Colm McCarthy: it's time to make space for the buses

In mid-December, The Irish Times published a plaintive letter from a resident of Fairview, Dublin 3, bemoaning the length of the daily car commute to a school in one of the western suburbs.

It takes an hour each way, sometimes more, and the public transport alternatives are unattractive. However, the numerals attaching to the Dublin suburbs are a clue to their location – low numbers including Dublin 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 are closest to the city centre and Dublin 3 is, at a push, walking distance from the Liffey which bisects the city. It is also beside Croke Park to which patrons walk from the centre in their tens of thousands to matches and concerts.

Things could get worse for car commuters unless affordable alternatives can somehow be brought into play. The Government has just announced, or re-announced, plans for expensive investments in Dublin area public transport, including on-street trams and an underground railway from the centre northwards to the airport and the suburb of Swords.

The current fashion, to solve problems with promises of long-term public spending, needs to be questioned, not least because Government finances could go pear-shaped at some future date, according to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.

The mainstream newspapers are supportive of the MetroLink, an underground railway parallel to an existing route, the Port Tunnel, which serves the airport direct to the terminals from across Dublin and a wide range of provincial cities and towns by bus and as quickly as would any conceivable rail alternative.

The tunnel is built and paid for, the MetroLink would cost €15 or €16 billion, maybe more according to pessimists.

RTÉ television came up with an even less plausible idea in a recent multi-part series called Futureville, made with finance from Science Foundation Ireland. Athlone, whose population rose 6% from 2016 to the 2022 Census, reaching 22,869, would grow to 250,000, 11 times today’s figure, by mid-century according to the RTÉ vision, which enthused over similar possibilities for other midland towns.

Athlone is about 100 kilometres from Dublin and any notion that population growth can be catered for by its expansion is pretty far out too. The city of Tokyo, one of the world’s largest at 32 million, could fit between Dublin and Athlone, and at high density it might even be feasible to build a Tokyo-style public transport system.

But low density sprawl and good public transport do not go together, a lesson that remains unlearned in the Dublin region and in the Irish provincial cities. The Fairview area in Dublin 3, from which the frustrated car commuter wrote to The Irish Times has, along with most other inner suburbs of Dublin, notably lower household car ownership rates than those more distant.

The fastest growth rates in Ireland for population and car reliance in recent decades have been in counties Meath and Kildare – within Dublin county, the fastest growth has been in Fingal, well to the north and formerly a largely rural area. Zoning policies which push the population further out from the city create car dependency and long commutes.

RTÉ’s Futureville solution for Athlone envisages the acceleration of trends which have created today’s commuting mess. Even a belated reversal of the planning failure would be too late to create a denser urban environment in Dublin, Cork or even in the smaller provincial centres, essential to make fixed-line public transport economically viable.

Sprawling cities are a hostile environment for public transport and Irish cities have been sprawling for at least 50 years. Even if higher-density development was to be pursued aggressively, the damage has been done and some of the pseudo-solutions, including MetroLink and Futureville, look like escapism.

Both New York and London have instituted congestion charging schemes to discourage peak-hour car commuting. Both have extensive public transport systems which cannot be replicated at affordable cost in the low-density sprawl which careless land-use planning has created in Dublin.

The best that can be done is to contemplate a proper congestion charging scheme for road-users, including an end to the car-user subsidies built into the current system.

Residents in the busier inner suburbs are granted special permits to use the meters, including the most expensive ones (€4 per hour in the yellow zone) all day, and all year round, for just €50 per annum. This subsidy even covers narrow Victorian streets which allow kerbside parking and makes two-way traffic impossible.

Some are busy scheduled bus routes, so the lucky residents get to park, virtually for free, in the kerbside lanes where the buses ought to be.

The Port Tunnel is the only route in Dublin with congestion-related charging. All others including the M50 and tolls on national motorways are undifferentiated flat charges. It’s time to make space for the buses.