Submitted by Kevin, who says:

A few months ago, the Government of Ireland announced Project Ireland 2040, a scheme covering many aspects of infrastructure and development for Ireland. One announcement was Metrolink. Metrolink is the previously planned Metro North from Dublin City Centre to the Airport plus a connection with the existing Luas Green line and its upgrade to Metro standard giving Dublin a continuous metro line from the Northern suburbs, through the city centre and all the way into the Southern suburbs.

When it was announced a lot of people were confused as to how this would work with the existing Luas Green line as the two seemed to be running along the same path. So I felt the need to explain it through a map.

But once I’d started I couldn’t stop and so I done all the planned lines that have bee planned for Dublin over the next 2 decades. including some elements that I added myself, link the DART Circle. A Circle line running around the city core using the Existing Phoenix Park tunnel and the planned DART Underground on the south side, opening the way to allow the current single line DART network to double into 2 lines. Plus the southern section of Metro Orbital connecting Tallaght, its planned terminus, with Sandyford, the terminus of Metrolink.

I chose to stick to the current branding of Transport for Ireland (Basically TfL for the whole country) using, their brand colours, curves from the logo and their brand typeface Univers and Univers Condensed.

Imperative for me was that this map HAS to function in 2 languages. Not just because its the law in Ireland that government issued communications be in Irish or Irish AND English but because I love Irish as a language and I enjoyed the etymological research i had to do to translate some of the place-names. For example the Orange line orbiting the West of the City was announced as being called Metro West. I changed this to Metro Orbital. Which gave me “An Cuarmheitreo”. Cuar being a prefix meaning circular.

I haven’t done a proofing of the spellings and theres sure to be a few errors, but that’s what other people are for. To find my mistakes 😛

Transit Maps says:

This is hugely impressive work, Kevin – not least for the way you’ve skillfully and cleanly incorporated the need for dual-language labels throughout the map. As the Irish language labels are often quite a bit longer than their English equivalents, this is no easy feat at all!

I also love the triangular station icon where three lines pass through: it neatly locates each coloured dot on its respective line with a minimum of fuss and creates a pleasingly compact symbol. The dashed lines to indicate short walks are welcome information, and you’ve done as good a job with the fare zone rings as can be expected.

I’m a little unsure as to why the one-way section of the Luas Green Line needs to be indicated as a cased line: I feel that directional arrows alone would be enough to indicate this. If there’s more meaning to the line treatment than this, then it should probably be explained in the legend, which is comprehensive and easy to understand. Your matrix of line names/colours is an unusual but effective way of denoting all the lines on the map, though perhaps it could be even better if it included some information about proposed service frequencies as well (I’m presuming that the light rail lines run more frequently than DART, for example?)

Overall, though, this is a lovely piece of speculative work – an inspirational vision for the future of rail transit in Dublin!