Boardwalk or Boardsit ?

i noticed that disruption of the boardwalk before, it ending at the bridges but i can’t imagine how you would integrate into the brdiges along the way could you?

Who uses the Hapenny bridge now as much as they did before? Or do you ‘aim’ for the new pedestrian bridge instead? Anyone of you walking north/south in that direction on regular basis now?

I cannot honestly ‘remember’ the last time I purposefully ‘aimed’ to cross the Liffey ‘at’ the Hapenny Bridge.

Is this really a good thing?

I mean…. should one expensive bridge project be done right along side another pedestrian bridge project….. so that one entirely negates the value of the other?

Especially considering that, the rest of the country…. Cork, Limerick, Galway, would never get that calibre of pedestrian bridge building.

I really think that in future… these projects should be alot less to do with ‘curtain-raising’ and politicians cutting ribbons… and a hell of a lot more to do, with actually putting something where it is actually needed.

Just a side note, I was down in Henry St, this sunday morning at 9am, with the ‘spire’ at the end….. without the people, the concept works very different I think… any opinions.

In fact, the whole city of Dublin works very differently as a concept without the people…

At Harrold’s Cross bridge, where you could turn down towards the Locke restaurant and portobello before…. they have blocked off now to car traffic.

The swan wildlife have very cleverly taken advantage of this fact too, and the shelter from the bridge itself… and established this little patch as ‘their territory’. Birds tend to do that you know, and more species than one too.

Anyhow, has anyone ever seen a swan going to sleep? Just like a turtle the neck, head and feet all go in under the shell sort of….. but i was cycling by this way Friday evening late in the dark and saw, in the lamp light,…. what resembled a whole load of ‘white plastic bags’ scattered all over the place in front of me.

I quickly explained this fact away, by assuming that the builders in the nearby building site, were just reckless with their rubbish or something.

Anyhow, as I was ‘just’ about to do that thing, you often do when on a bicycle… ya’know when you see a plastic bag blowing around the temptation is to aim for it with the wheel of one’s bike?

Then at the very last split second…. the truth of what I was about to do…. finally dawned on me and I barely managed to swirve my way, and somehow navigate my way through a whole flock of about 50 odd sleeping swans!

I can assure you it was a rather skillful piece of cycling if I do say so myself.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Don’t get me even started about having to walk from Parliment street all the way over to College green and back again…. because the only cash dispenser there… had a cue, that resembled a football match.

And the dear folks all along in front of the Olympia Theatre etc, just walk around as if they were strolling in St. Stephen’s Green on a hot summers day…. which means you have to step out on the footpath, and with traffic zooming down, the hill from Christ Church you really only have millimeters/seconds of margin to avoid getting splattered all over the road…. wellington quay style.

If ever there was a good candidate for footpath improvement, right in front of Olympia Theatre is a good one. What bugs me though, in this country is how we imagine how having more cops on motorcycles is going to straighten out these sorts of problems.

How a LUAS going through the city at 100mph is going to improve things…. https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2744&pagenumber=3 …. that is where I spoke of suburban shopping centre traffic/pedestrian relationship too…

Cash machine in square in temple bar is a joke too… avoid it at all costs…. horrible space there now really, and yet you would expect it to work,…. but it doesn’t really… dunno.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

I heard the boardwalk doesn’t integrate with the millenium bridge by design – at the request of the architects involved.

Something along the lines of: they wanted their winning design to be ‘as entered’ into the millenium bridge competition, and the boardwalk interefered with that so the council respected their wishes and 20 feet clearance later thankyouverymuch.

i use the liffy bridge just as much
usual

The question of integrating the boardwalk with the Liffey bridges raises the fundamental question: Should the boardwalk have been built outside the quay wall?

Everybody agrees the boardwalk is wonderful, and it’s undeniably a pleasant space. But it’s no harm to ask the question: On a relatively narrow river like the Liffey, uniformly enclosed by a stone quay wall and Classical bridges, was it right to put the boardwalk out there, to encroach on that ‘sacred space’? Is the boardwalk an acceptable solution to the problem of providing pedestrian space by the river, pending the removal of heavy traffic from the quays?

Elsewhere on the forum somebody said An Taisce was wrong about the boardwalk (because it objected to it in the first place). But An Taisce asked these questions at the time, and they are still valid.

If you were building a bridge on the Liffey, with carefully designed abutments, would you want a boardwalk coming along and crashing into one side of your bridge, messing up the symmetry etc.?

how would you envisage a place to sit down on the pavement behind the river wall?

there are now building the boardwalk further down the river i think its great… i always wondered why they didnt’ build it on the other side too…

encroaching on the river i dunno…. i thought it actually makes it look better , its better looking then a slimey green rgey wall….
now that the river ain’t used for anything its good thats it area is being improved….

i was reading a frank mcdonald book yesterday and he was suggesting building a weir down at the custon docks which i thought was wierd

No that’s exactly it Phil. The river would only be tidal as far as the weir, meaning you could put leisure/tourism/passenger boats on the Liffey if you wanted with no worry about them getting banked.