enough demand to justify sufficiently frequent services between Limerick and Ennis to justify say 30 minute or even hourly frequencies between the 2 centres; without a good service to plug into the fear is that the Shannon line may not wash its face.
What may be a very positive piece of groundwork may be to try to increase the number of stations between Limerick and Ennis; if the Dublin Underground Interconnector gets built there may be a lot of additional diesel rolling stock which can’t be used in the underground and due to Ireland having a unique track gauge cannot be exported; once the Dart Underground is signed off there will be surplus rolling stock due to any replacements of rolling stock being electrically powered units. Building additional stations would be the only capital cost of testing this strategy to ascertain if commuter rail can form a significant part of transport provision in the Mid West; in the shorter term there may be additional rolling stock from the now closed Waterford/Rosslare route.
In the UK they diagnosed a problem with particular local authorities granting unsutainable planning consents on the basis that local authorities would take an extremely favourable view of many planning applications because any built property resulted in commercial business rates. To remedy the problem the UK altered its system to one where the national government receives all business rates (but not residential council tax) and then issues subventions based on a clear set of criteria to all local authorities.
A similar move may be appropriate in Ireland.
Groundscrapers are the real problem i.e. 8 storey buildings where height should be limited to say 4 to 6 stories to preserve the existing grain; the problem has never been genuinely tall buildings as those are rarely applied for and when they are they are rarely refused because few will take the risk of spending a seven figure sum on design fees knowing the location is inappropriate.
@wearnicehats wrote:
Did you know that there is a Facebook page extolling the virtue of the use of the bizarre word amn’t?
I was using pre-fabs as an example of the appalling state of Irish schools. My point is simply that primary and secondary education are more in need of funding than one third level project, especially one costing c. €500million. A person on another site is in favour of it because, at present, they “have to go to three different libraries for their books”. Most secondary schools would kill for just one library. infrastucture “projects” which are really just (white) elephants in the room.
I think that the project for Grangegorman is a good idea; there would be the potential to cut back a number of duplicated administrative functions that are currently provided across a number of different sites; not to mention the fact that the main DIT adminstriative function was undertaken for many years at Pembroke St which is not attached to any of their disperate colleges.
The issue for me is not the principal it is that doing it now would result in a loss of focus from the urgent need to create more places to upskill umemployed people who will leave the country if they are left to rot much longer; the second consideraton is the manner of funding it; the Grangegorman project can at the right point of the property cycle be heavily subsidised by selling their existing buildings for conversion into other uses such as offices or residential; this would clearly be the wrong point in the cycle to agree a sale post completion of Grangegorman and vacant possession being delivered.
I expect to see Grangegorman built at some future point as there is a clear rationale to the project; the focus of DIT, DCU, TCD and NUI at this time should be to build once in a generation capacity to retrain the 100,000 or so structurally unemployed people; given the number of vacant office buildings available on soft terms, facilities provision is the least challenging aspect of them playing their part in converting 100,000 drawers on scarce rersouces to 100,000 contributors to paying down the national debt.
You seem to forget that the object of the legislation was to protect the public from rogue traders; do you really expect your arguments to be afforded respect when you directly seek to exclude people with sufficient practical experience who are prepared to pay a reasonable fee to sit a professional exam and be bound by the rules of the profession going forward.
There is a middle ground that protects the public, recognises professional competence and does not exclude hard working taxpayers whether or not they were lucky enough to be able to receive a third level education in a career they have managed to be lucky enough to select at attempt one.
@wearnicehats wrote:
I’m sorry but you cannot write such a total car crash of a post in terms of spelling and grammar whilst putting down the importance of primary education.
We owe a fundamental right to our children to treat them properly. The education system needs to be overhauled from the bottom up, not the other way around.
No chickens = no eggz
What I think the city needs is designated areas where clear height limits are set out. This may take time, but it is the only mechanism that establishes clearly defined, unbreachable rules, and lets everyone know where they stand. As such, large swathes of the city centre – note, not everywhere – could be designated as Zone 1: a maximum of six storeys, with the potential to rise to eight storeys where there is a clearly demonstrable urban design justification for the increase in height.
I’m not sure that this would take a lot of time; if you look at the functional area of Dublin City Council 60-70% of it comprises mono-use residential areas, parks and insitutional lands surrounded by mono-dimensional residential. Planning applications are down what 70-80% from where they were only 3 – 4 years ago.
Adopting a block by block approach in Dublin 1,2 and the CC fringe commercial zones that extend into D4, D8 & D7 is not asking a lot to offer all parties a little visibility for the next five years; there is nothing to stop an applicant knowingly applying for a proposal that is expressly not compliant with the development plan if they are confident enough to expend signficant planning and design costs on making a sustainable argument; however with a block by block approach they at least would have some gauge on the level of risk that involves.
Why are DCC planners unwilling to offer visibility to all parties do they not trust elected representatives to look favourably at subsequent LAPs written as supplementary documents over the life of the unitary document?
but if a significant proportion of unemployed graduates emmigrate there will be a lot fewer mammies in future years. Having a good chat with region level CEOs about their specific skills shortages over the next business cycle and designing training courses to meet those skills will ensure that the exchequer has the funds to renovate as opposed to patch repair schools over the next cycle; the primary school I went to was subsequently condemned and replaced; the conditions did no harm to my academic prospects when I went to second level.
@thebig C wrote:
I could be wrong, however, I would be fairly confident that the LAPS will never be published, and, the height cap will become de facto right accross the City. The LAPS are really just a fig-leaf to given an appearance of balance and consideration. In reality, if they are even commissioned in future (doubtful) , in every area there will be a slew of anti-highrise objections from local residents
You have hit the nail on the head; insert the word local and forget the expression high rise; there are a number of brownfield areas in the city where there are no locals; examples include Heuston, Docklands, West of Inchicore; all of these areas are on rail lines. I think people always want high rise; they just don’t want it beside where they live, some examples where it it has been successfully developed into meaningful clusters are Connaught Rd Hong Kong, Bishopsgate City of London, La Defence Paris and Taunusanlage Frankfurt; they all have two things in common, no residents and the buy in of the conservation lobby. With the exception of Frankfurt these cities are top 10 global tourist hubs to boot.
Grangegorman is really worthy objective; but you feel College places are needed in the next 15 months or else there will be a major heamorage of talent…
@ac1976 wrote:
I came accross this site by chance, it’s a project done as part of a masters degree in NCAD and it’s absolutely facinating.
http://www.venetikidis.com/aris/Dublin-Transport_MA.html
A new vision for public transport based on what we have, what is being built and some common sense and good international proactice. The result really is quite amazing.
There are some maps which look exactly like maps of transport you might find on the continent! It really is facinating to see how our public transport might be if we were a continental European city!
Maybe one day?….
Frank McDonald wrote recently about Busways, which are like tramways without rails, and this is based on this concept but look what it can deliver! When you see the maps it really does impress.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0527/1224271228154.html
I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank got his inspirition for that article from this very project!The last post above really loses the focus of the discussion
@notjim wrote:
So according to
http://www.twitter.com/Grangegormandev
this was confirmed in a press briefing.
I love your optimism; I can’t see anything substantial happening until such time as the existing buildings rise in value; in the short term DIT should take additional space in office buildings at 10 year leases with tenant only breaks on five years; to ramp up capacity in post graduate training now when people need it. DIT happening at Grangegorman is entirely linked to a pick up in the value of the existing sites…..
No use serving everybody if they won’t use it.
I’d hardle call annual 135m passenger bus journeys for Dublin Bus in 2008 a lack of use. Where service levels have increased so too have passnger numbers; if the 46A QBC can be a success it can work anywhere in Dublin.
Car drivers will not use buses.
That assumes that congestion levels do not increase, parking levels increase and parking prices stay static or fall. If bus services were upgraded in tandem with some affordable rail improvements; the so called car drivers that you speak of would consider their options provided they live and work within areas of a sufficient scale. If people choose to live in Virginia and Work in Rathcoole then the public transport system owes them nothing.
BRT in Dublin streetscape, fantasy tosh.
Add the 95m passengers carried by Bus Eirrean to the 135m carried by DB and you have a substantial number; denying the existing usage is uninformed. Even with an extensive tube network that carries 1.1bn passengers per year this impressive statistic is dwarfed by the 6.1m passengers per day that travel by bus i.e. 2.2bn or twice as many bus journeys as tube journeys in London.
There are positives and negatives to having so much heritage; the positive provides a nice atmosphere; the negative is that it limits development potential. The point I wish to reiterate is that certain parts of the City can take higher densities and certain parts can’t for example take Cumberland House on Fenian Street it is quite tall given its proximity to Merrion Square at 8 stories but covers less than 50% of the site.
The manner in which ARA developed the former IBM site on Burlington Rd for Bennett Construction is a masterclass in how to hide a vast quantum of Grade 1 office space in a very sensitive location and yet the building has sufficient profile to act a headquarters building. Through the use of lightwells, set backs and Atria it is very simple to increase densities significantly without breaking the grain at street level.
A proper height study based on a physical survey where the city is systematically walked block by block to assess impacts of various alterations to the street grain would be the very minimum you would expect to see before any changes are made in this policy area.
http://www.rte.ie/news/morningireland/player.html?20100727,2794009,2794009,real,209
A good feature on Morning Ireland this morning.
Very impressed with the work that went into this plan; it is easily the most thoroughly researched graduate plan I have ever seen. The authors have mapped out the entire city and found some very good nuggets from their commuter profiling.
Not the solution in isolation by a long way but a very useful piece of work in an area that does not get enough attention given the prevailing densities over the vast bulk of Dublin.
This plan should be looked at in great detail by whoever acquires Dublin Bus.
