a boyle
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if the bones were moved then i don’t really have a problem. after hundred of years these tombstones are no longer spiritual, in any sense, merely historical. It would be a good idea to stop ball games, but it is a nice space to pause and reflect , and i like it very much.
@markpb wrote:
Super high-rise should never be needed in Ireland because of our size and population but there’s no way Dublin can continue to grow outwards that way it is at the moment. The cost of not building up, in terms of transport, utilities, ameneties and community spirit, are huge.
Raising a child in a high-rise block might not be ideal but raising one when you’re commuting up to two hours each way is equally bad, if not worse. Living in an area where everyone is isolated because everyone commutes, or where the nearst shop is a drive away because densitiy is so low are bigger problems IMHO than having a shortage of play areas.
Well built high rise apartments with decent floor space could mean better local facilties, better mass transport and less commuting. With enough children living in a block, there is added pressure on the developers or the LA to provide playground facilties nearby.
I disagree, unless you have almost dictatorial control over the planning it is very hard to get it right. Witness the ifsc, sure it’s nice and all , but it is simply dead . gated communities of single people who don’t trust a soul . In order for high rise to work, the planning authority need to have a level of power where they can demand a school, a park, so many shops in this configuration. This can only eat at the money available for architecture. And it is not at all clear that any authority would divest such power in a good way.
Just one specific point if you live on floor thiry of x building and there is a nice park fifteen minutes away , you are going to spend 25/30 getting there with your small children, same with a shop. You simply replace driving with long walks. (environment improvement ok – but it is not nicer to live in). And any sense of community is flushed down the toilet.
I lived in high rise for a time , and although i am single , i could see many issues. In a semid your car is just outside , on the thirtieth floor you car is ten minutes away. Trying to do basic things is just as annoying as in an estate.
In any event there is just so much space with the city limits that is not being used that there isn’t a need for high rise. A dramatic change in the organisation of planning yes.
Amsterdam pursued a very successfull medium rise system. 4/5s storey lets you pack em in and yet if cleverly done give every one plenty of space.
@jimg wrote:
how long do you think the semi-D estates around Lucan will last for example?
Fair point. But with respect to ballymun the cost has been enormous. I don’t think the regeneration would have occured but for the unavoidable social problems.
I do think the rest of my argument stands up. One or two ugly highrises are so hard to mask.
.The sprawling housing estates of the suburbs make a different but interesting discussion. With the right faciliatory legislation , i could readily see the redevelopment of these estates happening. You would not need more than four houses in a row to create enough room for a dense 4/5 storey (no more) structure with room left over for a proper park. The land use in estates is just so bad that i think you can create big enough appartments for families , parking, communal garden , while the buildings required would not tower like monsters. Something will have to be done, just as ballymum had to be sorted out.
@niall murphy wrote:
I have no problem with Dublin people. Its just there exists an attitude that everywhere that isnt Dublin is equal to “down the country”!!
This is totally off topic so I shall stop now.
I won’t . I think we need to be very clear that once you step over the dividing line of county dublin , you are into a wilderness of inbreeding, violence, and bog . I mean de state of these muuk savages.
Irish conservatism towards high rise is a very good thing. High rise creates just as many problems as it solves. They are not fantastic places to raise children (though they can be). They are also very very long lived, with almost no chance of being removed if they turn out badly. They are a big bet.
They are also not necessary. The you get diminishing returns the higher you go. Medium rise (5 -10 floors) does the trick a lot better than 10 -100 floors.
On an architectural level, i have visited San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York , Philedelphia, London , Paris , Stockholm, and Berlin. The high rise concept only , only looked nice in Chicago. Every other group of high rise buildings that i have seen, has been a collection of very very plain/ or ugly buildings peppered with some master pieces. Unlike a low rise setting , the masterpieces cannot overcome the ugliness/plainess over their surroundings. If you give the green light to high rise , you will enevitably have to contend with cheap efforts, just as you do with low rise development.
New York is particularly dull. Where it isn’t dull ,it’s horrid looking. It can be done however, Chicago is just beautiful.
@lunasa wrote:
I love the planting in the ‘driveway’, Face it guys, some people actually adore this. Love the alarms, shows they have money as well as taste.
Yes i can think of a few people who would really like this !
@Thomond Park wrote:
Would the leaders of the rising have occupied a museum?
Well they occupied the middle of stephen’s green with tall buildings all around! Militarily i don’t think they were the best. They should have tried to occupy the castle. What they lacked in competence they made up for in bravery .
But to be honest i think they would have occupied a spar had they been around.
indeed indeed.
if there is a northern metro there won’t be an interconnector.
Which is why i keep bleating on about the madness of building the metro when the other option is so much better.
by the way this stephen’s green station doesnt connect with the dart or the red line. it doesn’t connect with anything ! if an interconnector is built in fifteen years then it will connect with one dart line instead of both.
ok it is not quite so clear cut. But to have any hope the post needs to have the space to innovate and get it’s house in order !
The houses of parliament turned into a bank , so it is not unheard of !
Thomond Park wrote:No argument on the interconnector,On de basis of Bertie’s political expediency the metro is a done deal between Swords and Stephens Green whatever happens]
see we don’t disagree that much. I would argue that the swords line be luas (there are in fact plenty of things that can’t be done to cleverly improve segregation). And when it comes on stream run additional services between sandyford and harcourt.It would be very easy to add a short spur round the corner on hatch street, to allow for trams to turn around. This is where the big extra demand is. it is also almost entirely segrated as it is.
Leave the provision of large capacity to heavy rail , that’s what it is there for!
Thomond Park wrote:I can see the point you are making and I do agree that more Luas lines are desirable but I think that if investments are to be made then priorities have to be integrating the existing transport networks and high demand spots such as1> City Centre
2> Airport
3> Sandyford
4> Dart lines
5> Suburban LinesBuilding 4 or 5 additional Luas lines is great in theory but unless the above are connected with sufficient capacity then the commuting public will not be able to rely upon the service]
With respect to linking up things , this is why i put forward the interconnector so forcefully. It links everything( built or unbuilt).
The luas (Green) is running close to capacity. But increasing the frequency to 4 minutes would do the trick. There just are not enough people to warrant quadrupling the service. And you see if we built 4/5 luas lines . At that stage we could close the city to traffic except for access, like in strasbourg (who had the same low density problem we had) . This would allow trams to run up to two minute frequencies on the street.
I am saying the 4/5 luas lines can provide up 100 000 per hour over a much wider catchment area. whereas this metro light tops out at 40 thousand on a narrow strip. Such a network of trams would not get in the way of buses either.
The interconnector also allows for darts to progressively run to higher and higher frequencies ( 7/8,maybe 10 times an hour) . there is already an north south rail link , why duplicate it ? east west does so much more.
It is lovely. but i went through inchicore recently and saw some of his other handy work – AWFULL! it doesn’t fit in at all.
Thomond Park wrote:I along with many others having been saying this long before any newspaper came to a similar conclusion (with the exception of Frank McDonald).If this city is to increase density it needs to provide infrastructure before developments are built.
For too long in this country people have been working and living in places for years before infrastructural and service provision catches up.
The M50 is the prime example of this and Luas B1 will join the list quite shortly when an in service upgrade to Metro is undertaken]
Now mr Thomond we finally agree ! YES absolutely. we build then we service. BUT reversing this through the buidling of one high density route is not as good an option as building 4/5 medium density routes.
And i will tell you why! it will take so much longer to redevelop the strip along this high density route. To redevop several medium density routes with medium density housing will happen much sooner.
This is why frank mcdonald is against the metro. The numbers simply don’t add up . We will have to demolish 1 km either side of a metro line and buil 5/6/7/10 storeys to get the requisite numbers.
The facts on the ground work against this. In the mean time only the narrow strip along the metro is being redevelopped while the rest of the city sprawls like goodo.
There is only a set amount of money and it needs to be spent to provide the most improvement to the most amount of people
come back to me in thirty years !
An post will annihilated.
RTE will be annihilated.
Eircom will be annihilated.
Ntl will be annihilated.
Unless they change completely. The last century and a half was about the revolution in transport. with the canals and trains annihilated in turn.
This century is about media and information.
In college (for now the only places with sufficiently fast internet) You can listen to up to 100,000 radio stations and a thousand tv channels.
Having only graduated in the last few years , i can tell you than an entire generation of people are growing up downloading the tv shows they want to watch, and performing everything media related in an electronic way.
The likelyhood for an post is a once a week bulk service to arrays of post boxes at the edges of housing estates or at ‘points’ along main roads in the country side.
This entire discussion is not really for here as it is economic.
@Thomond Park wrote:
It is totally like the M50 in that almost upon completion in this case or in the case of the M50 within a decade of completion this transport project will have to undergo a costly ‘in service upgrade’ that will (a) cost as fortune and (b) result in significant service disruption.
This scheme could be upgraded to metro(taking the eastern alignment) immediately providing sufficient capacity for the forseeable future and the Beechwood to St Green Section could continue as Luas in tandem with the City Centre link up with the route extended on the Metro Western Alignment to Glasnevan or Finglas via Phibsboro.
It almost like you spout what the papers say !!The city has a third of the density of comparable cities.
200,000 people live in fingal. 700,000 thousand live south of the liffery. both the green line and red line are around the 10,000 per hour mark, How will fingal provide 30,000 per hour ? it is a joke. For a sprawling city like ours. 5 luas lines would cost the same as one bit of a metro , and move so many more people. Even the dart only moves around 20 000 per hour. And it has carriages that are up to 8 long! Come on. This metro is a white elephant there are much better things we could do with 3/4 billion.
@Thomond Park wrote:
You would destroy this building inserting a stage and cambering seating banks a theatre at this location is simply not an option at this building of national architectural, cultural and historical importance.
I further consider that you over estimate the importance of e-mail as many items such as utility invoices and legal notices simply cannot be sent to every recipient, An Post has a viable future should delivery charges be structured to reflect the actual cost of delivery on an address specific basis.
Putting the abbey in the gpo is but an idea. The demise of an post has already happened! Re bills and that – i don’t think so ! Even my luddite parents pay all their bills online. There is no reason why bill can’t be delivered electronically in the future. Already more than half of people return tax forms electronically. We legislated for electronic signatures years ago.
If anything i underestimate the impact of email and the internet.
The only future is in the parcel delivery area. But an post had to close that division down because it was crap! We get a 3/4 days a week service. The published reliability figures don’t lie : an post do a crap job. in less than two years they have to face competition from others. There is no way they can justify keeping such a prime piece of property, no way. That assumes that they stay in business, why i very much doubt.
It is not really like the m50 at all! . There is little point in upgrading the luas to metro-light status yet. As it is the luas is only just about at capacity, and there is room to increase frequency to 3/4 minutes intervals.
It would be a great waste to decommision the stretch between the green and beechwood at this stage by duplicating the line with a tunnel underneath.
The whole metro idea is a bit of a sham really . The north of dublin has the fewest people living in it. If the south of dublin only requires tram services for the next decade how is a metro going to have enough passengers ?
In any case most people drive to and fro the airport irrespective of good transport because they have lot’s of luggage. And the port tunnel will provide a much faster connection for coaches than any of the metro alignments.
The interconnector is the obvious next step as it provides improvements to all the current commuter routes and joins the dart to the green and red line.
An orbital tram (maybe metro light ) from tallaght to blanch would be a very good alternative, as the census shows that outside the m50 ,this is where most people live.
Swords deserves a luas connection for sure but the metro is simply a waste of money. Just because people repeat over and over that their is a need for a metro doesn’t make it true. The city remains three times larger then either brussels or amsterdam which have the same population.
Sure look at the dart. It is a proper metro and it still doesn’t come near to having enough passengers to justify even this metro light scheme !!!
@GregF wrote:
It would be awful if the GPO ceased operating as a post office. Maybe they could include a museum element within the GPO and display items from the 1916 Rising.
Since the arrival of email , post as we know it is in a slow and perpetual decline. The is no way the GPO will still be open in thirty years time.
As it is , others are going to be given a chance deliver post soon enough , and given the recent figures on An Post reliability they are likely to go extinct a lot sooner, as they do a crap job, and cost a lot.
It would make a great future abbey theatre.
