Re: Re: Dublin’s Bicycle Clutter
@davidarthurs wrote:
To be honest when there is no real junction and no one crossing the street must cyclists will go forward.
You are getting into all kinds of general bad traffic design decisions that are programmed around cars, but not in safe free moving around a city.
Dublin has become over stuffed with traffic lights and poles in recent years mainly to control cars.
Who knows how many millions Dublin City Council and their decisions have cost over the years. There is no sense that there has been a continuous record of integrated planning that strives to balance the needs of all who live and work in the city.
@davidarthurs wrote:
Exactly. I don’t get a sense of anyone watching the daily problems that most can see that cycle regularly in the city. There is a big difference in surveying a road route by car and getting out as a pedestrian or bike. And even then I’m not sure they have anyone watching out for these things. Most cyclists I know are constantly having to email and phone DCC about damage – If that is the way they want to do it, they should at least set up an automated reporting website to make the process easy. But really Dublin is tiny and it shouldn’t be necessary.
I think reporting such damage to people who are not doing the job in the first places may be, in the case of DCC, a bit of a pointless exercise. People who are incompetent enough to make the mistakes in the first place are less likely to see those mistakes when they’re pointed out.
@davidarthurs wrote:
Most problems, like the total lack of a cycle route around the East side of the Green could be fixed easily. It says buses only on the sign – but shouldn’t that be buses and bikes only? Everyone cycles that route to get to Earstfort tce > ranelagh/rathmines anyway. But if you ring them they tell you it is officially for busses only and you are supposed to go all the way to the end of Baggot street and take a right up the canal – absurd – and no one does it. And rightly so quite frankly.
And for how many years and how many times have they been contacted about the same problem? Probably a few hundred times. All one of them has to do is walk the 20 minutes from Wood Quay to Stephens Green. Of course that would be followed by the scary hard part: making a decision.
At the moment over 20,000 people a day cycle into Dublin. By 2020 the government plans to reach a target of 160,000 cycling to work daily. The city is not expanding like an elastic field to accommodate more and more traffic. The streets will not be any wider.
How many cyclists will die or suffer injury as a result of those plans? How many people will suffer broken bones or have a nervous breakdown after seeing someone run over? To just simply pour more and more people into an unregulated situation where people will do whatever they want regardless is a recipe for disaster. Saying that the number of injuries and deaths is low is not much use to 2 children who have lost a parent even if the statistics are good overall. If you’re lying in a hospital with a brace screwed into either side of your skull to put tension on your spine being told you were in the right legally is not much comfort either.
