Luas Docklands extension to cost €60m a kilometre

THE COST of the Luas extension to Dublin's Docklands is €90 million - or €60 million a kilometre, the chief executive of the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA), Frank Allen, has revealed.

Addressing the Oireachtas Committee on Transport yesterday, Mr Allen said the cost of the Cherrywood extension to Bray is in the region of €300 million - or €40 million a kilometre.

The costs compare with an average of €30 million a kilometre for the development of the original Red and Green Luas lines, now almost four years old.

Mr Allen however refused to tell the committee what the anticipated cost of Metro North was, because he said the agency was about to formally request tenders from four consortiums interested in the project.

In the course of a wide-ranging update on agency projects, Mr Allen also told members that he had been asked by Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey to consider extending the proposed O'Connell Street to Broombridge (Liffey junction) line as far as Meakstown, where it would join up with the proposed Metro West. The agency was in favour of the proposal, he said.

Mr Allen also told the committee that the Luas was drawing favourable attention from tram operators around the world, as it was now carrying 29 million passenger journeys a year, a figure which worked out at 1.2 million passenger journeys a kilometre a year. This compared with a figure of just a half-million passenger journeys a kilometre a year for the Dart, he said.

Mr Allen said the entire Luas network would carry some 220 million passenger journeys a year when it was complete. However he essentially ruled out allowing buses to share road space with trams - at least in most of the existing tram routes. This was because the trams were narrower than the buses and should they meet an oncoming bus, problems could arise.

He also said if a bus was stopped at a tram stop, the 5.4-metre distance between platforms would not allow an oncoming tram to pull up at the stop until the bus had gone.

In relation to the capacity of the proposed Metro North, Mr Allen said this was about 20,000 passengers in each direction an hour, which he said was an "exceptionally high level of passengers". Very few cities in Europe - outside of London and Paris - had a metro line requiring a greater capacity than that, he said.

Mr Allen said he did not believe the density of population or the density of public transport would ever deliver greater passenger numbers to Metro north than its built-in capacity.

While he acknowledged the tunnel could not be expanded when built, he reminded the members of the committee that Metro west was also being developed and passengers could divert to that, along with all the new Luas lines.

To expand capacity in an underground you did not dig up the tunnel but added more lines, he said.

On a suggestion from Michael Kennedy (FF), Mr Allen said he would provide capacity figures and international comparisons to the committee "in writing".