The two billun is from a 2023 government report. They said yesterday that the cost benefit analysis and what have you will be published this week.
20k an hour 
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Beautifully put. If there was a ‘Line of the day’ award you’d have won todays……
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100k passengers a day to dublin airport
10k workers at airport
Etc etc
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Same with the Ryder Cup
Ah stop.
A physicist can crunch the numbers so that theoretically a 4 tonne elephant could stand on 4 wine classes without breaking them.
Then there’s reality.
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The M500 PPP component of the price relates to rolling stock, commissions and multi decades of operations.
It’s 32 years total in length.
M401 and M402 relate to Civils.
In broad terms you are looking at 30 years (roughly) of “cost” here for the State.
This ignores the multiplier effect of infrastructure.
It ignores the residual value of properties CPO’d.
It ignores that post completion of this you could literally shut down PSO subsidies on many bus routes. You wouldn’t want to do that but it cannot be overstated that aside from the impact of capacity and transit times this will have, it’s net effect is to make running the transit of 10s of millions of people far cheaper for the State.
Dublin’s Metro is basically a copy and paste of Copenhagen’s one and there is a wealth of literature that explores the savings this offers.
The cost benefit analysis also ignores land values. This is how other countries often finance their transit lines (see Hong Kong as a great example) but is ignored here in CBAs.
We were heading that direction but the crash resulted in a highly conservative approach to these things. Speculation a dirty word. But look at Poolbeg and Irish Glass Bottle. They could easily have financed a Red Line extension just through the land values held in NAMA but that would have been a disgrace.
This is what Copenhagen did.
The Government don’t want to talk about this here as they’ll get hammered for selling State assets blah blah blah. The LDA got handed over hundreds of acres of land near the MetroLink terminus by NAMA (for example).
Tim, which specific PSO bus routes do you expect to be withdrawn, and what are the actual projected savings?
I don’t buy that argument at all. Metro stations only serve fixed locations, so large numbers of passengers will still need buses to get them to and from those stations.
If MetroLink is genuinely going to carry the passenger numbers being claimed, the feeder-bus network may need to be expanded rather than reduced.
The suggestion that the State can simply remove PSO subsidies from “many bus routes” sounds like absolute garbage unless you can identify the routes and produce the figures.
The official plans describe MetroLink and BusConnects as complementary services, meaning the buses are an essential part of getting people onto the Metro in the first place not a cost that magically disappears once it opens.
Two billun was the national figure. It was 1.5 billun for the greater Dublin area. But shure what’s 500 million in the grand scheme of things
Of course bus routes will be changed.
This consistently happens in the rare instances of new rail lines opening in Ireland.
The 48-48A were both discontinued several months after the Luas Green Line opened.
This is a strange line to go down.
What “feeder network” are you referring to btw? Are you saying something like buses from around the M1 might hook into MetroLink? Why not- that would then open up a host of existing BÉ services into the city centre they could do more local services. 2@& of that is logical, I’m not sure on what the gotya here is?!
I stand corrected. I’m very cynical about AI I should have known better than to trust the ai summary the search bar gives you. 1.5 billun is still a fair amount.
You were saying that savings would be made on PSO routes. I believe that extra bus routes will be required to feed into the metro station stops, so no savings there.
I’m saying on a like for like basis that investing now in automated rail would reduce demand for existing bus services, which is an objective fact. What’s controversial?
Tim, I’ve gone through the published figures again and I cannot find any support for your claim that nearly 50% of the MetroLink cost relates to 30 years of operation.
My calculation is approximately 80% capital and delivery costs and 20% operating and renewal costs. The current central delivery estimate is €15.75 billion, while the earlier business case estimated €3.385 billion for 30 years of operation and approximately €1 billion for renewals.
Even if I generously classify the initial train fleet as an operating rather than a capital cost, the division is still roughly 77% capital and 23% long term operation and renewal.
So please show me precisely where your 50% figure comes from, because it is not supported by any official breakdown I can find and that enormous upfront capital cost is my central objection to the project.
I am equally unconvinced by the supposed savings from eliminating PSO bus services. Which routes will disappear, and what is the quantified saving?
A Metro serves fixed stations, so substantial feeder bus services will be required to bring passengers to it.
Nor would I blindly accept passenger forecasts based on yesterday’s commuting patterns.
Remote and hybrid working will continue and gather pace massively reducing routine office attendance, while AI is likely to eliminate very significant numbers of city centre administrative jobs over the coming years.
The traditional model of hundreds of thousands of people travelling into Dublin offices five days a week is dying.
Airport demand will remain, but spending €15.75 billion on the assumption that historic commuting patterns and projected city centre employment will continue for decades is an enormous and very questionable gamble.
My preference would be to invest in the regions that have been almost completely denuded of rail transport. We are discussing somewhere between €15.75 billion and €17.5 billion for MetroLink before the market has even priced it, with every possibility that the final bill could move towards €30 billion.
That money could build an extraordinary amount of railway across parts of Ireland that currently have no service whatsoever.
With remote working becoming increasingly normal, there is no reason why employment and population growth must continue to be concentrated in Dublin.
In fact, improved rail and broadband connections could make living and working in the regions considerably more attractive.
A restored Galway–Sligo route, a proper Sligo–Letterkenny connection and a Northwestern corridor linking Portadown, Armagh, Omagh, Monaghan and Letterkenny would transform connectivity across Connacht, Donegal and the border counties. If we are serious about balanced regional development and potentially planning for a united Ireland those are precisely the strategic links we should be examining.
Spending anything approaching €18–€30 billion on one 19-kilometre Dublin line represents very poor national value compared with the amount of rail infrastructure that money could potentially deliver across the northwest and west.
I believe that would serve a far wider section of the public and represent a much fairer use of taxpayers’ money.
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I hope we will live to see it
Munich opened its first U-Bahn section in 1971 and spent the following decades building a proper, joined up transport network
By 1990 it had 65 kilometres of U-Bahn, seamlessly connected to an extensive S-Bahn and tram system.
Now compare that with Dublin.
The railway from the city centre to Bray and Greystones had existed since the 1850s, as had the northern line through Howth Junction and Malahide.
The DART did not create those rail corridors. After decades of prosperity, EU funding and enormous corporation tax receipts, our great leap forward is a proposed MetroLink of less than 19 kilometres which may not open until the late 2030s and God knows when, if it follows the usual Irish overruns and delays.
Munich built an entire integrated network, we electrified railway lines left to us by the Victorians.
No you haven’t.
You picked up on one headline and ran with it.
I’ve given you the components of it.
Similar to your cringe “let the Spanish at it” (whilst they tender for the job ffs), it would really help you if you educated yourself on a topic before you commented on it.
So what’s your point?
You were shitting on about a rural railway earlier.
You have zero concept of costs. You’re a mouth, the pub bore. MetroLink literally is the most highly spec’d and reviewed project in the history of the State, based on international standards. It’s expensive, so were projects backs 50 years ago and 100 years ago but more so.
It’s this idea that some nothing chap like yourself thinks the Irish haven’t had the brains to engage international expertise that’s the funniest. Again someone is sitting in a pub listening to your rubbish.
We electrified the DART, replaced a few tramlines and now are looking to bankrupt the country building an underground. Thats our rail transport plan in a nutshell.
Thanks Tim