Take David McWilliams’ big idea: to move the port away from the city, and use the land for housing. 

There’s a lot to be said for it. At Parisian density, the port could house 130,000 people. Located between the bay and Dublin city, along the riverside, it could be the best neighbourhood in Ireland.

Dublin Port doesn’t want to move. Of course it doesn’t. It’s been at the mouth of the Liffey for 300 years and it’s quite happy there. It claims moving would cost up to €15 billion and take decades. 

I would submit that – whatever other objections – we shouldn’t decide against moving the port on the grounds that it would be too costly. If we play our cards right, the Irish state could make a few quid from the deal.

The pen-stroke two-step

The basic idea is as follows. The port is zoned industrial. There’s a massive difference between the value of industrial land and high-density residential land. High-density residential land might be 20 times more valuable than industrial land. 

Who decides the zoning? The government! Who owns the land? The government! 

The simple route to profit is to rezone the port as high-density residential and then sell it to developers. The profit from the land sale would defray the cost of building a new port. 

To be sure, governments find it tricky to capture land value uplift because it takes speed and coordination. Qualities governments aren’t known for.

What happens is that the government starts thinking about building a new metro line somewhere. The decision takes years and the deliberations take place in the public eye. Entrepreneurs, watching on, buy up the land on the route in anticipation of the metro line and the upzoning. Because they move faster than the government, they capture the value. 

But with Dublin Port, that’s not a problem. The government already owns the land. It can’t fail to capture the value. All it has to do is masterplan it, rezone it and sell it. 

The real limit on the government’s ability to extract money from Dublin port land is infrastructure. Zoning for high density is well and good, but making it fit for high density will require lots of trains, roads and sewers.

An instant network

The hardest infrastructure problem is transport. If we say the government wants to make maximal cash from this project, it’ll need high-capacity transport to get people in and out. The highest capacity transport is a dedicated metro line. 

Capacity is metro systems’ superpower. Metros don’t necessarily move people through the city much faster than other modes. But they can move huge numbers. The space dedicated to a metro could move 30x the numbers of an equivalent road.

Dedicated metros are capacious, not because they use tunnels, but because they don’t share their lines with other trains. That allows them to run very very frequently. Top-end systems can run at up to 28 trains per hour, one every two minutes. And being electrified, they don’t need to be turned around at the end of the line. They just hit reverse and go back the way they came.

The place that’s best known for this land value capture metro manoeuvre is Hong Kong. It’s how Hong Kong’s amazing urban form took shape. The government bought up land, masterplanned it, built the subway line through it, and then sold it. The developers were happy to have a well-connected new neighbourhood and the government was happy to sell them the land. 

One difference to Hong Kong, though, is that Hong Kong already has a metro network. When it built new neighbourhoods, it extended the existing network, which was already quite extensive. That meant the new neighbourhood had access to the rest of the city by metro. 

In Ireland, we don’t have that. A rail spur from Connolly to the port would only be of limited value because Connolly isn’t well connected to the rest of the city. 

But let’s keep going with this, why not? 

Dublin’s urban form is typical for a European city. It has old freight lines rolling into it from the east and the west. The freight lines used to be very important to Dublin’s economy but they aren’t any more. Dublin’s biggest challenge today is moving workers around. 

Lots of European cities have found themselves in this position. What some have done is to convert their old freight network into an improvised metro system by building a tunnel connecting the rail termini on the east and west of the city and electrifying the old freight lines. And it works very well. The lines are called s-bahns and you’ll find them all over Europe. I’ve written about them
before.

The big advantage of an s-bahn is that, for the price of one tunnel, you get a good but not perfect metro network that connects the city and its hinterland. Of course, if money was no object you’d have tunnels everywhere. But tunnels are expensive, so turning the old freight system into a commuter rail workhorse is a great compromise. 

This idea isn’t wholly new to us. We’ve done it already with the Dart. But what we’re talking about here is turning the Dart from a line into a city-wide network. 

The five-kilometre tunnel from Heuston to Connolly wouldn’t come cheap. It might be €2.5 billion. But if the line ran past Connolly all the way to Dublin Port City; if the line had big capacity; and if the line connected not just to Connolly station but to the whole Dart line and the job-rich city centre and West Dublin; then you could justify building very densely in the port. It would be viable to live there without a car. And it would be absolutely viable to build at Paris or Barcelona densities.

We’re talking €2.5 billion for the s-Bahn and say €5 billion to build a new port (without knowing much about ports, Dublin Port Company’s estimate of €15 billion seems way higher than peers. In Louisiana, they’re building a port 1/4 the size for €800 million). How much might the state expect to net from land sales?

If we build at Paris or Barcelona density, that’s 310 units per hectare. The port is 260 hectares in size. If we say the units sell for €500,000 each. If we say the land’s percentage of the selling price is 20 per cent, a rough rule of thumb in property development. That would net the state €8.1 billion from the sale of the Dublin port land. 

€8.1 billion would pay to move the port and dig the tunnel. But in this mad hypothetical world, the government would still have another card to play.

East to West

Were the government to do all this – move the port, upzone the land, sell the land, build the tunnel, electrify the lines – it might as well go one step further and do the same thing on the west side of the city. At the other end of the tunnel.

Beyond Heuston station, there is a double-tracked line running through open fields for 20 kilometres. The scale of the opportunity along that line dwarfs that of the port. The land is 20 minutes by train from Dublin and zoned agricultural. Why not do the same trick? 

I’ve written much more about west Dublin rail in The Currency. Capturing the land value uplift for the state (in the scenario where the state doesn’t already own the land) takes a bit of nous. Next week I’ll show a practical way the Irish state could do it.