An Irish Diary

Pole position – An Irishman’s Diary on visual clutter and the Luas Cross City line

Plonking tall, thick poles in front of the curved eastern colonnade of the Old Parliament or anywhere else on the Luas Cross City line route is much more visually obtrusive than attaching wires directly to buildings

Frank McDonald's face
Frank McDonald
Sat May 13 2017 - 00:01

What is to be done about the unwelcome new forest of chunky steel poles that have appeared along the Luas Cross City line?

I’m surely not alone in feeling dejected about this latest example of needless clutter, especially as many of the poles are located alongside major historic buildings, such as the Old Parliament House in College Green.

Altogether, the €368 million tramway is set to leave us with 126 such poles between St Stephen’s Green and Parnell Square. And this is happening in a city that’s probably the most slovenly in Europe when it comes to street signage, despite pledges in Dublin City Council’s 2011 public realm strategy to “de-clutter” it, especially in the centre.

The tragedy is that the latest blight of additional Luas clutter could have been avoided had the Railway Procurement Agency – now subsumed into Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) – adopted a more architecturally sensitive approach, by stringing the catenary from buildings, rather than poles, as was done with street-running sections of the Red and Green lines.

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The Luas Cross City route includes not only relatively majestic Dawson Street but also College Green, Dublin’s great architectural set-piece. Yet these are among the areas where the poles have appeared because TII took the view that it needed to avoid attaching wires to “buildings of international or national importance such as Bank of Ireland, College Green”.

TII reaffirmed that “in general, building fixings have been considered the best approach in city centre streets,” but it is clear that this is not being done for Luas Cross City.

Plonking tall, thick poles in front of the curved eastern colonnade of the Old Parliament or anywhere else on its route is much more visually obtrusive than attaching wires directly to buildings.

In Bordeaux, the French ministry of culture was so concerned about the visual impact of its tramway’s “wirescape” on the city’s largely 18th century core that French tram-builder Alstom – which also supplied the Luas trams – had no option but to devise a wire-free alternative. This draws power from a third rail that’s only “live” when a tram is right on top of it.

Thus, the pantograph on every tram folds down as it enters the city centre and glides through this sensitive area, as if by magic. That’s why An Taisce, Dublin Civic Trust and the Irish Georgian Society all argued that a similar solution should be adopted for Luas Cross City, to protect the historic environment and enhance Dublin’s bid to become a Unesco World Heritage Site.

TII was opposed to the Bordeaux option, insisting that the use of an alternative power system for the long-missing city centre link “would not achieve the levels of everyday reliability required to match the present-day performance of Luas”. This was mainly due to the weather in Dublin; it was wetter here, with more chance of ice, the Luas Cross City team said.

And yet, Bordeaux is also an Atlantic city, subject to the same “fronts” as Dublin. Yet despite the success of its 44km four-branch tramway – conceived at the same time as Luas but completed years earlier – Dublin’s transport planners remained committed to having an overhead power line; it was probably another case of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.

However, An Bord Pleanála was so intrigued by the seemingly effortless outcome in Bordeaux that it commissioned an expert report from Systra, an international transport engineering consultancy, on whether this would be feasible in Dublin. It concluded that a similar alternative power system would work here, subject to some technical issues being resolved.

Dublin City Council supported this option, at least in principle, but also cautioned that ice and rain would need to be taken into account. These reservations led An Bord Pleanála senior planning inspector Brendan Wyse to conclude that “there is not a convincing case on technical grounds for departing from an OCS [Overhead Conductor System] in the city centre”.

As a result, the appeals board effectively flunked it in granting a railway order for the Luas Cross City scheme. “In such circumstances, given the unresolved operational issues, the board did not consider it appropriate to impose a condition requiring the provision of an alternative power system in the city centre,” it said. Thus, we were left with all the poles.

Even at this stage, it should be possible to persuade TII that its reticence about attaching wires to buildings of national or international importance is misplaced.

Certainly, what’s been done makes nonsense of Dublin City Council’s commitment to “develop the city’s character by cherishing and enhancing Dublin’s renowned streets, civic spaces and squares” – including College Green.

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