I have no wish to engage in a protracted dispute with Garret FitzGerald. But it seems to me, on the basis of his column last Saturday, that his continued obsession with the capacity of the Luas light rail system planned for Dublin serves to obscure some of the wider, perhaps less measurable, issues revolving around the future of cities and urban transport. Not once in his column did he respond to the charge I made here last Tuesday that the position he adopts in favouring an underground directly contradicts his statement as Taoiseach in 1986, that the "extremely low density" of Dublin's suburbs made the city "quite unsuited to mass transportation". How does he reconcile that with his current espousal of a mass transit system which would cost at least twice as much as Luas? And, as he must know, suburban densities would be even lower now than they were 11 years ago.
Dr FitzGerald also chooses to ignore what is happening abroad, not just on the Continent, but even in Britain, where light rail transit (LRT) is experiencing a remarkable revival, half-a-century after most of the old tram tracks were ripped up. What does he have to say about the success of Manchester's Metrolink? Or about the fact that Birmingham, which is also much larger than Dublin, has just started work on a similar LRT system? How can these cities be wrong and Dublin right, if we followed his advice to go underground?
What does he make of the recent decision by Lyons in France that a 20-kilometre extension to its new underground system - installed, incidentally, with massive disruption - will be built on-street? Or the verdict, quoted here last week, of the deputy mayor of Frankfurt that the biggest mistake his city had made was to put its public transport system underground, because it was much less pleasant and secure to use and also required substantial additional expenditure to keep every station manned, day and night?
Does Garret FitzGerald give any percentage to the intangible benefits which LRT can bring, in terms of its civilising effect on city streets? Is he not impressed by the likes of Cathal Mac Coille's discovery, on his first visit to Amsterdam last June, of the beneficial effects in terms of human wellbeing of moving about in a city designed for people, rather than cars? Has he even been to Strasbourg to see for himself the quite stunning transformation of the whole atmosphere of its central area by the installation of an LRT system?
No doubt all of the cities with new light-rail systems, and those now planning to install them, such as Bordeaux, have considered the issue of capacity, which so exercises Dr FitzGerald. And contrary to his claim that I was being "cavalier" about it, what I actually said was that concentrating on this issue, to the exclusion of all other considerations, is "something of a red herring" - not least because the likely increase in passenger demand could be catered for by ordering longer trams, and more of them. That's my interpretation of the ESRI's conclusion that additional funding may be necessary to complete the Luas project to an "adequate standard" - not, as he would have it, that the Government's economic think-tank is suggesting that it should go underground in the city centre, at more than double the cost. He is also wrong in saying that 30-metre or 40-metre trams cannot be coupled to operate on-street; such vehicles are usually articulated as well as being mounted on flexible bogeys, which make them quite capable of turning corners.
CIE has a draft contract with its French supplier, GEC-Alsthom in La Rochelle, to purchase 29 trams, with the option of ordering five more at the same price. This is equivalent to a 17 per cent increase in capacity which, even according to Dr FitzGerald's calculations, should be enough to cater for a higher peak demand generated by the growth of population, employment and car ownership in the Dublin area - all three of which, as he rightly points out, were under-estimated by the Luas consultants.
Dr FitzGerald maintains that, in order to meet a peak demand of 7,500 passengers per hour, Luas would need to run at a two-minute frequency in each direction, and that this would "block junctions and cross streets on average of once a minute". Has he ever visited Zurich? Is he aware its traffic lights are programmed to detect oncoming trams and let them through? The lights immediately revert to their previous sequence to facilitate other traffic.
All these issues will be thrashed out at the forthcoming public inquiry, and Dr FitzGerald must have sufficient confidence in the common sense and impartiality of Judge Sean O'Leary - a onetime party colleague of the former Taoiseach - to reach the right conclusions. In the meantime, he should bear in mind that CIE's Luas project team is doing no more than implementing one of the key elements of the Dublin Transportation Initiative's strategy for the metropolitan area; it has not dreamed up some demented vision of its own.
Which brings me to the Automobile Association, whose spokesman, Conor Faughnan, dashed off yet another apologia for cars last Wednesday. Writing in a hit-me-now-with-the-child-in-myarms mode, he found it "deeply offensive" that I would characterise the cars being used by parents to drop pre-school children to child-minders as "private chariots". The chariots I had in mind, as he must surely know, are driven by an army of commuters - all travelling alone - who daily clog the streets and treat the city centre as a parking lot.
If Mr Faughnan really believes that "inefficient public transport and a lack of resources for traffic management" are at the root of Dublin's traffic problems, then he should be supporting the Luas project, rather than denigrating it. He says Luas is going to cost £220 million and "before the first ecu of that money is spent, all of the options, including underground, should be properly assessed". The roads now being planned in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown alone are going to cost £400 million; should they not be "properly assessed" too?
What the current debate about Luas indicates is a failure of belief on the part of its detractors. It is worth recalling that there was a similar outbreak of scepticism in the French city of Grenoble in 1983, when its LRT system was being planned; this was reflected in the results of a referendum, which approved the project by a slim majority of 53 per cent. A year after the trams started running on the streets in 1989, public approval soared to 93 per cent, and I am convinced that this would also happen in Dublin - if only we could gather our guts together to go ahead with Luas.
PS. I don't know where Garret FitzGerald got the notion that I would favour pedestrianising the whole city centre from Parnell Square to St Stephen's Green. I have never made such a case: indeed, I would be opposed to an outright ban on cars. What's needed is the implementation, on a widespread basis, of traffic calming measures to give more priority to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport.