Water Bus

[Gary]

Has anything ever been looked into using the Liffey more as a means of public transport?

For example

Heuston to Tara
Custom House to Clontarf, Blackrock, Sutton, Howth, Donbate, Rush etc.

I know there's tidal limitations on some of the routes and how fast would a boat be as oppossed to rail/ bus from say Rush I don't know.

Also there's a tourist boat which paddles along at 1knot from Ha'penny to the point with a couple of new pontoon stops built along the liffey for it. Its def not run for commutters though, be quicker crawling.

Still seems to happen in a lot of other cities.

[Colm Donoghue]

I think there's two different things there
the Liffey is unreliable, level wise, it'd need a weir at the lower end of it's range to make sure there's enough water all along and then at high tides, the bridges would be too low. There'd be a speed restriction of about 4 knots on river craft( may be different in Dublin port, that's what it was in Arklow.)

Dublin isn't Venice, it's hardly even Paris. The cost of putting a weir would be prohibitive - think EIS, aBP appeals, putting in a lock....
Compare to putting proper bus prority measures down the quays...

To run sea ferry services, the weather would be to fickle for boring normal operation with cancellations. people wouldn't accept the weather as an excuse
Also this would be either very expensive or very slow or both.

So I don't think this could ever float ;)

[Derek Wheeler]

I bet we're sorry we sold the JETFOIL now!

[SickCert]

The old B&I jetfoil, gawd what was its name?

You would want to spend a year dredging the Liffey, some amount of crap in there.
But wasnt it a hundred years+ years ago when a river rivalled the dart line? Between Dun laoghaire and the city? So maybe something in this water based travel.

[dowlingm]

In Vancouver SeaBus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaBus) (2 ferries, 400 seats each) is an integrated part of the local transit setup.

In Toronto TTC operated the Island Ferries for a while but that was more for visitor traffic, not many residents there.

[Prof_Vanderjuice]

We used to have ferries across (not along) the Liffey, run by the Corpo - so probably the only municipal public transport ever to operate in Dublin. The last routes running were across the river at Commons Street (where the Sean O'Casey bridge is now) and a triangular route between the Point, York Road and Britain Quay. They finally shut down when East Link opened in 1984 (even though the bridge didn't cater for all the journeys possible by ferry; the Britain Quay services would still be useful today, at least until the next new bridge goes in).

I also think the DDDA ran a ferry for a few months at the Sean O'Casey Bridge site, as a kind of taster for the bridge, though I could be misremembering.