Re: Re: college green/ o’connell street plaza and pedestrians

Today’s Irish Times says that that the plan is to continue allowing cars access to city center car parks such as Fleet Street. Also, I imagine that taxis are included in the phrase ‘public transport’. Buses are visually intrusive and noisy and dirty but they do use road space more efficiently than cars.

If you spend some time in a city with a lot of light rail, it is dangerous and frightening for pedestrians. Crossing the street in Amsterdam or Zurich, the trams are almost silent, and it’s easy for one tram to obscure another travelling the opposite direction. Trains and pedestrians (particularly kids) are hardly a happy mix.

The ideal would be to have enough elevated or underground rail lines crossing the city so that everywhere was within easy walking distance of a station. At that point, you really could ban all road transport from the city centre. We will have three such lines (2 DARTs and a metro) The red line luas could be sunk for it’s cross city portion. If we had one more that would proably be enough.