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@dermot_trellis wrote:

The one in Pearse St seems to constantly be tuned to some garbage rolling news channel with the latest celeb stories etc (or else, the other day, a Windows blue screen error).. Is there any way we can vote to reject these things? I’d rather they spent the few grand on a better train system and removed the tacky visual pollution..

These installations deliver revenue; the structure is quite simple; you spend nothing, collect rent and if you negotiate a good deal a healthy turnover top-up. Sadly the content probably reflects the reality TV World that has become the dominant media of late.

Rail passengers heading for the city are being encouraged to get on their bike rather than take a taxi or hire a car, with a cycle rental and storage scheme being copied from the Netherlands.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article7134513.ece

Abellio Group, whose parent company runs the Dutch railway, is behind the first such facility, which will open in Leeds in July. Passengers will be able to rent bikes by the day from the Cyclepoint, as well as lock up their own machines, have repairs done and buy cycling accessories or bikes. The Leeds Cyclepoint is funded with a £500,000 grant from the Department for Transport, through Network Rail, which is being spent on the new two storey building.

Evans Cycles has been contracted to run the facility and will supply 350 bikes for rent at £8 per day. The charge for storage is likely to be £1 a day, with discounts for season ticket holders.

Plans are in place to introduce radial cycling routes from the suburbs into the centre by 2011, aimed at people living three or four miles outside the city centre. It is also proposed that satellite cycle points at other nearby Northern Rail stations, such as Bradford, Harrogate and Skipton, could be created so that passengers could start and finish their rail journeys by cycling.

Abellio’s parent company NedRail found that the provision of extra cycle parking and bike storage had substantially boosted the number of passengers it carries. However, in the Netherlands, a third of all trips to and from the station are undertaken by bicycle, whereas in Britain only 2 per cent of rail passengers arrive by bike. At the moment about 100 passengers a day leave their bikes at Leeds station.

Anton Valk, the chief executive of Abellio, believes that the number of rail passengers beginning and ending their journeys by bike could increase substantially if the facilities that his company runs for the Dutch state railway are adopted in Britain. In the Netherlands, cycle hubs can be found at 40 stations and have between 500 and 3,000 cycles per station.

Mr Valk, who cycles daily from Marylebone to his Central London office on the fringes of the City, said that if the Leeds Cyclepoint pilot proved successful, his company would like to introduce others. The Department for Transport and Network Rail have earmarked Liverpool Lime Street, where Abellio operates Merseyrail; London’s St Pancras, Victoria and Waterloo stations; Grimsby; Hull; Scunthorpe, Sheffield and York in the next two years.

The Leeds Cyclepoint will be situated directly in front of the station, next to the taxi rank. The development will start small but storage can be increased as demand grows.

Capital idea, Mr Mayor

Behind the story: Alex Spence

Thousands of new cyclists will be encouraged to take to Central London streets after the launch of a £140 million bicycle hire scheme on July 30.

The brainchild of Boris Johnson, London’s Mayor, the scheme will allow the public access to 6,000 Canadian-made bikes from 400 docking stations across the city. The Mayor claims the scheme will generate an additional 40,000 cycle journeys each day and revolutionise transport in Central London.

The fleet, which will be maintained by Serco, the services group, is based on a scheme in Montreal that had more than a million users in its first year. Other cities have similar schemes. Paris’s Vélib, below, has become a favourite of tourists since it was launched in 2007 and now has 20,000 bikes at almost 1,700 locations. In Hangzhou, China, a scheme is said to have 40,000 bikes. Other cities with bike-sharing schemes include Berlin, Barcelona and Mexico City.

Merging this type of scheme onto an annual season ticket accross all modes would be a leap forward.

@KerryBog2 wrote:

Some interesting old posts there!:eek:

FWIW, I heard that de nordside location was picked as Drumm & many other senior execs did not want to commute across de river..
My suggestion for a bad bank did not happen, and DOC has left. Hmmmmmmmmm.
PVC – re-reading your posts is hilarious.:D:D:D:D
Kb2

The level of concealment from the market was a first in an Irish context; I got it wrong but then again so did most others as like an Iceberg you could only see the top 10%. I did however call the UK right which is a market that has behaved more in line with the US and Asia and I expect to see the Quinlan assets deliver serious profits as they are disposed of to commodity originated wealth.

At least the International sector has held up; if it didn’t or it doesn’t you would have very serious problems.

There is a reason for the decline of the East end of Oxford Street; approximately 50 – 80 shops have been CPO’d to be demolished for the delivery of Cross Rail from Dean Street to TCR These took place in late 2008 but that it was going to happen has been known for years. Consequently retailers won’t spend the c£500k it takes to fit out or refit and then the retailers leave to a location where they can refit. Landlords were left with an assortment of choices restricted to cheap rags and shit goods operators to choose from until they get paid via the CPO. Conversely most of the few national / International retailers that were lease bound have now moved further towards Oxford Circus which has helped that middle section dramatically. But until TfL take full possession of these repossessed properties it will ressemble Burnley on a bad day. Once the consortium led by Land Sec redevelop the mixed use TCR interchange it will be an altogether different proposition with a huge quantum of office workers adding to demand.

Lauder you would have to guess that Dunnes are keeping the Grafton Street store as leverage in any negotiations they may have with Stephens Green SC; no doubt when they get the optimimum position from the centre they’ll instruct someone to get a new tenant for what is highly marketable space; that is assuming they don’t develop a new retail concept or buy an existing one leveraging tough retail conditions internationally; few retailers manage their cost base as effectively as DS.

Laura Ashley are also restructuring their retail model; they are expanding Internationally but cutting back on the number of stores in their more mature markets. Recent UK research indicates that most retailers would be a lot more profitable if they stuck to the top 30-40 retail destinations and ditched the other say 100-500 shops they have. This theory if applied to the Irish market could see a dramatic rise in the demand for streets like Grafton Street, Hernry Street and Cork’s Patrick Street at the expense of towns such as say Kilkenny, Mullingar etc. What Grafton Street has to offer is that the stretch from Nassau Street to the Green is all more akin to South Molton Street than Oxford Street in terms of retail ambience and standard of retailer but has the reputation in the local market as the dominent retail choice.

Spending money clearing a high profile site when the construction PMI index is in the 30’s is to my mind a sackable offence.

I agree with you that there is more to this than a simple answer based on the guidance; but anyone with any smarts could see that this site was not going to be developed anytime soon; particularly given the architectural competition would give objectors free license to crucify any spec build standard proposal making its development value as a site significantly diminished.

Why do you need a Dun Laoghaire Harbour Board anyway, even in a bull market?

I agree that the issue centres on a blockage at a viaduct but that post interconnector and if the at grade reversals were removed from Malahide then the viaduct that is the blockage would be the Victorian ‘Loopline’ running from Connolly to Pearse which is the only section of the network which suffers from the vexed 3 routings into 2 lines issue.

As explained the addition of grade seperation to divert trains towards Swords would in fact create capacity; if this were also to be done at Howth Junction even more capacity could be created by removing yet another ‘timetable gap’ required on health and safety grounds.

The timetable on the northern line and DART is also somewhat unweildy; the idea that every DART stops at every station between Connolly and Malahide/Howth and that Northern commuter services skip every station between Clontarf Rd and Kilbarrick is also somewhat flawed. To say that Raheny or Harmonstown needs a 3-4 minute service post IC is flawed. If trains to Drogheda stopped and served two of these stations and if DART to Airport and Malahide and Howth each skipped one or two stations then the ‘gap times’ required on these routings would fall allowing a higher number of trains per hour. Yes this would increase journey times on the outer suburban routes by 2-3 mins but if compensated by additional stations such as Stephens Green and Christchurch then it is a net gain not to mention that they might actually get the seat they paid for.

In a perfect funding environment you would build the metro regardless of cost, quad track the Northern line and Maynooth line but this is not even an average funding environment; it is the most constrained funding environment since the creation of the state; make no mistake there is a divergence in credit markets between the haves and the have nots in the Eurozone and Ireland for the forseeable future will be a have not.

There is a real danger that if the costs of MN exceed €1.7bn and if the operational losses exceed €2 per passenger that the costs could force the mandarins of Merrion St to call time on the Interconnector; which has it would seem not had an EIB application made.

One cannot forget that the blockage that you assert might happen at Malahide already exists it is called the Loopline and existing services will remain crushloaded until such time as it is removed by the Interconnector. Until this blockage is removed then all new routes will need be assessed very much as secondary objectives.

Great link it really does display that light rail and period architecture can co-exist once the overhead wiring system is well done. And the weather in Nice; i’m now drooling :p

AC makes a very pertinent point re the pricing matrix for fares on the system; there is no way that cheap fares are going to be part of the deal as the money simply isn’t there to subsidise mass transit in the way that some other countries do.

One of the key advantages that the interconnector will have is its ability to rely heavily on the existing station network; which will be all heavy rail. It will be interesting to see the estimated cost base for the interconnector section of the network which clearly must be established prior to the metro north project even being contemplated. The last thing Irish public transport needs is an overscaled management contract for the proposed Metro North line eating up a budget that is required to run public transport across all major urban centres.

Blunt and to the point. 😀

I think looking at MN from a sum of its parts approach would be useful

1. Spur to Dublin Airpot c €500m
2. Spur to Swords c€250m
3. Luas to Ballymun c€500m
4. Park n Ride North Dublin = 2,600 * 15,000 c €40m

Total €1.29bn

The cost if it can be really acheived for €1.7bn is €410m more expensive; however once it is operationally efficient to point that the operational subvention is at the lower end of subvention norms then it is an acceptable. There are however four major caveats that need to be addressed.

1. The €1.7bn would need to be actual cost payable by way of the normal S-Curve distribution funding model and not some exotic funding structure that pays a spread above sovereign rates

2. That the passenger numbers would need to be stress tested to a recessionary loading i.e. at about 21-23m pax to see what the annual operational loss would be.

3. That a €100 – €200 per square meter development levy be placed on all development within 1km of the route for the next 20 years including domestic extensions to make up the €410m shortfall.

4. That the funding environment would permit both Metro North and the Interconnector which is a far more strategically valuable and necessary project.

We will soon see if the RPA have been able to leverage the poor construction pmi conditions or were over-optimistic in their ability to mask the true folly of the original costings.

@neutral wrote:

@PVC King wrote:

No I would propose to complete both MN + IC as per plans and would expect to see the IC receive EIB funding on the same scale as MN when their application for planning permission is at the same stage as MN.

The Luas line as proposed many years ago to the airport is long gone.

I am beginning ito wonder f you ever looked at the Luas proposal to Ballymun as it was never intended to go to Dublin airport. Simply up Drumcoundra Road and on to Ballymun with a few CPO’s to remove a little garden here and there.

In terms of the planning process there is little difference between MN and IC one is mired in poor drafting whilst the other deferred their application on foot of pre-planning meetings given that the MN application is unapproved it is clear that the tender process is entirely premature and will end up being rewritten; with the taxpayer paying the bill. The only parrallel one could draw is the Deloitte computer consultancy for the HSE.

What I can’t figure out is why a ‘price to be determined’ application wasn’t made.

I don’t buy the Cat and Cage argument as when the routing was announced it was in the context of the Port Tunnel not being completed which has made a significant difference to traffic levels on Drumcoundra Road by banning large numbers of HGVs en route from N7 to N1 who didn’t want to pay the toll on the M50. This area also has a continuous bus lane; without going off point too much there are also fall back positions such as CPO powers to remove parking areas, gardens or worst case some buildings or the route could see a change back towards Glasnevan once the key Drumcoundra station stop was passed.

The IC in isolation does plan for the growth of the City providing 4 seperate development corridors along existing rail lines by creating capaicty on each of those lines. In addition you have two Luas extensions that are now into Green Fields which the development machine will target as soon as the resdiential development market recovers in 4-5 years time.

What I don’t buy is that the Metro North project is critical; it would provide capacity but in the wrong places; other than serving the Airport it addreses no strategic needs; you mention the M50 upgrade you should consider this another way; the real analogy are the development densities along the proposed Metro route at locations such as Swords and Ballymun; if the three lane approach were adopted then the densities would have been a multiple of what they are; which is housebuilder led sprawl versus a Lyonesque vision of sustainability. You don’t spend billions at a time of austerity plugging in low density urban sprawl you target investments that produce significant additional capacity from the existing infrastructure.

The frightening part is that there is no EIB funding for the Interconnector; not even an application listed on their website.