The aul dollop of tarmac!

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    • #707208
      Niall
      Participant

      From today’s IT letters page, any thoughts?

      DIGGING UP THE PAVEMENTS

      Madam, – Much time and money have been and are being spent on the enhancement of the whole St. Stephen’s Green area. Rightly so: it is a wonderful centre of excellence for Dubliners, visitors and tourists alike.

      It is all the more of a disgrace, therefore, that as soon as a stretch of pavement is beautifully and expensively relaid, along comes yet another communications company to dig a trench the length of it, haphazardly refill the trench and seal it with black Tarmac, thus creating an ugly, black, uneven line down the middle of the golden paving slabs.

      It may well cost more to lift the slabs rather than noisily cut through them, but that is no reason to desecrate them.

      This unpleasant desecration of pavements is happening all over Dublin, but to fully appreciate the damage, the north side of St. Stephen’s Green must surely rank as the worst case yet.

      On a practical, as well as an aesthetic note, the Tarmac softens when the sun deigns to shine and any lady unfortunate to be wearing anything other than the broadest of heel on her shoe will sink into the surface, thus ruining both shoe and elegant poise! – Yours, etc.,

      TONY CHEW, Shrewsbury, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

    • #744067
      FIN
      Participant

      very funny but he has a good point.

    • #744068
      GrahamH
      Participant

      What – on the Green north?! Surely not, sure there’s five lanes of roadway to dig up. This must be a very temporary measure, esp considering the effort and expense injected into this project.

    • #744069
      Paul Clerkin
      Keymaster

      that always pisses me off so much….how hard is it to co-ordinate efforts?

      also when a large job is being done, why dont they line the street with six foot diameter concrete piping so that everything can be accessed and repaired from underground? doing each street, and gradually interconnecting them, they would eventually have an underground services grid (a bit simcity but hey…) – it may take 30 years but it would eventually allow for proper surfaces to be maintained….

    • #744070
      Anonymous
      Participant

      Originally posted by Paul Clerkin
      also when a large job is being done, why dont they line the street with six foot diameter concrete piping so that everything can be accessed and repaired from underground? doing each street, and gradually interconnecting them, they would eventually have an underground services grid (a bit simcity but hey…) – it may take 30 years but it would eventually allow for proper surfaces to be maintained….

      In Chicago they built an underground mini rail system for the postal system in the 1920’s it does exactly what a six foot round concrete pipe would do, it provides copious quantities of space for the public and private dry (elec/ telcos) utility companies.

      Starting a similar system would be a highly progressive step, I lost count of the number of times Georges St was dug up during the late 1990’s but I rarely had a quiet Sunday morning living there.

    • #744071
      Anonymous
      Participant

      are we talking about the new granite paving ! ?

    • #744072
      blue
      Participant

      No I think it’s on the Compustore side of the St Stephen Green North and the paving is of the cheap concrete kind.

      It looks like it is to facilitate the liking of traffic lights at the top of Dawson to those at the top of Kildare St, part of the new traffic system on the Green. Which was a rush job so hopefully they’ll return to reinstate the payment.

    • #744073
      GrahamH
      Participant

      Ah well then, it’s not the OPW job – sure in that case the tarmac’s probably an improvement 😀

    • #744074
      GrahamH
      Participant

      Poor O’ Connell St has been the worst victim over the years:

    • #744075
      Andrew Duffy
      Participant

      It drives me mad. What is the legal postion? Does the council sue the idiots who dig up the roads and fail to repair them?
      Any bets on how soon the plaza on O’Connell Street will be destroyed? Henry St. took about six months.

    • #744076
      kefu
      Participant

      It beggars belief that the utility companies aren’t obliged to reinstate the pavement as it was.

    • #744077
      Anonymous
      Participant

      They are obliged, but the obligation often isn’t enforced

    • #744078
      GrahamH
      Participant

      Do companies’ contractors relay paving or are the CC reimbursed for relaying themselves?

    • #744079
      Anonymous
      Participant

      Generally the contractors do it themselves, but the two problems are 1>> They don’t want to repair the street immediately because if something goes wrong with the installation they have to dig it up again, I suppose they view it as double expenditure.

      2>> Many of them go bankraupt, for example a family of travellers from Rathkeale getting a ‘sub contract’ to resurface most of the Berlin Rung (ring motorway). It must have been funny to observe the fallout from that one. Then you have Chorus who are being carved up by the liquidators.

      The only solution are realistic bonds being deposited with the CC

    • #744080
      urbanisto
      Participant

      I think there has definately been a marked difference in the level of utility works in the city centre in the past couple of years. Whether this is a result of economic downturn or the result of changes to the law (the Communications Act which allowed all deregulated utilities the same rights as the old semistates was ammeded about two years ago) or simply better management by the CC is open to debate.

      There also seems to be a more concerted effort to replace the aul dollops, although I think the situation on Henry St is a disgrace.

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