Michael Moynihan: What Madrid’s metro teaches us about Cork’s transport woes

What about our Cork Metro? Our Leeas, our CART?

A few lessons might be no harm.

Madrid has tripled the length of its metro system in 12 years, faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. I know this because of a stunning article I read at worksinprogress.co by Ben Hopkinson, head of research at Britain Remade. It was so good I rang him to ask if there were lessons in Madrid for, say, a city on the northwest edge of Europe looking to build a . ..

“Based on the population numbers for Cork you’ve given me, it’s certainly the right size to support such a development.

“In France every city with over 150,000 people has a tramway or metro. By contrast, in the UK there are 30 cities of 150,000 people or more which don’t have anything along those lines. This is a problem which affects Britain and Ireland.”

Having seen the metro system in Bordeaux up close, I can only agree. Further south?

“Some of the lessons from Madrid for building regional transport could be applied elsewhere.

“The political system helps. The Community of Madrid can levy taxes for local spending, and the four-year building programme lines up perfectly with regional elections. The centre-right People’s Party ran on a pledge of ‘we’ll build 30 miles of metro over our next four-year term’ and they won the election.

“They had all the powers to fund the metro, to approve it, and to build it, to speed up delivery when it came to environmental impact assessments, all of that. Conveniently for those politicians, the lines would be finishing and stations opening just before the next regional election.

“They could then say ‘we’ve built 35 miles of track and built these stations near you, we plan to keep doing that,’ so that’s why their appeal was boosted when they promised to deliver Metro Sur, a route to connect towns south of Madrid.”

We don’t have that level of autonomy in Ireland on the local level, but clearly it’s crucial to the success of Madrid.

Absolutely — the lesson from Madrid is if you want politicians who will build things then you need to give them the power and the ability to be rewarded for delivery of results

“Here in the UK, the mayors of London or Greater Manchester don’t have the powers to approve light rail extensions. They might be able to oversee such works but the interplay between the central government and the regions generally means it takes a lot longer to deliver on projects like that.

“And because it’s not tied to the electoral cycle over here, unlike Madrid, no-one takes responsibility. Because of that the costs keep going up. No-one’s really to blame but no-one’s able to deliver a project on time — and able to take the credit for it — either.

“Without a city council or regional government, or a mayor who can be the figurehead for building the project, it can be difficult to get costs down to the levels Madrid operated with.”

Environmental assessment

The Spanish enjoy other advantages. When Ben says their attitude to environmental impact statements was “brisk” he’s not kidding. One four-mile stretch of track in Madrid had a 19-page environmental assessment.

The environmental statement for a 3.3-mile branch line in Portishead in England, by comparison was 17,912 pages.

“In Madrid it was recognised that you’re building a metro beneath existing city streets, so they weren’t going to have to worry about ancient woodlands or virgin lands untouched by man. They were tunnelling through a city which had already had environmental impacts from the buildings erected there, and the effect of the metro would be to get rid of cars clogging up and polluting the city anyway.

“The needless paperwork was slashed because while environmental statements in the UK can take two or three years to compile, this (Madrid) was clearly a green project. Of course you must be aware of the heritage and archaeology, but the Madrid assessments were abbreviated because the extensions were in urban areas.”

Then there’s station design.

“Britain Remade, our organisation, released a report last year on light rail systems in the UK.

“We found, for instance, that in Manchester approximately £40m was spent on one station. It’s a really beautiful station — but £40m would have built at least three miles of tramway which could have had standard, functional stations, like bus stops.

“You can make stations look nice with sculptures and a mural or two without making them architectural behemoths. When it comes to projects in the UK and America in particular you often hear promises like, ‘we’re going to build the biggest or fastest or grandest’ when what’s needed is something simpler than these grand computer generated images — which are never completed anyway.” Another advantage in Madrid will resonate with Irish readers.

Consultants

“One issue British infrastructure faces, and I believe Ireland may be the same, is that there’s a reliance on consultants.

“Those consultants may not have the same incentives that the group tasked with organising and overseeing the infrastructure has. Broadly speaking, the consultants get paid whether the project is delivered on time, or under budget — in fact, often if the project is pushed back they continue to profit by working on it.

“In Madrid they cultivated expertise and focused on paying people what they were worth — outside strict civil service pay scales — and that team was able to work very quickly to deliver any changes to the design, to oversee the technical side of tunnelling.

“That can be very complex: a mistake in a tunnelling project can shut it down for years, which is what happened at Heathrow.

“But having a core team which could learn over time and figure out which contractors were the best was instrumental to Madrid staying on track.”

That core team was part of Mintra, a public company established by the local government which built up its own expertise and sidestepped the reliance on consultants we see here and in Britain.

“The politicians trusted that core team based on delivery, so both politicians and team worked well together. You didn’t have the kind of repetitive disputes you might get between contractors, consultants, and other bodies — there was real harmony working together.”

I won’t belabour the comparisons with our own array of disasters and non-starters, but there are clear lessons to be learned from the experience of the Spanish capital. The big one, though, seems to be empowering local politicians. Is there an appetite for that?

Just something to consider when next you’re trapped in a traffic jam on the quays, or on the link road, and wondering what the alternative might be.