Another fine mess
Belfast’s transport hub descends into chaos
David Browne
10 November 2024
The official opening of the new Belfast
Grand Central Station.
The opening of Belfast’s brand-new hub, Grand Central Station, designed to be at the heart of the North’s transport policy was hailed as a triumph of the devolved administration. Yet getting from A to B in Belfast in the past few weeks has been problematic. As widely reported, the reason is the troubled opening of the same “transport hub”. The dismantling of the nearby Boyne Bridge, and the closure of nearby streets for perhaps a year, has caused chaos.
As for actual people as seen in the delayed buses, cancelled and truncated train journeys if all this disruption is anything to go by it is going to be anything but plain sailing. But as with Starmer’s Labour government, perhaps the strategy is to get the painful stuff out in the open from the start.
The way people are herded is obviously a concern for government parties. How they go about it in realizing their targets depends on what they feel people will stand for in order to bring about a result. That is the nature of infrastructure projects in a capitalist economy. People and plant.
In reality this will do very little to improve transport services. So, what is it for? It has cost £340 million. It is a project to help create wealth for business interests. There are some services that will be worse, such as rail travel between towns either side of Belfast. Whereas passengers used to just take one train to travel through Belfast now they will have to board another at the new station.
Another new and positive change is the introduction of an hourly Enterprise service but this could have been accommodated by the existing Lanyon Place Station. The Hub aims to attract business to an area around the station called Weaver’s Cross where the acquisition of the land used for the station has freed up land to be sold to new enterprises and property developers. All of this land is the property of Translink, which people think of as a public service but is actually managed like a private company.
The Hub is part of an economic plan, a wealth creation scheme. It’s not part of a people centered transport policy. The big shiny new facility is an empty substitute for that. It’s propaganda, a spectacle. For ordinary local transport users there is basically nothing. The East-West Glider won’t even stop there. The outdated and dangerous cycle lane system has not been improved. On opening there was no provision for cycle parking.
Typical for this sort of project is the aim to set out transport policy for the next 25 years, but there has been no expansion of services towards Derry or expansion to the South other than the Dublin train service.
Grand Central Station was hailed as the jewel in the crown of a Stormont administration with an unbroken history of failure. It looks like the whole concept was a disgusting fantasy, a vanity project but all the empty space waiting to be filled with one’s concept of a future society cannot but help fire the imagination. The Stormont administration would like the Transport Hub to be symbolic of something. Something good about the northern state. But this would be a lie.
The people of the North continue to be penalised for being seen as extraneous to the economic prospects of British capitalism. London has the Underground. Dublin has the Luas. Belfast has chaos, confusion and profiteering.
The real tragedy of this situation is that this sort of expenditure normally sets the tone for transport development into the future. Yet Derry and West of the Bann are left in the same situation as in the past and the new hub has soaked up all the capital funding that could have led to real development.
Rather than a flagship for the northern colony, it depicts yet another failure of the failed statelet.