The agency responsible for planning a metro for Dublin wants to install an underground walkway to link the €2.4 billion system with the rail network.
The Railway Procurement Agency has proposed the subterranean motorised travelator, most commonly found in airport terminals, to connect a planned metro stop at D’Olier Street with Tara Street Dart station.
The RPA has proposed the travelator as a cheaper alternative to running the metro through a Dart station, which it believes would greatly increase the cost of the project. Passengers would alight from the metro on D’Olier Street and enter an underground tunnel that would bring them by conveyer belt into Tara Street Dart station, at least 500 metres underground.
The ambitious plans have not received the backing of the transport minister, however. Seamus Brennan is concerned at the safety implications of an underground travelator. He believes passengers carrying luggage could encounter difficulties and that policing it could be costly. Department sources say he will only agree to the travelator as “a last resort”.
Brennan has said that he wants to bring proposals on the metro to cabinet before Christmas. The minister has delayed discussions until the RPA has come up with alternatives that would facilitate a direct link-up between the Dart and the metro.
The metro is due to run from the airport to O’Connell Street and connect to St Stephen’s Green.
The proposed route runs through Ballymun and Glasnevin, goes underground at Dublin City University and then travels via the Mater Hospital and O’Connell Street as far as St Stephen’s Green.
Original plans by the RPA did include a link with Connolly and Pearse Street Dart station, but these were dropped to cut costs. The minister now wants an alternative direct link that will not add significantly to the overall cost.
Original costings of €4.8 billion provided by the RPA were revised to €2.4 billion after the minister refused to accept this figure. Experts from Madrid in Spain said it could be done for far less than the amount first proposed by the RPA.
The minister and the RPA, however, have since mooted a plan to allow a private consortium to build the metro. This would defer any payment until the new service is operating. An annual levy of about €300m would then be paid by the state over a 25-year leasing period. It is believed that the Department of Finance is not convinced that the metro represents value for money. A report carried out by Goodbody Economic Consultants on behalf of the department said the project was too expensive.
The RPA is standing by its travelator proposals as being the best, given its tight budget. The agency is providing more details on the scheme, including an estimation of the length of time it will take to travel from D’Olier Street to Tara Street. Ger Hannon, a spokesman for the RPA, said the details are still being finalised but the RPA believe that it could be done in such a way as to eliminate concerns.
Travelators are commonly used in other countries to ferry passengers to and from trains and planes. One in Montparnasse station in Paris carries passengers at seven miles per hour. A travelator was mooted after the RPA was asked to find ways of reducing its original estimate for the cost of the metro.
If you think that the link to DCU is a tenuous one, its worth pointing out that it has been mooted almost as long as the idea of a metro for Dublin has been around. In the Platform for Change document, DCU is clearly marked as a stop on one of the luas lines.