Re: Re: Proposal to ban private cars from Dublin city centre

@wearnicehats wrote:

I drive to Galway rather than take the train so I don’t have to listen to some inflated fool talking on his mobile the whole way.

I know. I drive everywhere because it is the most rational choice when the planners have devoted 30-40% of the city’s land area to infrastructure for this type of machine in exchange for my 151 euro per year. Pedestrians do take up space, a couple of metres squared when walking and a metre squared when standing. A car takes up about 12 metres squared parked but nearly 100m2 when moving in a city (lane width 3.5m, 2 second headway, 50kph). Car parks typically allocate 25m2 per car to allow for access and there are said to be 8 parking places per car in the city, most paid for through indirect subsidy.

So why let peope drive around dense urban cores when land space is so much at a premium, when they often only manage to travel at walking speeds, when their noise and air pollution affect more people than rural driving and when their presence delays a larger number of people on public transport?

Each time you get on a bus the bus company gets a little extra revenue that can be used to improve services or frequency. In Dublin though there is a very odd problem. The Dublin bus company gets less than a 10th of the average european subsidy as a proportion of costs and its main services seem to have been operating at capacity during peak hours for the past few years. 20 years ago we got half the average European subsidy so it must have been policy to starve the bus company for at least the last two decades.
subsidy in 2000/2001: 3.6%
subsidy in 1994/1995: 4.4% http://www.cfit.gov.uk/docs/2002/psbi/lek/a3/08.htm
subsidy in 1986: 20% http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0113/S.0113.198605280007.html

It seems that while fare revenue has been increasing steadily, the government has just pocketed the change.

I’m not sure if you are seriously comparing the danger from people walking or cycling to me in my 1,000 kgs of plastic and metal travelling at 50kph. I’d have no problem with my kids playing on the street if the worst they could meet was a bicycle.

One major restriction to further luas capacity is the intersection with cars. And who’s in those cars? Why me, buying a packet of cigarettes or an ice cream and if I kill someone on the journey, something that happens every day in Ireland, well who cares because I paid my insurance premium so everyone’s laughing and Axa can just resurrect the dead and make everything OK. Meanwhile I saved walking to the shop and the possibility of talking to a human on the way and I didn’t get WET.