Re: Re: Failure to Provide Infrastructure – The Cost to our Environment & Economy

This goes without saying. Anyone living in Dublin now can look around and see what a complete and total disaster our infrastructure is. I am so tired of hearing about quality bus corridors and roads…stop building roads around the capital. We need railways. And not railways linking one side of Dublin city centre to the other. Railways linking the vast suburbs to the centre or to each other. Be it darts, trams, trains…whatever. And worse again, we can look at the southside..places such as sandyford and cherry orchard where the mistake has been made, and see what NOT to do in other areas of the city’s suburbs. To my eyes, the north of the county from,say clare hall out to balbriggan and further, is slightly less choked up in comparison. And yet, still they buy land for huge amounts of money, get planning permission for massive developments and put in no infrastructure whatsoever.
Being from the northside, I’m going to take the M1 as a prime example. It was completed around 2003.Last year, traffic lights were put in on the roundabouts at the top of the off ramp for Swords/Donabate. Traffic lights were already in place at the airport off ramp. Meanwhile, as they were putting in said traffic lights on the m1, on the M50 they were launching a massive project to build spaghetti junctions and get rid of the traffic lights….
The volume of traffic on the M1 has doubled or more since it opened. In 5 years time, they’ll probably decide to deconstruct it’s junctions (which have traffic problems, although not as bad as the m50) and build spaghetti junctions. Forward planning just doesn’t seem to exist in this country.
Developers should be under a legal obligation to provide for bus services, at minimum, with every new development. Without going into details, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. Unfortunately it’ll probably never happen.