In the last few weeks the affordability crisis in housing, long a staple of coverage in the newspapers and broadcast media, has been joined in prominence by the drudgery of long-distance commuting and specifically the extreme congestion on the M50, the orbital route which goes three-quarters the way around Dublin.

The two problems are connected, since the scarcity of housing closer to the city incentivises urban sprawl and longer commutes, but the political system tends to prefer short-term fixes or infrastructure investments which have enormous costs and very long timelines.

An extreme example was a letter-writer who complained that the bus trip from Rathfarnham in Dublin’s southwest to the airport takes over 80 minutes, expressing support for the MetroLink project, which will see an underground railway to Swords, linking the city center northwards to the airport. The route does not serve Rathfarnham or anywhere close, from which a bus into town, a transfer to MetroLink and the promised 25 minutes to the airport will absorb the full 80 minutes or so, which provoked the writer’s complaint.

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Costed at €3 to €4 billion when first proposed in 2005, the most recent estimate was €9.5 billion for 2021, with an upper estimate over €20 billion. If commenced quickly the project will open for business in 2035, or possibly towards the end of the 2030s. There are pessimists who fear that it could cost over €20 billion and a reasonable guess at this stage would be somewhere around €15 or €16 billion, allowing for construction inflation, which has averaged just under 4% per annum over the last decade. This would be enough to make MetroLink by far the largest infrastructure investment ever contemplated in Ireland.

A firm cost estimate has not been offered and must await the outcome of the tendering process. No independent cost/benefit analysis has been published either – the favourable verdict when the cost figure was €3 to €4 billion was the work of engineering consultants Atkins, commissioned by the project promoters, an offshoot of the Department of Transport.

Under the provisions of the Public Spending Code, the intention had been that the Department of Public Expenditure would undertake a definitive project evaluation, independent of the project promoters. This has not been done for reasons which have never been explained. The original project has in any event been truncated – it now connects only central Dublin with the airport and Swords, a shorter route than envisaged when the new route was to run from Sandyford, further to the south, incorporating the green Luas line.

An additional concern is that the proposed MetroLink route will compete for passengers with the bus system which, on this particular axis, enjoys use of the existing Dublin Port Tunnel – through which there are frequent services from various points around Dublin and from virtually every significant city and town in provincial locations. Dublin Airport is by far the busiest bus station in Ireland, located on the M1 Dublin to Belfast motorway and close to a junction on the M50. There are no direct rail services, but buses deliver public transport too, and Dublin Airport has a higher overall public transport share than some large European airports which have rail as well as bus. Figures illustrating this happy state of affairs were published annually, based on a passenger survey taken at the airport, until their disappearance some years back. It is understood that this data is still collected annually by the airport operators DAA, but is no longer published on the website of the National Transport Authority.

The congestion on the M50 is a symptom of the engineering impossibility of adding capacity to what has become the main street of the city. At just eight or nine kilometres from the center throughout most of its length, it is simply too close to the city to be a by-pass, the intention when it was first envisaged, back in the 1940s, when its working title was the ‘Dublin western by-pass’. At that time, the city suburbs would have been largely inside its embrace, but now extend to virtually every town in Leinster, spreading commuting misery far and wide.

There is a brutal trade-off between urban sprawl and rail-based public transport – the passenger volumes are scattered over too great an urban area, poor service and operating losses are inevitable. Potential passengers will tolerate the slower car commute times, while demanding rail services which are impossible to deliver. Recent wheezes have included a plan by some UCD professors for a population of 250,000 to be accommodated in Athlone, around 10 times its current count and 125km to Dublin, and an expansion plan for Newry, a mere 105km. Higher density development, closer to the city, is the best way to cut demand for car ownership.