Reply To: Irelands Ten Worst Roundabouts

I think that like building roundabouts over the M50, housebuilders took the easy and cheap method in constructing housing estates.

It involved minimum design, minimum hassle clearing the planners, (once the brown paper bag had paid for the rezoning) and they could use a fairly low skilled workforce and pay them buttons as most of it was thrown up in a recessionary environement.

The result is that literally 10,000’s of houses were thrown up in the decade 1985-1995 with minimal capital contributions to pay for roads or social infrastructure.

The result is a completely car dependent area where schools are quite a distance from homes, jobs cannot be reached easily and shopping involves long delays finding parking/negotiating traffic jams.

Instead of learning the lessons from the D14 experience it is still being replicated in D15 and D18 and D24 on an unprecedented scale.

All at locations close to transport nodes, no doubt in the belief that these locations are ‘accessible’. They are accessible but to the cost of the core areas that the roads were designed to serve for intercity transit,
They are not serving the purpose for which they designed because they are gridlocked with people dropping the kids off to school or buying a pint of milk from the nearest garage.

Flyovers and a planning freeze close to major insections are urgently required.

West Limerick compares very well on a number of cars per square meter of paved road basis.