Tuesday is the Feast of the Epiphany, the traditional end of Christmas. Due to work patterns that have developed post-Covid, it’s also the day when hundreds of thousands of Irish people will face their own personal epiphany as they resume the grim treadmill of the midweek commute, leaving their homes hours before dawn and returning even more hours after dusk.
Ireland’s transport crisis isn’t confined to Dublin, but Dublin is its most extreme expression. Stories in the run-up to Christmas highlighted the bleakness: motorists on the M7 experiencing chronic delays; the National Transport Authority acknowledging the M50 was now at full capacity and faced a future of permanent congestion; Dublin Bus reporting that average travel times across the capital had fallen to historic lows. A bad situation was made worse by a power outage on the Luas and a bridge strike on the Dart. But these only emphasised how the entire system of moving people around the city is now failing.
An annual league chart of the world’s most congested cities shows Dublin rising four places up the rankings to 11th worst in the world, and third worst in Europe. The capital is like someone who has been neglecting their health for decades and is now facing the consequences: clogged arteries, collapsing lungs, failing knees.
A few relatively quick remedies could help alleviate some of the symptoms. It would help if the city’s traffic was actually policed properly. Drivers regularly flout the rules, driving in bus lanes, stopping on yellow boxes and ignoring laws restricting private vehicles in city-centre zones. If you do any of these things at the moment, you’re pretty unlikely to face any consequences.
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It beggars belief that there still isn’t a fully integrated ticketing system with on-board contactless payment. That inevitably lengthens the time it takes for passengers to board public transport. Meanwhile, the reliability of real-time displays at bus stops and in transport apps has been in free-fall for years, with no adequate explanation given.
All of these – the illegal driving, the outdated ticketing, the unreliable information – add to the unpleasantness of using public transport in Dublin, and probably push some people back into their private cars. Fixing these issues would help, but this won’t solve the underlying problem, which you can see and feel every day: there are more people than the system can serve.
It is now 20 years since Bertie Ahern’s government confirmed it was proceeding with Metro North. Since then, the population of Leinster, including the Greater Dublin Area, has increased by nearly 700,000, or 29 per cent. Babies born in the year of the metro announcement are now young adults resigned to the fact that it can take hours to travel a few kilometres from one side of the city to the other. And, of course, there’s no metro.
The standard litany of blame for this cites political short-sightedness, the economic crash and nimbyism. But there’s another, almost forgotten factor: a long-standing ideological hostility in some quarters to mass public transit and, by extension, to the vision of the city adopted decades ago by most of the European countries with which we routinely compare ourselves.
For decades, that ideological stance had influential supporters in the political and administrative class. It found public expression in the pronouncements of academics and economists who opposed every significant commuter project from Dart to Luas to the various iterations of the metro.
It might seem absurd to suggest that a handful of academics are responsible for Dublin’s transport woes. But these were influential voices and wielded considerable authority in policy discussions. Their ideology was formed by a reaction to the failed Irish economic model of the 1980s and influenced by the example of deregulation and privatisation in the UK and US. Most of them are well past retirement age now, but the vision they offered in the 1990s and 2000s – of a city largely dependent on buses and private vehicles – is the place we find ourselves living in today.
Contrast Dublin with Copenhagen, a city of comparable size, which has also experienced significant population growth. Since opening its first metro in October 2002 with the M1 and M2 lines serving 20km and 22 stations, the Danish capital has systematically expanded its metro system through multiple phases: extensions to Vanløse in 2003 and Copenhagen airport in 2007; the entirely underground 15.5km M3 City Circle Line with 17 stations in September 2019; the M4 Nordhavn branch with two stations in March 2020; and the M4 Sydhavn extension with five stations in June 2024.
‘One lesson for Dublin’s future might be to recognise that it’s not just systems failure that has led to the current shambles’
The city now has four lines serving 44 stations across approximately 43km, with 30 stations underground. It carries more than 300,000 daily passengers on driverless trains running 24 hours a day. A fifth line, M5, is scheduled to open in 2035, continuing a methodical buildout of rapid-transit infrastructure that has helped make Copenhagen one of Europe’s most sustainable cities.
The Danes didn’t achieve this through superior competence alone – though competent execution certainly helped. They achieved it through a fundamentally different vision of what their city should be.
So one lesson for Dublin’s future might be to recognise that it’s not just systems failure that has led to the current shambles. Cultural and ideological opposition to certain kinds of urban planning have also played a part. You can see this not just in the transport mess but in the abandonment of large-scale construction of social housing and the reluctance to address the role of private speculators in the degradation of parts of Dublin’s inner city.
There is a generation of Dubliners who came of age during the bust, when everything was cancelled. They’re now part of the workforce in a city that treats their two-hour commutes as an acceptable price for participation in the economy. They could be forgiven for thinking this was inevitable. It wasn’t.
We need now to finally discard outdated theories promoted by those whose supposedly common-sense predictions - that a city of Dublin’s size can function without world-class rail-based public transport infrastructure - have been proved wrong for 40 years. And to recognise that the choice isn’t between a single metro line and an affordable bus network. It’s between a functional city and an increasingly dysfunctional one.
