# A Waste of limited & costly resources !



## garrettod (15 Oct 2003)

*A Waste of limited & costly resources !*

Hi,

I cannot believe the amount of staff time that has been wasted over recent years, due to various Gardai "protecting" the bus lanes.

This is a stupid situation.  

We started off with a load of bus lanes, half of which are not being used efficiently due to the lack of busses available in Dublin - what a waste !  These bus lanes replaced valuable road space, a limited resource in Dublin & some other cities.

Drivers decided they were paying more than enough in tax to justify using these empty parts of their roads, so they began to drive in the empty bus lanes, in order to get to their destination faster (no doubt, this often contributed positively to recent years growth, in the Irish economy).

Then our wonderful decision makers concluded that this was a terrible crime and should be punished so what do they do - they go and waste another valuable resource, by placing Gardai on watch at various bus lanes, to ensure they remain empty .... in the hopes of a bus driving down one of them, no doubt.

So, as a result of our wonderful decision makers, we have:

- less available road space & limited opportunity to develope more within the cities

- more traffic congestion due to less road space

- more empty bus lanes to frustrate private motorists tryijng to progress in traffic, but unable to due to traffic congestion

- less available Gardai to help protect us from serious crime, due to the fact that they are protecting the empty bus lanes

- more frustrated Gardai as a result of them being assigned to protecting the bus lanes !


What a waste of money !

.... but thankfully, our expert decision makers then came up with two further ideas to help make this country great:


- an underground tunnel which is too small to permit larger trucks to pass through it (despite the fact that these larger trucks will be the way of the future and are quickly being adopted by various UK comanies - our prinicpal trading partner !)

- a LUAS system that could take up further valuable road space in the capital city,  cost an absolute fortune to construct given no fixed price contracts from day 1,  a lovely modern replacement for something that was removed from our capital city only a few decades ago and last but not least ... a tram system build in irregular size tracks, so as to ensure that any future carraiges would have to be acquired from a limited number of manufacturers at no doubt, additional expense (our rails are apparently slightly narrower than most other tram systems in Europe & the Western World !)

It's great to see our hard earned taxes are being put to good use !

Regards

G>


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## rainyday (15 Oct 2003)

A touch of paranioa setting in there, Garrett! What have you been taking?

Let's ignore the (very major & substantial) issue of whether we need bus lanes or not, just for the sake of clarity. We have bus lanes. The law applies to all drivers, including those who choose to contribute to our economic growth by nipping into the bus lane. 

Do you really want us to move to be the kind of society where individuals will pick & choose which laws to uphold. The heroin addict who breaks in to take your DVD player or mugs your mother for her handbag can make a convincing arguement (well about as convincing as your 'economic growth' arguement) about how he has to feed his habit - Are you happy to stand by & let him rip you off as well, once he has a good arguement.

If you break the law, you pay the price. Here's my positive suggestions;

- Set your alarm clock 15 minutes earlier
- Get a bike & use it 2-3 days a week
- Get some nice relaxing anti-paranoia self-help CD's and play them in the car while you sit in the traffic jam.

I'd also be really interested in seeing your cost-benefit analysis of how increasing the tunnel height to accomodate the 3-tier car transporters & few Tesco super-trucks pays off for our economy.

Cheers - RainyDay


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## Dearg Doom (15 Oct 2003)

Or another positive suggestion: Get up earlier! Or on the other hand, don't - you might impact my congestion free comute in the mornings...


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## daltonr (15 Oct 2003)

> I'd also be really interested in seeing your cost-benefit analysis of how increasing the tunnel height to accomodate the 3-tier car transporters & few Tesco super-trucks pays off for our economy.



To be fair, I think it would be more beneficial to compare the cost of allowing for the greater height in the first place.
This issue was being discussed long before they started digging.

Same as any project, the sooner a mistake is noted and fixed the cheaper it is to correct.  The cost rises exponentially as the project proceeds.  If they turn around in the future and increase the size of this tunnel I'll throw my hat at them.

I'm hoping someone has made a well founded decision that the current tunnel is all we'll ever need.  If it turns out that we need to accomodate bigger truck, that will be a disgrace.

-Rd


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## sluice44 (17 Oct 2003)

Just my two cents...

Port Tunnel.
The problem here is that it was first thought about 15 years ago when tall trucks were an engineers wet dream (hope that's not rude!) but by the time it gets built, the dream has become reality.  There needs to be a shorter time between design commision and implementation.

Luas.
I'm really puzzled about this.  They're built a fixed rail line down, say, Harcourt St and around Stephens Green.  What happens, in 10 yrs time, if Harcourt St etc is not a busy business district.  You can't rip up the tracks and move them to, say, Wexford St (parallel street).  At least with Buses, all you have to have to do is tell the bus driver to take a different route.

Though, of course, with the unions in Dublin Bus, it might be easier to rip up the tracks....

Off-topic but Enterprise Ireland (EI) wanted to move some of their staff from Dublin 4 to the Northside.  The unions wanted €500 'compensation' for the upset.  EI refused and it went to arbitration.  Arbitrator refused 'compensation', pointing out that most of the staff actually had a shorter commute.  Still, at least they have their benchmarking award!!

Sluice


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## daltonr (21 Oct 2003)

> At least with Buses, all you have to have to do is tell the bus driver to take a different route.



This was my sticking point too when talk started on it.  You go through all the chaos of building the tracks, just to produce an on street system that runs on rails so there's no flexibility.  It can't even be redirected via another route if there's a problem.

The upside is the number of people you can carry on rails compared with buses.  I presume someone did a cost benefits analysis and figured out that the volume of people you can carry makes up for the other issues.

I'd love to see the figures though.  It'd be fascinating to see how many buses could have been put in place, how much sooner they'd have had an effect, and how much less disruption there would have been.  And then show the payback time for the Luas.

I'm sure the analysis was done,  I'd just love to see it explained.  Prime Time Special perhaps?   Anyone listening?

-Rd


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## darag (21 Oct 2003)

your dreaming daltonr; do a cost/benefit study before 
spending government money?  that'll be the day.

in the UK the department of transport has suspending funding
for urban tram systems because they deliver such poor value.
we'll probably do the same but before we've even joined up
the two amputated bits of a system we're currently building.

i'd be surprised if a luas line had a higher capacity than a
quality bus corridor.


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## Protocol (22 Oct 2003)

*tram vs. bus*

Well then how come many, many cities all around the world are investing in light rail?

A success in many French and German cities, etc.  Go to Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Basel, see how good the trams are.


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## darag (22 Oct 2003)

*Re: tram vs. bus*

light rail is not the same as on-street trams.  usually light
rail refers to systems which don't have to interact with
traffic and so can use relatively long trains (longer than
two carraiges) with long platforms so it only takes a 
minute or two for everyone to get on or off.  they can
run at higher speeds and so their capacity is many times
that of on-street trams.  for example peak time dart can
carry tens of thousands of people an hour while each luas 
line will be able to carry around two and a half thousand.
the layout of the european cities you mention is completely
different to dublin.  dublin unfortunately is more like la or 
the uk cities and conurbations;  i.e. a huge area of low
density housing.  trams are good for high density inner city
areas but because the track is a major cost, they don't make
sense for low density spread out areas.


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## Protocol (23 Oct 2003)

*trams vs light rail*

Well yes, there is a distinction between older-style tram lines than tend to run on streets, compared to light rail which tends to have more reserved track.

Note that the DART is neither.  It is a heavy rail system.

Cologne has both trams and light rail.  A casual observer wouldn't notice the difference.  Indeed, some lines are underground at some points, and share the street with cars at other points.  Some lines are pure reserved, with no interference with other traffic.

The Luas tram track from Sandyford is mostly on reserved track, until the canal, where I think it drops down onto Adelaide Road.  So it could be called light rail until that point.

The Tallaght line is a mixture of reserved track and street running.

Yes, the DART, or a metro, has much higher capacity, as they can consist of 6-car trains, whereas trams are just one, or maybe two, cars long.

But they complement each other, the tram acting as a link, or a feeder to the heavy rail network.

Have a look at Zurich, very successful public transit, no metro, just bus and tram lines as well as suburban DART style lines.


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## cuchullain (23 Oct 2003)

*waste etc*

if anyone wants to define waste lets start with this one
I reside in Dundalk. 50 miles by motorway from Dublin. I enquired of CIE locally if any of their 14 buses a day from Dundalk/Dublin used the motorway, as I have a daughter attending college who prefers to commute ( at this stage anyway). Anwser no. So off toddles ALL these buses up the old 'Dublin Road' every hour or so. I then enquired how much it would cost to hire a bus for a  day driver included  as I indicated that I genuinely think that at least 1 bus in the  morning leaving town ,calling to Drogheda could be filled by students alone, especially ones attending northside colleges and perhaps UCD which is also hard to get to from Connolly station. No joy on the one. 
Wait for this: at 6.30 am each morning TWO busses leave bus station in Dundalk using the old road to Drogheda,  BOTH of them at the SAME TIME using the SAME ROUTE , with perhaps 15 people on board. When they get into Drogheda one of them empties its passengers into the other one and continues on the 'old road 'to Dublin and the other one : unbelievably switches to the motorway.  Unreal or what.? anyone with any sense would delay one of the busses by 20 minutes and send it up the motorway to Drogheda while the other one would arrive in time to switch customers it picked up on route to the later one. but that would  make sense and all cie want to do is make losses. I honestly think that if CIE advertised and then ran  a bus service along the motorway once or twice a day they would fill it. NOT every bus . Only 1 stop Drogheda. Imagine having a motorway and not using it. I do understand that they have a public service obligation but I think to ignore something like a motorway is ostrich like.
or is it only me?


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## darag (23 Oct 2003)

*Re: waste etc*

hi protocol, yes i've been in cologne a couple of times (years
ago) and i loved the public transport there.  i've also been
in many other european cities which have similar systems.
however i think my main point stands.  cologne, for example,
is a relatively compact and dense city; dublin is the opposite.

luas for me combines the worse of both worlds - low capacity
and very high cost.  it's frightening to think how much we've
paid just so that 2500 commuters from tallaght to the city
centre can use public transport carriages which run on rails
rather than on bus corridors.

unless a city is densely populated, the cost of building on
street rails will never be recovered by the benefit it provides.
the advantages of on-street trams over quality bus corridors
seem very small to me. if a city already has the 
infrastructure, fair enough, but i can't see the benefits
justifying the costs of building these systems from scratch.

i think we would have gotten better value by building proper
dedicated rail links from tallaght and sandyford even if the
lines would terminate at the edge of the city center.  you
would get ten times the benefit in terms of passenger 
capacity.  i wouldn't mind on-street trams within the city
center (between the canals, say, linking connelly, heuston 
and the new stations serving tallagh and sandyford), but it 
would still be questionable whether such trams would offer 
value compared to running proper integrated bus services.


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## Protocol (23 Oct 2003)

*trams in cities*

Off the point slightly, but here is a lovely photo of a tram on a very narrow street in a German city.  So they don't seem to have to have wide boulevards for their trams.

[broken link removed]


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