Luas

Dublin, being the big city, that is in comparison to the other cities in the country, has by definition, the largest population in the country. Granted that I don’t really consider Dublin to be that heavily populated, you still need to be able to move people around efficiently. One of the hallmarks of a growing city is the presence of mass transit systems. One of the main causes of traffic jams in cities is that too many people use cars. I some cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong, they rely much on mass transit systems. In those cases they use trains to shuttle people around. Dublin also has their own mass transit system, though I might say it is still at its infancu. It would be more apt to call it a light rail system since it is quite small.

The Luas, it Dublin’s answer to Hong Kong’s MTR. The difference is that the Luas is totally above ground probably due to construction cost issues as building above ground will make it cheaper. However, the trains will not be able to move as fast as they can since they will need to be competing with the buses and cars, not to mention people randomly walking on the streets. The Luas system only has two lines as of the moment, and as it was described to me, it doesn’t go anywhere you want to go. Perhaps the deferred plan to extend the system would be able to answer this, however that will have to wait for a while. There are no interchange stations between the two lines either. There is an automated ticket kiosk here and there are no gates! So you buy your ticket and you just get on board. There will probably be on board inspectors but I don’t think I saw any.

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