a boyle
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of course!! they are already off shore : they are in sellafield. We already are able to buy nuclear energy and will be buying a lot more in the future when the interconnector with wales is built.
There are many different technologies available with nuclear, so the broad stroking arguments for and against here and in the media are not helpfull.
Frances nuclear waste is only dangerous for 100 hundred years. given that regular waste dumped can take over 150 years to degrade , that is not bad. They have a pretty simple method akin to forests managed on 300 hundred years rotation.
whether nuclear is needed or not can be debated perpetually , what can’t is people getting pretty annoyed about shelling out buckets of cash for electricity, gas ,petrol .
Further price hikes will focus the mind wonderfully on what to do.
could we please stop refering to transport 21.
giving the government’s top twenty pork chops for the country a name gives the list a veneer of thought and competence.
a list does not constitute a plan.
i have come round to the view that the council have all but wasted the effort in o’connell street. it is now festooned with signs and metal all over the place.
as of yet no thought has been given to moving the cycle parking, or providing a decent amount on side streets ,where there is plenty of room.
The taxi rank is a joke , it could have been moved to cathal brugha street where there is a lot more room.
The bus stops signs, all over the place.
Frankly the idea was good and it still is , but there is just shit all over the place.
i agree . I think the u2 could be very nice, depending on how close it fulfills the architects vision.
however if it is not possible to find a developer … well if you are breaking through the ceiling of 10/11 storeys, then make it big high and beautifull.
that before and after photo you have mocked up is very interesting.
i think there are so many different things needed to feed into each other in order to bring about an improvement in college green and the city center in general .
there is transport: no one has actually decided what is going. happen.
will the interconnector and metro be built ? in that case will all(most) bus routes be diverted away from the city, as they ought to be?
are we going to continue to allow this network of access to city / are we going to continue to create traffic cells?then there is planning. are we to try to create a linear park the length of the liffey (there were comments that it might not be needed the whole length on the other thread / but i think if you build it they will come. ) or are we going to create a pedestrian zone from the green to parnell . (i don’t think we can to both.)
then there are the licensing laws. If we took away all that junk from college green got rid of traffic , we would have to replace it with something … some small kiosks fronting the square would be great (ie. facing trinity with ulsterbank to the right and boi to the left) I saw this done in stockholm and it was very cool.
i have a book by frank mcdonald that i read sometime ago , in it he keeps pointing out that while individuals have valliantly tried to improve things we have been perpetually muddling through for decades. In truth since the start of republic. I found it a thouroughly depressing thought at the time but it is true.
You won’t see the vision and the balls to improve college green for a decade (ahern not going to do , and enda is even less inspiring.)
what would be great is a bold big ,expensive fountain . bus stops moved to three locations dames street westmoreland and nassau.
there is a peculiar fact (actually proven) that the best way to improve traffic is actually close roads.
i cannot understand you. are have backed up my point , and yet dispute it with me . all the cities are sufferring from decline or relative decline while the suburbs are thriving .
You confirm this. I merely point out that this type development is seen in the cities of america which are either in decline (detroit)/or might as well be they are so horrid (los angeles)
I don’t care if every body is getting on in age in cork, they point blank should not be moving to the suburbs. , you have an entire swathes of land in or at least close to the city ripe for housing . cork has seen the opening of several out of town centres , after dublin conprehensively tested them in tallaght liffey and blanch . Each one is more depressing and shite than the next.
Again that is a pattern of development we have borrowed from the americans.
Now having said all this , go to an american city (not new york) have a look at how transport works . It is dire.
This entire discussion on cork transport is completely irrelevent unless you begin to look at the basics. sure you had a wonderfull ring road with tunnel. now only a few years in operation it is jammed.
I note with some scorn that while all this cork lads are happy to knock my ramblings , not a single counter suggestion .
no what ireland is experiencing is not a normal course of events.
It is one thing to have suburbs spreading like mad , but normally these would occur because you would have such an increase in demand for housing in the city itself.
So in taking the census you would hope that while the suburbs might grow by 40000 , the city would grow by 150000. and when doing it in percentage , based on the population in situ you would hope the city would increase in population by 10 percent while the suburbs grow by 5 percent.
What we have is what is happening in old american cities like detroit that are in perpetually decline. It is something that is completely against any normal healthy growth in a country.
Argueing that the city boundaries are now outdated is only accepting defeat, and doens’t acheive much. We have a situation in dublin and undoubtedly in cork limerick and galway, where city schools are closing, due to lack of numbers and whole blank areas in meath kildare louth wicklow have not half enough schools , hospitals etc.
The whole point of a planning system is to put people where you can cope with them . We seem to have gone for putting the masses in the countryside instead of the city , which is ruly thick way of managing the growth in the country. It is the single reason for so much traffic on your lovely ring road. Because believe it or not we have relatively few cars per person in this country.
no problem .
As i alluded to in another thread. how is it possible that cork city has lost population in this new census.
What hope is there of ever getting improvements in transport if people are ever moving further to the suburbs , where it is fiercesomely hard to provide for them? reversing that trend ought to be the top priority of cork galway ,limerick and dublin.
There is no chance of things like a light rail happening in cork without addressing this .
no hoggy you missed the point entirely . Shannon is near to both galway limerick and cork. So if you spend money on decent rail infrastructure linking the three towns to shannon then shannon has a much bigger catchement population . You stop subsidises such jokes as knock and kerry international airport, and close cork , because if you can get shannon dealing with a sufficient number of poeple then it becomes economical to open routes to many new places. If you spend money on top notch trains and buses feeding into shannon then everyone ends up at least a little bit better off, but most poeple end up a lot better off.
Cork is simply too far from galway and galway is simply to far from cork .shannon is bang in the middle .
It is the same as dunnes stores on the southern ring road compared to the spar/centre round the corner. dunnes is much bigger , and further away from most than the local spar , but every one is willing to drive to it.
Not rocket science ,common sence.
Trully risible that a new terminal is opening up and a company is pulling out of cork.
Yes that is an interesting idea. I would favour simply pedestrianising the entire length of the liffey north and south , with one lane kept for buses.
Although alot of planting would be needed to make the liffey a nice place to be . !! ! it is usually very windy due to the tunnelling effect of the buildings either side of it , in my experience.
who were these people crowing about corks sizeable population , supporting a local airport ?
You need a single airport for the eastern side of ireland. not two half proper ones plus 3/4 subsidized joke ones.
Your money would be better spent on decent rail links to and from shannon and much improved bus links.
What is the point of a cork airport , convenient as it is to kerry and the local industry , if few companies will fly there ?
Remember a proper rail link to shannon would put it at a 40 minute trip . From dublins point of view that is a stones throw .
clearly i am wrong . a small airport serving london that is ten minutes away is much much better that a large airport fourty minutes away serving all the destinations that dublin airport does and more .
Risible.
you won’t see the attention to detail necesary to bring improvements in dublin unless you had a minister for dublin , or a mayor with some power , or a council that could tax you to some degree
i am hopefull the u2 tower and the new abbey theatre will convince people that modern achitecture can be big and nice. because i firmly believe that when it comes to modern architecture dublin did not get off to a good start, (save the airport).
Then maybe it might be possible to envisage further tall buildings . Perhaps it is a good thing that we did not build much high rise so far during this boom so far, considering the dross that has been built.
that is very good point. culpability in accidents might change driver behaviour. certainly it would make a bigger impact over some fine for entering a cycle lane (the latter would only be perceived as unnecesary nanny state nonsense).
Is such a change possible though? we are the only state in the eu (and europe i think) which has a consitution.
I am no barrister or solicitor, but i seems very unlikely that you could pass a law where a driver would be automatically guilty of reckless driving if he/she hit a cyclist. Even something less severe would be difficult. It has been pointed out to me that what holds ireland back in some ways is that we have a little too much democracy. (i am not sure if that is true but it is at least worth thinking about.)
They do respect cyclists in holland ,but is that not a result of there being so many ? if we had such a large number of cyclists then i think drivers would take care .
It seems with most of these things that it is a chicken and egg situation , nobody is going to cycle till lots are already cycling. And nobody wants to lose space on the road unless everyone will benefit. come on think about it these piddly strips will never get us anywhere.
a seperate space for cyclists, priority at some junctions, taking the ground floor of the corporation car parks and giving them over to cyclists. a good sturbborn middle finger raised to car drivers , and we might get somewhere.
expecting a car to sit behind another car turning right , instead of nipping into the cycle lanes is just never going to happen .
No amount of policing will ever provide the level of respect for road traffic rules you seek. Sad maybe (personnallly i don’t, i think it is a good thing that people in general are disrepectfull for some of our road traffic rules as they are a joke.)
not even in germany do they have that level of respect and as a result they often segregate cyclists.
far better to provide an exclusive space for cyclists , i think you concerns regarding left and right turns are over inflated. but no matter is not much more to add.
the idea is stated , it will never happen , and the just recently published census comfirms that we have cemented the development of the country for the nest century as a long commuting los angelas style environment. Even if we put cycle lanes in who the fuck is going to use them since all young people are living in athlone, portlaoise, and portarlingtion (i don’t even know where that is).
There is some good to this government . but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of living : it’s like two deaf and dumb monkeys at the controls …
it seems incomprehensible to me that in a period of such economic and population growth shannon and cork have lost people , and dublin has gained so few.
Who would have thought the countryside was where to put the masses ? again ireland trailblazing. No doubt the rest of europe will join us in swapping cities for farms!! just bonkers.
i am not so naive as to think that some porker is going hop on a bike to save time. But i do think there are some people who are in cars would like to cycle. The sight of people on bikes leisurely cycling by as they sit in traffic would encourage a lot of people to migrate .
As regards cycling through the city ; you are a braver man than i.
What i am really trying to get is that this is a fairly simple thing to do , which can improve things without any perceptable disimprovement to car drivers. Because let’s face a large part of the problem is that with so many having to use cars it is difficult to argue reduction in car access unless you can guarantee enormous improvements in congestion, which of course you never can . every car driver that decides to take the bus/walk /cycle is just a quickly replaced by someone else.
@cobalt wrote:
Both tracks on one side of the road would certainly work to give enough width to pass, but I’m not sure of the implications for actually travelling – e.g. if you wanted to make a left turn and your cycle track was actually on the right hand side of the road, you’d have to cross all the traffic going both directions to do so. Although at a glance you might think that’s no different from the current situation where you’re on the left of the road and want to turn right, in fact it is worse because you’ve not got the benefit of filter arrows etc. that are set up to allow cars to turn, as would be the case if the bike were on the same side of the road as the cars. You’d end up having to cross with the pedestrians. And there’s never going to be continuity between all the streets for which side of the road the cycle lane is on. It’s a nice thought, but I think it’d end up making cycling desperately cumbersome, so people whose primary motivation in cycling is to get around the city efficiently just would stick on the road with the cars. And then the car drivers would get frustrated because we’re not in the cycle lanes.
Nor would it solve the glass problem, which I have to say is a bit of a bugbear of mine.
Ok so what we need to do in that case is increase the time alloted to pedestrians (and consequently cyclists) .
Vis a vis broken glass and peddles , thats is a question of maintenance . If such a laneway included both directions it ought to be wide enought to allow one of the specialized cleaning vehicles you see in temple bar to pass over and suck up all beneath it.
I think the cumbersome nature of making certain turns ought to be outweighed by the fact that despite the growth of different areas in the city , the vast majority of people go in one direction — town.
perhaps my idea ought to be consider as a stage. I.e. a way of initially getting people out of cars , thereby freeing up space which could then be reassed and reused in a better way. we have to start somewhere.
I know it rains alot but i firmly believe that if one was just to provide something like a physically seperated cycling lane people would jump at the chance. Car commuting is one of the most soul destroying inventions of the last century.
does anyone remember the olympia promising to rebuild the porch after it was knocked by a truck ? nothing cam of it . any council workers here who know anything about it ?
