Luas chaos illustrates the law of unintended consequences

It’s hard to think of a policy where you spend so much to make things worse... until you look around, writes Eoin O’Malley

‘MY government spent half-a-billion on a tram system and all I got was this lousy traffic jam.” It’s not the Luas Cross-City’s new marketing T-shirt, but it could be. One Saturday before Christmas, ministers lined up to welcome the shiny new Luas line, hailing it as great progress for Dublin’s commuters.

Then came Monday morning. There was horrendous traffic, with even the Taoiseach complaining in the Dail that his journey to work took much longer than usual. That might have been teething problems, but the following months have shown that it wasn’t.

Within weeks Dublin transport planners admitted that there were a number of pinch points, where there was more traffic going through a junction than space in that junction. This has led to trams being backed up on O’Connell Street and Dawson Street. Buses have been diverted, adding to their journey times. It appears to have caused further problems for the existing Green line. Senator Neale Richmond complained last week of “lengthy delays becoming the norm for Luas commuters as trams are increasingly overcrowded and frequency is becoming ever more sporadic”.

It’s hard to think of a policy where you spend so much money and make things worse… unless you look around.

Policy failure is hardly new, and is not unique to Ireland. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were designed to make the US a safer place after the September 11 attacks. On most reasonable measures the US is now less safe. It has lost much of its global dominance as a superpower, more people want to harm it, and all at a cost of $2.4 trillion when you include interest payments on the money borrowed to wage the war. I’m not sure how many zeros that it, but it’s a lot of money for a negative return.

Back in Dublin, the council recognises it needs to fix some of these problems. It’s considering stopping all non-Luas traffic from going through College Green. By creating a new public space it will stop bus services from using what was one of the two busiest junctions in Dublin.

So Luas customers might consider themselves lucky, at least their journeys are being prioritised. But what will happen if this proposal goes ahead?

It’s likely when we try to fix one problem we will create another. There will be fewer cross-city buses even though many multiples of people take buses compared with Luas or Dart. The already overcrowded Luas can’t cope and we’re a decade at least before the relaunched Metro.

The city’s planners are trying to do the right thing, but they failed to see the unintended consequences of their actions. Transport planners are told about the efficiency gains of using trams, and this is meant to offset the enormous extra costs compared with the investment in buses. But they forget that trams can break down, or meet drivers who don’t see them. A minor Luas crash blocks up the whole service. A bus breaks down, and the next bus gets around it. In this case it was pretty plainly going to be a problem to anyone who took a bus in Dublin, but often it’s not always as obvious.

Unintended consequences are a part of policy making everywhere, but we can learn from what happens elsewhere. Last year, Simon Coveney introduced a type of rent control, in the hope that it would put a brake on spiralling rents in Dublin. What happened? The controls pushed rents up. Landlords rushed to get rent increases through early, because they thought this would be their last chance. We should have known; it happened in a lot of other places.

That’s because people anticipate political action, and react to it. When the US declared a ‘War on Drugs’, it enhanced the power of drug cartels, and the drug problem got worse. When Barack Obama spoke about gun control, it had the effect of increasing gun sales. When Australia, a leader in anti-smoking policies, banned e-cigarettes, smoking rates increased for the first time in decades.

When Mexico City attempted to reduce traffic congestion and pollution, it made it worse. The city introduced a rule that cars were not allowed to be used between 5am and 10pm one day a week. So if your registration plate ended in 1 or 2, you couldn’t drive it on a Monday. As most of the pollution came from the city’s 2.5 million cars, taking half-a-million of them off the road on any weekday might have reduced pollution by a fifth. People were going to car share or take public transport on their car’s day off.

But the city’s drivers were smarter than the city’s leaders. To avoid being grounded, many people took taxis, which were plentiful, cheap, old and polluting. And taxis are empty about a quarter of the time, so pollution went up.

More people bought an extra car to ensure access to a car at all times. These cars tended to be second-hand and hence more polluting. The number of cars in circulation went up as did pollution.

We have spent a lot of money subsidising the retro-fitting and insulation of old homes. This is aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing carbon use. But one effect of this attempt to seal off any potential heat loss is a decrease in ventilation. If the home is in an area prone to radon, radon poisoning becomes a real possibility when we make homes airtight. The lack of ventilation can also cause mould to grow, which might increase reactions for asthmatics.

Unintended consequences are not always negative. Bull Island, now a nature reserve in Dublin, exists as an unintended consequence of building the Bull Wall to keep Dublin Port clear of sediment.

But unintended consequences are a real problem for policy makers. They need to look around corners, to anticipate others’ reactions. A bit like a Rubik’s Cube, you move one thing to make it better, and something else moves out of line. But unlike a Rubik’s Cube, it is never solved.

Some other problem will always emerge.

Dr Eoin O’Malley is the Director of MSc in Public Policy at the School of Law and Government Dublin City University

‘Unlike a Rubik’s Cube, it is never solved as some other problem comes along’