Re: Re: The destruction of St. Stephen’s Green
@notjim wrote:
You appear to have forgotten about the hospital and, um, my house.
Glad to see you moving up in the World!
In comparison the Mater probably employs the same number of people as Stephens Green Shopping Centre and the HBoS offices next door; it would attract a similar number of patients / visitors as the shopping centre but owing to the number of staff that work unsociable hours I would estimate that a large number of them live within walking distance and would not be tied to a single transit route.
hmm dunno about that. Theatres, Cinemas and all the good pubs that good citizens drink in are nowhere near Temple Bar
That is probably correct in terms of indigenous Dublin patterns but I think it is fair to say that if you remove drinking / dining from Temple Bar / College Green that there is no predominate use and that the land usae intensity in pedestrian terms drops off significantly.
I have a GAA frog in my mouth
You can reasonably give the most successful sporting organisation in the land a €20m grant towards their stadium in the context of double digit GDP growth; you can’t build a €4-6bn metro line to serve say 19 GAA weekends, 4 rugby matches and 3-4 Soccer matches the latter 2 which were always served by rail whilst the majority opted for the walk from the city centre and will move back to an almost completed stadium.
Yeh some fair points there PVC but you are, in my opinion, mistakenly assessing the Metro Corridor as it is today rather than the corridor in the future. Ballymun will not be low density in a decade and without intimate knowledge I’d profer that Santry has potential to intensify. DCU certainly has. In any case given the admitted need for Metro at various locations along the route, how does one tighten the belt, quite literally, in the middle? The solution is to identify sites along the route in existing suburbs and build on them. Had your argument applied no suburban rail would ever have been built.
Most rail was never suburban rail to begin with but intercity rail where mostly Victorian developers persuaded rail companies to open additional stations to facilitate the exodus of the midddle classes from slum city centres to model towns which were created. The costs in providing rail to these new suburbs were marginal as the railway companies were buying farmland and only needed to build stations.
The Metro is a multi-Billion euro project which will require over 50% of its Dublin City Council area route underground; the end result being a few stations which are predominently low/ medium density and will have significant nimby brigades who if they have their metro will be hell bent on preventing further development.
In the context of falling GDP and renewed growth from 2010 – 2020 being in a range of 2.50 – 5.00% p.a. the idea of spending €4bn -€6bn on intensifying land use at Santry, Ballymun, DCU is a nonsense.
€1-1.5bn would connect Swords and the Airport to the existing rail network and four track the northern line from Spencer Dock / Connolly to the point where the airport line would depart. This would also release a lot of development land between the existing rail line and the airport.
We are in a much more disciplined fiscal environment where viability is no concept it is the kernal of all investments. Has one study ever been produced that the Metro breaks even on an operational basis and this is excluding the 8% annual funding cost where debt would mature 20 to 30 years down the line.
