This might sound mental but could we not replace a lane on the M50 with a twin track Luas and expand the hub at the RedCow.
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Yes you’re right. It does sound mental.
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You’ve already outlined that you don’t understand the reasons for the metro. It’s to move up to a millun people around the place. I’m all for rail for the need for the metro is far greater than the need for rail connecting connacht to Donegal.
You’re correct that it’s expensive but big projects don’t tend to get cheaper. The reasons why it would be a lot more expensive to build this yoke in Ireland than on mainland Europe are also fairly obvious.
What about the port tunnel road? Just get rid of a lane there
Why not the Luas though?
To the airport? The metro will travel faster and move a lot more people. Is my rudimentary understanding.
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I was part of a company who was working on costings for the metro link (cc @Fran). It started about €2bn or so, and by the end of 2004 stood at a projected cost of approx €4bn and would take 8 or 9 years to fully complete (albeit we had thought 16 years might be more appropriate given delays and how construction tended to go). It got stalled, obviously, and here we are at multiples of that cost and program out the window.
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Its double the capacity of the luas mate.
with the rest you are proposing to put longer distances with fewer passengers ahead of short distances with lots of passengers
As eamon says, its like a tree, best time to plant was years ago, next best is now
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Seriously? You are proposing a longer journey with way less passengers?
No it wouldn’t
The Luas carries about 50% of the potential passengers.
It isn’t automated.
It goes overground.
Lets say it works out €1bn per km
€1000 per millimeter of track.
Not like for like costs.
€7.3bn of the costs are to operate the Metro for 30 years. This therefore presupposes no fares on MetroLink.
€500m of the costs relate to essential workers housing. That will be another asset for the State that can be leveraged for essential workers for complex mega projects from overseas into the future.
The costs of say CPOing the Darthmouth Square and other property comes to €760m. This again presupposes the State does absolutely nothing with the properties ever again.
€5.5bn is set aside for risks and inflation already.
The Madrid project you reference is just the construction cost.
Spain are more efficient because they do this all the time btw. We need to spend money now to acquire these skills and keep building into the next century.
I’m not proposing it.
I’m playing devil’s advocate for more learned people like yourself to educate me on it.
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Whatever it costs it will be worth building.
If we hadn’t decided to stop building everything years ago we wouldn’t have such an infrastructure crisis now.
The existing Red Line and Green Line alone should tell you why. Both are completely over capacity.
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- Whatever it costs it will be worth building
- €1000 per millimeter of track
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Costing it per millimeter of track is a bit silly though isn’t it?