Bus system redesign saw €19.5m spent on one firm

BusConnects plan will see the creation of 16 bus corridors, together with separate cycle lanes across Dublin, a project which would see 230km of priority lanes put in place.

A proposed redesign of Dublin’s bus system saw €19.5m paid to one engineering firm in 2020 alone.

BusConnects, a wholesale redesign of the capital’s bus transit system, which would see the city divided into a series of specific, lettered travel corridors, paid Jacobs Engineering Ireland €12.2m for an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and €7.3m for design services for three of the proposed bus routes last year.

All told, €55m in expenditure from 2018 through 2020 is detailed in a breakdown provided to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee by the National Transport Authority, which has overall responsibility for the roll-out of the project, which represents the biggest redesign of Dublin’s bus system in generations.

Different engineering companies appear to have been paid different rates in terms of the number of corridors they have designed.

The Irish office of Jacobs, a Texas engineering concern, was paid €2.4m for the three routes it designed. 

Meanwhile, Arup was paid €9m for five routes, or €1.8m apiece, with Aecom Ireland and Roughan & O'Donovan receiving €1.4m and €0.95m respectively for the four routes they each designed.

The ultimate bill for BusConnects is expected to be in the region of €2m.

The plan, first announced in 2018 following a year-long wholesale review of the city’s bus services, will see the creation of 16 bus corridors, together with separate cycle lanes across Dublin, a project which would see 230km of priority lanes put in place.

Controversy

The project has not been without controversy, with the first of three public consultations in early 2019 attracting some 13,000 submissions, many of them relating to the felling of trees and compulsory acquisition of parts of people’s gardens in order to create space for the new lanes.

The final plans for the project, delivered last November, will see 3,000 trees felled and the part-acquisition of 726 gardens.

NTA chief executive Anne Graham described the plan as representing a “major programme of investment”.

She stressed that “mega projects” like BusConnects or the proposed airport MetroLink cannot be carried out without extensive planning and design stages.

She said BusConnects had required designs for “multiple roads, bridges, retaining walls, pavements, drainage, lighting, services, landscaping, traffic signalling, signage and similar” which had seen the compilation of thousands of engineering drawings.

A final implementation date for the project does not seem to be available, though the project website states it will go live from 2021 subject to Government funding, on a phased basis lasting several years.

Significant expenditure

Other significant expenditure detailed in the breakdown includes some €927,000 paid to consultants KPMG for “programme management”, the majority of which was paid in 2019, and internal NTA charges of €550,000 incurred in 2018.

PR firm Q4 meanwhile has been paid €1.05m to date across the three years for the provision of a “full-time in-house communications team”, with its bill split evenly between the bus corridors design and the network redesign sides of the project.