Re: Re: Luas Central – Which Route?

Indeed, which highlights even more the need for less clutter in this hugely significant area. College Green over the next 10 years is going to be transformed beyond recognition in a fashion similar to O’Connell Street, which 1. makes it all the more disappointing that cables and poles are going to pass through this space, and 2. will make these additions so much more intrusive than they would be in the current haphazard streetscape.

As for ‘admitting’ to public transport having to pass through College Green eventually – what would I know about the transport needs of the city? By all accounts there may be a relative need to pass through College Green – all I’m saying is that the cable element simply hasn’t entered the radar of public disussion on Luas.
It reflects for me Irish people’s typical disregard for the built environment – the fact that a powered rail system doesn’t seem to have been given adequate consideration for use on the exceedingly short, not to mention virtually flat stretch of Dublin’s principal streets and arguably its finest public space in the form of College Green.

In Bordeaux the French went out of their way to develop their system, not just copy it from elsewhere.
Similarly a no-wires policy has operated for the best part of a century in Washington, Manhattan Island, and even London originally, purely for environmental reasons; with some of the systems as with Bordeaux adopting cables once outside principal areas.

And it’s a cop-out to say that Dublin is not an historic gem as other European cities, or that trying to eliminate cables is attempting to ‘preserve’ the city as a ‘museum’. For basic modern-day environmental/aesthetic reasons it ought to be seriously looked at. If nothing else, large floats will now have to be banned full stop from the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.

We could be leaders in developing alternative energy sources for LRT if the will was there, but it isn’t.
Which is no surprise.