college green/ o’connell street plaza and pedestrians

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/1024/1224715115568.html

Council says car ban needed to unclog city

OLIVIA KELLY

A PERMANENT ban on cars crossing Dublin city centre may have to be introduced to avoid the city grinding to a halt, a new report from Dublin City Council has warned.

Restrictions on cars, which will be put in place within the next two years, to allow the construction of Transport 21 projects such as Metro North and the Luas interconnector line, are expected to be retained to allow the city to function in the future.

Dublin’s road network is at capacity and “there is no room for additional cars on the city’s roads”, the report from the council’s planning department said.

The car ban must be complemented by better development of the city and suburbs, the report said.

Proximity to public transport can no longer be used by developers to justify large scale residential or mixed-use schemes which would swamp transport services, and even small developments must be subject to traffic management analysis, it said.

There was also a need for better coordination by various transport agencies, which up to now had been “piecemeal”, it said.

The planners’ report will be put to councillors next week and used in their review of the current city development plan.

It makes a number of recommendations in relation to ensuring the city’s increasing traffic problems are brought under control.

The increase in car ownership and the growth in numbers commuting into the city centre each day from the current 200,000 to an expected 375,000 by 2020, has made tackling the traffic problem “even more urgent”, the report said.

“A major issue we have to address is how the city’s limited road space can accommodate the spatial needs of public, transport, pedestrians, cyclists and the private car.

“It is likely, having regard to some of the modelling which had been undertaken by the the city council’s roads and traffic department that all through-traffic will have to be removed for the city centre to function in the future.”

Properly functioning and integrated public transport was the key to providing a true alternative to the private car, the report said.

Co-ordination between the various transport agencies was sometimes disjointed and, while this may be addressed by the eventual establishment of the Dublin Transport Authority, certain problems needed to be dressed in the interim, it said.

Areas which needed to be addressed were the poor-quality passenger interchange facilities, difficulties in accessing public transport by foot or bicycle, congestion and restricted capacity at peak times and poor information systems.

Cycling had the potential to “transform the city’s quality of life”, the council said.

However, despite infrastructural improvements, there was a continuing decline in cycling to work or schools and colleges, the report said.

Safety fears explained the decline, the council said.

The planners recommend the provision of kerb-separated bicycle lanes as well as cycle storage at public transport facilities and better cycle-parking facilities.

Removing cars from the city would would allow the council to devote more space to pedestrians.

The potential for road space to be “dramatically reallocated” to pedestrians should be considered, the report said, particularly in the central areas around Westmoreland Street, college green and dame street.

New residential and commercial developments were the biggest contributors to the traffic problems, it said.

Areas with good-quality public transport links could better accommodate development.

However the report said this was ” sometimes used as a justification for very large-scale development adjacent to any form of public transport irrespective of its capacity”. This was “not sustainable” particularly if the developments were car-dependent, it said.

© 2008 The Irish Times

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/…715115568.html

God almighty are we still being fed this drivel 😡

Quote: “Properly functioning and integrated public transport was the key to providing a true alternative to the private car, the report said.”

Anybody find fault with the above sentiment ?

Oh dear…the compilers of the report don`t appear to have checked in with Transport Minister Noel Dempsey.

Our Minister for Transport currently feels that Dublin has more than enough buses,in fact TOO many and is “undecided” about funding any extra resources in that department.
What he has refrained from saying is that his Department is currently examining options from the CIE bus companies for a substantial REDUCTION in the Public Bus fleet.
In Bus Atha Cliath`s case we could be looking at 100 buses taken off the road.

Notwithstanding the current “Downturn”,this volte-face from the Minister merely underlines the lack of any real impetus for the Public Bus service that T21 supposedly was meant to encourage.

Now here`s a Quare one….” Proximity to public transport can no longer be used by developers to justify large scale residential or mixed-use schemes which would swamp transport services, and even small developments must be subject to traffic management analysis, it said.”

So marketing initiatives such as “Only a stones throw from Luas” will need to be revisited then ?
The reasons for Developers latching on to the Public Transport network in the first place was a total lack of any integrated planning BEFORE these developments were commenced.
Only in the VERY recent past has any form of official contact regarding Public Transport become accepted.

And to complete a thoroughly despondent report….”However, despite infrastructural improvements, there was a continuing decline in cycling to work or schools and colleges, the report said.”

This hoary old chesnut arises again,with not a mention of our Weather……Like it or not,while the committed chamois wearing cycliste will not care a whit about the weather,the huge volume of POTENTIAL job related ones most definitely will.
Mass transfer to the bicycle simply ain`t going to happen unless the earth`s axis shifts to satisfy DCC`s planners.

In the meantime the same pro-cycling professionals could do worse than take an in-depth look at what is left of the Cycle Shelters so expensively provided along several of the City`s main arteries…..within a very short time they became derelict,with not even enough cover for a gypsy to live in.
The only items contained within being the abandoned skeletons of vandalized machines whose owners rapidly returned to the Micra,Polo or Fiesta.
…..Get a grip DCC.

cycle shelters?

i was amused when I saw this….

lock and load?;)

this concept has escaped some EIS’s

Well if they policed them properly I’d welcome benches all over the city – however when the benches that are provided are taken over by Dutch Gold drinking junkie scum like the eden quay boardwalk has and nothing is done about it then benches will not be provided. Other cities move undesirables along – why doesn’t Dublin – perhaps because we’re afraid to confront them? Is it un PC? Probably

Until proper policing is carried out (i.e. moving them on) then retaillers will be rightly or wrongly opposed to having benches.

(and yes I’m well aware that I’m reopening the ‘don’t call them junkie scum argument’ but as soon as they start behaving themselves and show respect to the city and the citizens I’ll stop calling them that)

On the theme of an earlier posting or two here, good to see Frank McDonald picking up on the same trend in today’s Magazine.

DAME ST IN DISTRESS

VIEWPOINT: Dame Street, once one of the premier streets in the capital, has become noisy and tawdry. The sober financial institutions of the past have been replaced with a lot of badly spelled pubs, clubs and shops, writes Frank McDonald

IT’S DAME STREET on a Friday night/ Saturday morning. Everyone is out on the town and the junction with South Great George’s Street is heaving. A pair of bouncers in bow-ties stand guard at the entrance to Club Lapello, the local lap-dancing bar, scrutinising potential clients – mainly lads who’ve been drinking and want some extra entertainment.

In the eye-blinkingly bright Centra next door, a motley crew of revellers queue to pay for soft drinks and chocolate bars to keep themselves going, while down the street the footpath outside the loud, throbbing bars is choc-a-bloc with remarkably underdressed drinkers, some of them appearing to be “coked off their face”, taking cigarette breaks.

Last May, the Citi Bar – which exists only because it’s part of a licensed hotel – was censured for hosting a “Twisted Tuesday” promotional event for the Trinity College Students’ Union. The licensed trade’s watchdog panel, Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society (MEAS), found that the use of the term “twisted” on flyers was an incitement to excessive drinking.

Directly opposite, there are crowds outside O’Brien’s and the Mercantile Bar smoking on the footpath. A few doors away, a new bar called Le Cirk is pulling them into its fussily-decorated interior behind a mock-Victorian pubfront slapped onto a neo-classical building that dates from 1930; as William Deedes would have said, “Shurely shome mishtake”.

A bulbous stained-glass window projects from the rear on to Dame Lane and, above it, there are two floors with nothing but vents in the wall; why bother putting windows in the toilets when you can get away with this? Jay Bourke’s new bar, Shebeen, on South Great George’s Street is better; furnished with bric-a-brac, it seems tailored for the recession.

And when all the pubs with “special exemptions” and the sweaty basement nightclubs finally close their doors at 2am, there’s an unruly scramble for taxis – not just at the ranks, but everywhere. It’s the kind of mayhem you wouldn’t expect to find in a city that supposedly has more than 20,000 taxis, a throwback to the days when they were few and far between.

During the day, Dame Street is a different place; all you have to do to get a taxi is to put out your hand and signal one to stop. But for pedestrians, the environment is very unfriendly. The generally narrow footpaths are crowded and made even more so by obstructions such as the Citi Bar’s outdoor seating area, which occupies half the width of the footpath in front.

At the main pedestrian crossing close to the corner of Trinity Street, people have to wait for one minute and 40 seconds for the traffic to stop and then get just get 20 seconds to cross the street. It’s even worse at the South Great George’s Street junction, where the window of opportunity is reduced even further by motorists blithely driving through red lights.

Dame Street is one of the noisiest places in Dublin because of the huge volumes of traffic trundling through it. The street has also become tawdry, not just because of the proliferation of pubs but convenience stores and fast-food joints. Yet it is one of the longest stretches of the civic processional route from Christ Church Cathedral to Parnell Square.

The Pars carpet gallery beside Philips, which passers-by would remember for its gilt-framed woven portrait of a fixed-grin Mary Robinson in the window, closed down nearly a year ago and has just reopened as yet another Spar. And there were reports that Lidl, the German discount grocery chain, was lining up to move into the failed Habitat store on College Green.

The pace of change was so fast during the boom years that it’s often difficult to remember what was in any premises previously. But we do remember that Club Lapello, for example, was once La Mezza Luna, an Italian restaurant. And if I’m not mistaken, the basement that houses Condomania in the same short block used to be The Underground, a cutting-edge music venue.

The Olympia Theatre has been more of a venue than a theatre for several years and, despite the welcome restoration of its canopy after being hit by a truck, the interior stinks of stale drink – a real indication that the bars have become more important than the stage. Some refurbishment work has been carried out, including new seats, but more is needed.

Across the street is Dublin’s most peculiar new building, widely reviled by the public. Part of the problem is that it seems cropped while the stone-paved plaza adjoining it is quite bleak. The front façade, topped by an elongated mosaic-clad half-dome, is particularly eccentric and aggravated at night-time by strip-lighting behind a glass screen, in lurid dayglo green.

There are some good things, such as the Mermaid Cafe and its no-frills sister, Gruel. And Nicos, of course. Behind its new opalescent windows, this venerable Dublin institution where nothing seemed to have changed for years was given a makeover during the summer that took habitués by surprise. The menu is the same, however, and there’s still a piano player.

Some of Dame Street’s tawdriness – particularly its Bacchanalian atmosphere at night – is a spillover from Temple Bar (or should that be Temple Barf, as the latest Lonely Planet guide to Dublin suggested?). God knows what the 18th and 19th century denizens of Dame Street would make of it today; when they were around, it was full of financial institutions and coffee houses.

There are still a few banks, notably the huge hulk of Sam Stephenson’s Central Bank, where Goths gather every Saturday and teenage skateboarders persistently ignore the official ban on their form of fun, and the old headquarters of the Munster and Leinster Bank (now AIB), where Charlie Haughey ran up his famous debt of £1 million in the late 1970s.

Guinness and Mahon, the merchant bank that “walking ATM” Des Traynor once ran, is just another branch of Permanent TSB today, while National Irish Bank has the luxury of a barrel-vaulted high Victorian banking hall – a feature the nearby Ulster Bank wilfully destroyed – and the turreted building once occupied by AIB is now Charlie Chawke’s Bank bar.

Jurys Hotel is long since gone, its elaborate mahogany bar installed in a pub in Zurich, and the building that stands on its site at the corner of Anglesea Street is now occupied by the Financial Regulator and his staff.

Just down the street, it was probably inevitable that Starbucks would open its first cafe here on the edge of College Green, Dublin’s great architectural set-piece.

What will transform the area is the proposed Lucan Luas line, which will originate in College Green and travel out west via Dame Street, Lord Edward Street, Christchurch Place and Thomas Street. With wider footpaths all along the route and restrictions on through-traffic, “quality of life” for people frequenting this stretch of Dublin should be immeasurably improved.

But we’ll have to wait for that to happen. According to the Railway Procurement Agency, work on the Lucan line won’t even start until 2011. By then, who knows what state the public finances might be in and whether the Government will welsh on this or other public transport projects. In the meantime, the likelihood is that Dame Street will become even more tawdry.

© 2008 The Irish Times

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3129211&newstype=A&sectioncode=453

What were your reference points?

We looked at all the classical spaces in Europe, very detailed studies of different squares.

It seemed to us that there was a style emerging in London. A lot of new space in London is on the back of section 106 agreements, where cheap granite from China is used and all the street furniture is stainless steel with a bit of glass in the signage. There’s a sort of ubiquitous, corporate, commercial quality about it.

We didn’t think it appropriate to put that type of environment into Parliament Square. At the same time, it’s very difficult to put grass in areas that are going to get heavily trafficked.

The square’s also got a function for different events: pedestrian movement, with people going to work, but there are other key events such as state ceremonies. We’ve got to think about routes of ceremonial vehicles. Those carriages can’t really go on a lawn, so we need to put hard surfaces there.

We were looking at greening and softening the space by putting in more trees and choosing the position of trees very carefully. We were maintaining the existing plane trees on the west side of the square, and putting in additional plane trees on the north side.

But Foster’s had concluded that the square needed to be hard paving, so did Halcrow Fox in the seventies. In the 1940s, Gordon Cullen did some fantastic drawings, again showing hard surfaces. Almost every 10 years, there’s another attempt at doing it, and everyone comes to the same conclusion.

public transport and urban citizenship….
http://www.policyinstitute.tcd.ie/conference_presentations.php
http://gv2.cs.tcd.ie/ any more images of there work?

Did any one go to these presentations?
I have a feeling there is a new proposal on the horizon…