New Advertising in Dublin

@phil wrote:

At least they are prepared to cover it. There has been barely anything about it in other papers as far as I am aware. My bets are on a deluge of letters to the various papers once these things are actually put in place.

It’s been in all the newspapers – just a long time ago Phil

Finally this has been covered somewhere – Sunday Times from a week ago…

Turns out Brussels is getting 250 bikes without billboards on the basis that theyre paying 178K for their scheme; if this be so then the 500 bikes for Dublin is probably worth 356K… So let me see taking 356K away from the €85 Million that city officials claim the deal is worth leaves, hmm – €84.6 Million.

I know the proposed signage must be worth something, but between that and 4 public toilets amounting to a supposed worth of €84.6 million is surely in every sense of the word taking the proverbial piss…

All in all a good article, although its a pity that the journalist ommitted to mention the absence of a 183 vote by councilors

@The Sunday Times – July 1, 2007 wrote:

Dublin &#8216]

Ruadhan Mac Eoin

OILING the wheels of commerce to drive a green agenda sounds like a win-win situation, but critics of Dublin’s “bicycles for billboards” deal say the council has ended up a loser.

J C Decaux, one of the world’s leading outdoor advertising agencies, has given the capital significantly fewer bikes proportionally than it gave to Paris, Lyons and other European cities where it has billboard agreements.

Dublin has agreed to let J C Decaux erect 120 billboards on public footpaths around the city. In return the agency will provide 500 bicycles for low rent at 25 locations. It will also supply four kiosks with public lavatories, maps and signposts. The value to Dublin is calculated at €85m. The agency has also agreed to withdraw 100 of its existing hoardings from the city. New ones will be located on public property and some will carry civic information.

In Paris the company is providing 20,600 bikes this year in return for 1,628 billboards – more than 12.6 bikes for each billboard, three times the Dublin figure of little more four per hoarding. The Paris contract also involves paying an annual rental of €2,085 for each site for 10 years.

Several other European cities have similar deals with J C Decaux. Vienna was the first, in 2002. It was initially a disaster, with 2,000 bicycles stolen in the first 48 hours, but then 900 secure GPS-traceable bikes being provided. Each bike in Dublin will have a mini-chip to allow it to be tracked.

In Lyons, a city with a population similar to Dublin, 3,000 bicycles have been made available – six times more than here – while Barcelona also has 3,000. In Brussels, only 250 bicycles are available, but the J C Decaux advertising element is restricted to bike sheds. The city has paid €178,000 towards the scheme.

Dublin officials are refusing to release the contract on grounds of “commercial sensitivity”, so the value of any cash transaction is included in the 15-year deal is not clear.

Andrew Montague, a Labour councillor who supports the project, said more transparency would be preferable. He believes J C Decaux got the contract after “a fair tender process”, in which there had been six bids. “As the Paris scheme is a much bigger scale, it was logical that they would get better value”, Montague said.

The Paris terms were agreed after a court challenge by a competitor, Clear Channel, which claimed there were irregularities in the original tendering process.

Emer Costelloe, another Labour councillor, said the revelations about the Paris project confirmed her “worst fears” that Dublin was getting “an incredibly poor deal”.

She would be urging the incoming Lord Mayor to address this “as a priority”.

Dublin is permitting 70 “metropole” billboards, which are 3.5 metres high, automated and illuminated. A further 50 electronic billboards, similar in size to that of bus-shelter adverts, are to be installed in the city centre, primarily in the north inner city and along the Aungier Street axis.

The Dublin deal has attracted criticism over the lack of an environmental impact assessment and road safety issues. Forty appeals against planning permission have been lodged with An Bord Pleanala. They include objections filed by businesses such as Arnotts and An Taisce, the national trust, which say they were not consulted.

One complaint is that J C Decaux has engaged in project splitting by sending in 130 separate applications to the council. Critics say officials were already predisposed to granting planning permission.

Most of the billboards are to be erected on the north side and in the inner city, which critics say will lead “to further stigmatising already disadvantaged neighbourhoods”.

Stuart Fogarty, former President of The Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland, has lodged an appeal on the basis that “the agreed advertising sites will be both obtrusive and create negative aesthetics for the city…and are not helpful to either motorists or pedestrians”.

The Sunday Times understands that J C Decaux is already at an advanced stage of negotiation with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Council to introduce a similar scheme.

What do these metropoles look like? Are they like the revolving sign outside Scotland Yard?

Having just returned from Brussels, the official home of WTF architecture, I’ve had the chance to see some of these JCDecaux lovelies in person, as well as the ‘free’ bikes scheme (they’re cheap, but they ain’t free). First off, I should state that I’m unsure if any of these designs bear resemblance to the proposed metropoles and hoardings for Dublin; however, it’s a decent look at how JCD has gone about implementing this scheme in one city and may be of some relevance to the debate.

Beginning with the not-so-bad and proceeding, with due sense of dread and foreboding, into the dismal, here we have one of the bicycle stations outside the Ave Louise metro stop:

Not bad. The walkway is wide enough to accomodate the bikes and bike shed, and the design is crisp and relatively unobtrusive. The location of the bicycle stations also makes sense: most are located near major metro stops and few appear to add excessive clutter to the pedestrian paths. The grey ‘Cyclocity’ post to the right is actually a kiosk. People taking or returning bicycles use these kiosks to enter in their pin numbers and unlock the bikes. The system may make sense once you’ve had a tutorial, but it’s quite confusing and frankly off-putting on first (even second) glance.

Meanwhile, outside of Notre-Dame du Sablon, we have actual proof that some of the signs are being used to display ‘civic information’ rather than 100% ad space. Shocked? I was. But it still pains me to see this beast block the view:

Also in (sort of) favor of the scheme, there is a general consistency to the design of the bike sheds and the bus and tram shelters, also scattered throughout the city. The color, shape, and size of the billboards are basically the same and don’t stand out as hideous reminders of capitalism, etc etc. A typical tram stop:

Some dubious attempts have been made to incorporate a kind of Art Nouveau theme into the signage. Here, we have a pretty distasteful example (blocked by some pedestrians– I suppose it was getting a bit, ahem, crowded on the walkway) of a free-standing, internally illuminated metropole. It flips ads every few seconds. I really, really hate these.

And worse, in the time-honored tradition of the free-standing old-fashioned big-fat-get-in-the-way sign, we are invited to behold this ogre which has planted itself outside of the delightfully run-down Sainte-Catherine. Part of a different scheme, perhaps, but the same culprit nevertheless:

Overall, re: the JCDecaux invasion of Brussels, it appeared that many of the the bus shelters and bike stands, as installations, work. I even saw a few people using the bikes. But that is not, in itself, reason enough to assume it’s a good addition to an already chaotic traffic environment :cough cough Dublin cough cough: But those free-standing, internally illuminated gargoyles, those do nothing but obstruct, offend, and distract. Those have got to be stopped.

Does anyone know if the illuminated signage as seen in posts #108 and #110 of this thread are closer to the models proposed for Dublin? I’d be curious.

An overview below of the decisions issued by Dublin City on Decaux applications. There has been no instance of refusal of permission. The grants of permission were issued within a window spanning a couple of days.

@ctesiphon wrote:

But the fact that all decisions to grant issued within a couple of days of each other is simply because they were all submitted at the same time and were decided by the statutory decision deadline.

This is what I concluded at first, however on closer inspection I found there was a period of 5 weeks between 2 substantial batches of applications lodged (shown below) –

….the statutory deadline decision
This can be bypassed by the planning authority issuing a request for additional information – and in the 3 cases of A.I. on Decaux applications no final decision has yet been issued.

@PTB wrote:

Did you get paid for saying that?

Nope, but I presume somebody got paid to make me think it. 😉

Below is a chart of Appeals against Grants of Permission for North and South Dublin.
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Gumph…I think an appeal to the High Court by me is unlikely.

I’d love to stick it to DCC and JC Decaux and all their dodgy undercover deals though even if it was just for one out of the 120 seperately applied for monstrosities.

I’m sure the local gentlemen of the tracksuits will vandalise them anyway, but I’d rather they never got installed at all – particularly on a Protected Structure.