By deciding to commission yet another study on Dublin's £220 million light rail transit (LRT) project, the new Minister for Transport is clearly fulfilling manifesto commitments made both by Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats before last month's general election. A less benign interpretation of Mary O'Rourke's decision is that it amounts to a craven capitulation to the car lobby - as represented by the Automobile Association and the Dublin Chamber of Commerce - which would prefer if LUAS was sunk out of sight in the city centre.
The most bizarre irony in this latest twist in the LUAS saga is that it will now fall to Pat Mangan, assistant secretary at the Department of Transport and former chairman of the Dublin Transportation Initiative, to draw up a brief for the study of an option that the DTI itself rejected in 1994. It was Mr Mangan who steered the DTI, which nearly everyone would acknowledge was the most comprehensive review undertaken of Dublin's transport needs. The construction of an on-street light rail system was one of the principal recommendations in its final report.
What the DTI proposed was a balanced programme investment in roads, public transport and traffic management, amounting to £1.2 billion. It was a "seamless garment", in Mr Mangan's memorable phrase, a package which was intended to be implemented in full. The then Fianna Fail Labour coalition accepted the DTI's report and adopted it as Government policy in November 1994. Only one major change was made, which involved doubling the capacity of the proposed Port Tunnel.
The first phase of the project, a line connecting Tallaght with Dundrum via the city centre, was included in the 1994-1999 National Development Plan and became part of the EU-funded Operational Programme for Transport. Mrs O'Rourke was a party to these decisions. Long before he became Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern pledged more than once that the LUAS project would go ahead as planned. A year ago, Dr Garret FitzGerald stirred up a storm of controversy in these pages by questioning the basis of an on-street light rail system and suggesting that it should go underground. But that option was ruled out as long ago as 1987 by a Fianna Fail government when it scrapped CIE's long-standing plans to extend the DART to Tallaght, running underground in the city centre. Ten years later, we're back looking into an underground again - despite everything the DTI said.
The French city of Lyon decided recently that a 20-kilometre extension to its underground metro would be built on-street - not least to save money. Bordeaux looked at the possibility of going underground, but rejected it in favour of on-street light rail. Even in Britain, which ripped up its tramways after the war, light rail is surging ahead. Manchester has won approval to extend its Metrolink, Sheffield's light rail system has been turned around, work has started on similar systems in Birmingham and Croydon.
It is surely as plain as a pikestaff that putting Dublin's light rail system underground within the canal ring would be immensely more expensive than the surface alternative. London's Jubilee Line extension, for example, is costing 10 times more per kilometre than Croydon's LRT. Semaly, CIE's French consultants, has estimated that it would cost £308 million more to put the entire city centre stretch of LUAS underground. This figure errs on the side of caution and is likely to represent a gross under-estimate of the bill. Then, there is the delay factor. It has taken nearly three years of detailed work, involving CIE's project team and up to 18 firms of consultants, to bring LUAS this far, and it would probably take just as long to re-design the scheme if it had to go underground. Mary O'Rourke could minimise delay by confining the brief for the latest study to an independent, desk-top review of the work already done by CIE's consultants to determine whether their estimates of the extra cost of going underground are exaggerated. A more exhaustive assessment, involving trial boreholes to gather geo-technical data, would take much longer, perhaps a year to complete. The CIE project team is understandably concerned about any further delay. "Our position is that the Minister has asked for this study. We welcome it because it should clear up the issue once and for all. We just hope it won't take too long," said its director, Donal Mangan. There is also legitimate concern that EU funding for LUAS may be jeopardised, despite the assurance from Mrs O'Rourke that "funds won't be lost to Ireland". What she means, of course, is that they can be juggled around and spent on something else if LUAS bites the dust.
If the money ends up being diverted into roads, as the car lobby would prefer, not only would this undermine the delicate symmetry in the transport equation, it would also represent a shameless betrayal of Dublin as a European capital city grappling with virtual gridlock. Is it really conceivable that the European Commission - and Monika Wulf Mathies, in particular - would countenance such a betrayal, especially when it is aware that on-street light rail has had a profoundly civilising influence elsewhere.
But then, as someone said, we are at the adolescent phase of car ownership in Ireland. With new car sales running 6 per cent higher than the record levels reached in 1996 and traffic jams now a regular occurrence on the motorways, Mrs O'Rourke will simply have to recognise that there can be no solution down that road. But if the Government decides to put LUAS underground in the city centre, she must know that the space on the streets which would have been dedicated to it will be occupied, as it is now, by cars and other traffic.
Does Mrs O'Rourke think that we can build our way out of the problem by throwing roads at it? If so, she is out of step with what's happening almost everywhere else in Europe as well as with the new thinking among traffic engineers. Of course, there was always a danger that the DTI programme would be gutted and filleted by vested interests. But few expected that such expert butchery would be carried out by a serving Minister for Transport, at the behest of a lobby interested only in preserving road space for cars.
However, assuming the study she has ordered can be completed quickly, the LUAS inquiry under Judge Sean O'Leary should be able to proceed on September 29th while the CIE project team gets on with what they should be doing - planning an LRT line to Ballymun. But it has never been easy to get things done in Dublin. "In the late-1970s," as one rather jaundiced transport planner recalled, "we had a choice whether to pee or get off the pot. We chose to get off the pot. It will be very interesting to see if we do anything now or not." Vincent Browne is on leave. His column will resume next week.