Reply To: Dublin’s sprawl threatens to choke the nation

Originally posted by asdasd
never trust a consultant for the banks, or special interest groups. i suspect the figures here are misleading, while Dublin City ( the central area) has lost population in the last 21 years, it probably has seen some reverses of that in the last 5 – 10. Most of the decline, then, happening in the previous eras of neglect.

The city is not “irreversibly car dependent”, it has gotten so bad that there is apolitical and general will to change things now.

Colm McCarthy is one of the best readers of Urban Economic trends in the land.

His consensus is largely based on the 2002 paper by DITs Shiels and Williams that tracked the growth of the ‘Outer Leinster Commuter Belt’

Another analysis by James Nix of An Taisce and the National Institute of Transport and Logistics has looked at the development of the Sandyford phenonenum of clustering high density offices at a suburban location and radiating sprawling low density housing estates around them.

All of this is virtually car dependent as it is served by only one light rail route that goes only into the City Centre but doesn’t connect with any other transport network.

To make matters worse Europes largest shopping centre will soon open in Dundrum and one of Europes biggest retail warehousing parks will have access directly onto the Carrickmines M50 junction.

To move away from this trend Nix concluded that 40% of the semi redundant institutional lands would need to be developed in a high density fashion thus providing 38,000 housing units close to sustainable public transport.

When I read McCarthy’s article it sounded suspiciously like Nix’s which in turn was an updated version of Shiels and Williams