Public transport is not just another government service, and CIÉ is not just another semi-state. 

Public transport is part of the answer to the most pressing problems in Irish life: housing costs, quality of life, physical health, and economic productivity.

For a long time, Ireland was a backwater. Now Dublin has an opportunity to reach the living standards and population of world-class cities like Vienna, Lisbon, Lyon or Hamburg. But to get there, we have to get the public transport right. Public transport isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s the nervous system of a big city. Without efficient public transport, rich cities can’t be rich. Liveable cities can’t be liveable.

One way of fixing public transport is by grafting it onto the existing city. That’s basically what we’ve done so far in Ireland to this point.

The problem with this approach is, even if you manage to overlay a top-class transit network on the city, you need lots of people living on the line to support it. A high-performing public transport line can move 50,000 people in each direction per hour, but for that, you need (many more than) 50,000 people living along the line. Building additional homes for hundreds of thousands of people in already built-up areas of Dublin City, for example, is a political non-starter.

The other approach is to bring the mountain to Mohammed: to build housing intensively around preexisting transit nodes, like rail stations. It’s called transit-oriented development, or T.O.D, and it’s a much easier sell, politically, than intensifying development in mature areas. 

As it happens, CIÉ, the holding company for Irish Rail, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann, owns a bunch of unused land near rail stations. Lorcan O’Connor is CEO of the CIÉ Group of companies, and he’s making T.O.D. a big priority. 

This makes sense for CIÉ, which has an interest in generating as much public transport ridership as possible. CIE knows that, as long as our cities are broad and low density, they’re not amenable to public transit. “We can point to so many developments around the country over the last 20 years,” said O’Connor, “where it’s just complete car dependency. And it is very inefficient to serve the area by public transport.”

He added: “Adamstown was the first genuine attempt in Ireland to try and develop along the principles of T.O.D. It certainly looked good on paper. And I think unfortunately, it just coincided with the financial crash. And it didn’t quite happen.”  

Adamstown was built in 2004. Now, O’Connor is pushing the second generation of Irish T.O.D. schemes:

“We were the catalyst for [the Colbert Quarter development in Limerick] because we were the largest landowner. I remember John Moran, the Chair of the LDA, phoning me up saying, ‘I really want to do something around this. What does it require to get CIE on board?’ And I said, ‘Well, if you’re willing to adhere to the principles of T.O.D., we’re completely up for it.’

The Colbert Quarter is intended to house 10,000 people in and around Colbert Station in the centre of Limerick city. The homes will have fewer than one parking space each, with the idea that residents will use public transit to get around.

The Colbert Quarter is CIÉ’s most ambitious T.O.D. plan so far. But there are others. In Galway, CIE is seeking to build homes and offices in the area around Ceannt Station, at Augustine Hill. In Cork, beside Kent station, there are to be new office blocks and a new hotel. 

And of course, there’s Heuston Station. CIÉ owns rail yards around Heuston, as well as nearby at Inchicore. CIE has launched a Heuston masterplan, which imagines developing Heuston at high density, with tall buildings facing onto the Liffey, and with little to no private parking. 

“If you look at Heuston station, we’ve already set out the broad vision of it having zero cars. What we’re saying is we’re going to include a cycle park facility for three to five thousand bikes. We’re going to have additional bridges over the Liffey that will be for both public transport and for cycling. And then we’ll have additional access points for the rail station for rail users.”

“Then, there are longer-term opportunities that require a bit of work. The best example of that would be around Inchicore,” said O’Connor, “And we’re talking to the LDA there, because our neighbours at Inchicore are the ESB and the OPW. So we believe, a bit like Limerick, we can develop something there.”

T.O.D. fits CIE’s agenda in multiple ways. It’s a chance to make a few quid from underutilised rail yards in high demand locations. And it guarantees passengers for CIE buses and trains.

“Because public transport is in our DNA, we’re insisting developments are done on a T.O.D. basis. And we would see that as being beneficial for us, because obviously, greater dependency and usage of public transport helps our core business,” said O’Connor.

“Ultimately, we are state-owned, there’s a policy priority around climate change emissions. And then also, we know that housing is a key issue for government. So from a strategic perspective, it makes perfect sense,” he added.

If it makes sense to do ambitious T.O.D. at CIÉ’s existing stations, would there not be an argument for building brand new stations and developing there?

“I would categorise that as the speculative end of sort of property development. And it isn’t an area we’re involved in,” O’Connor said. “We would certainly be supportive of any kind of development that is close to public transport services… But we wouldn’t be in the business of buying land and hoping to rezone it,” he added.

The Holy Grail, and how to get it

An iron law of cities is that the median commute time is about one hour’s round trip. This number is found across times and cities.

When commutes get longer than one hour, people tend to either change jobs or change cities, because long commutes suck the joy out of life. 

When commutes are shorter than an hour, people tend to move farther away from the city, to where there’s more space. Or the city’s short commute attracts new people, which adds to commuting time. One hour is the goldilocks commute, on average. 

Another iron law of cities is that a city’s wealth is closely related to the number of jobs available in that one-hour commutable distance.

This is to do with something called matching. A worker’s productivity is determined by how well they match with their job: artists tend to be bad accountants and vice versa. 

The great thing about cities is that it brings lots of workers and lots of jobs together in one place, so people can slot into the job that fits them best. The better the match between worker and job, the more productive the worker is going to be, the better they’ll be paid, and the stronger will be the city economy. In Korean cities, it was found that a 10 per cent increase in the number of local jobs increased productivity per worker by 2.4 per cent.

The key to a successful city is to connect as many workers and jobs as possible. And since the median commuting time is one hour — after which, the willingness of workers to commute drops off — a key factor is the speed of the commute.

A faster commute effectively makes the city bigger. It brings more jobs within the reach of the average worker, which unlocks all the benefits of matching, productivity and so on. Melo et al (2016) found, for 25 French cities, a 10 per cent increase in average commuting speed increases the size of the labour market by 15−18 per cent. Add the French numbers to the Korean numbers, and a 10 per cent increase in commuting speed makes the average worker 4 per cent more productive. 

If we accept that the key to healthy city economies is fast efficient commutes, our thoughts must next turn to public transport. Because, once you get above a hundred thousand people or so, congestion means that cars travel slowly in the city. Cars are a blastedly slow and inefficient way to get around a busy city. In Dublin, the average speed of a car at rush hour is 11mph.

To get commuting speeds up from 11mph, you need public transport. Only with efficient public transport can you increase average commuting speed while at the same time increasing the number of people using the network. A commuter rail system like the DART, for example, has the capacity to move as many people as a 16 lane motorway, at an average speed of 20 miles per hour.

Getting people out of their cars and into public transport, what the experts call a “modal shift”, is the holy grail of urban development. I ask O’Connor on how to get there, and whether there’s anything to be said for David McWilliam’s idea that public transport should be free.

“Pre-COVID, the public transport network was largely operating close to capacity,” said O’Connor, “So were you to see a massive increase in demand the very next day by making the service free, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to serve that increased demand.

“But that would be something you could do over time. And research has shown, where public transport is free, you sometimes get the active traveller [ie the walker or cyclist] taking public transport because it’s free.

“Just to go to the capacity point, we were particularly constrained on the rail side before Covid… But what we have been able to do during that time with the assistance of the government is to order additional carriages for our inter-city routes. And then back in December, the largest order in the history of the state for the DART Plus carriages. So by the time we get back from Covid, we will actually be delivering additional capacity on heavy rails. And so that will be a significant opportunity for the modal shift.”