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@gunter wrote:
Where was the five storey with the Bovril sign?
Its just marked as ‘political posters covering the wall of a building’
http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?q=dublin+source:life&imgurl=8d3247e5df5775e5
thanks for posting morlan, most shots i haven’t seen either – plenty of new desktop wallpaper material 😉
@alonso wrote:
As i said above, familiarity may have a major role in this thread.
Familiarity is bound to colour our views. Dublin 8, like most other post codes holds a wide mix of character (& characters!) – I went to Synge Street & really like the surrounding area – harrington street, heytsbury, grantham, south circular from Leonard’s corner & the streets of it from the canal to kevin street, most of which estate agents like to call Portobello – and its urban end, south richmond street, camden street and down on to wexford street. Had I not spent 6 years there, it would probably be just another area i pass through on my way in to town & scrutinise from the top of a bus.
And if we’re talking comparable post codes, i’d take D8 over D7 any day of the week 😀
its the variation from mottled to solid colour, the point being it doesn’t work, & yes i know a small issue in the context of a successful redevelopment.
The reference is the 1930’s dust bowl and the lack of land use.
Land use is a product of economic demand and follows economic activity it is never something that can be assumed to alter organically. It never moves at a constant rate and is likely to see its most static period or highest rate of disintensification in 50 years over the next 10.
A fair assumption would be 20,000 housing units nationally per annum over the next decade of which 10,000 p.a. will be one off houses, 5,000 will be in Connaught / Munster / outer Leinster leaving 5,000 units pa in Leinster. If output falls to 5,000 units in the entire GDA what share will be built in a strip 2 miles wide and 10 miles long; what propospective homeowner will want a sustainable box when you can snap up a spacious pile for a fraction of the cost of 2006 prices?
We are in a different era now and all projects must be reassessed
not something i would have done thats all i’m saying ! the way it has to change to solid red so that ‘munster’ is legible doesn’t help.
quite surprised it was marked as Geragh, really quite different… any clue as to whether it still stands?
ok overall it looks great, but what is the story with the mottled seating ? and obviously as i said before like, they really need to redevelop the terraces to connect with the stands as originally planned.
@jdivision wrote:
That’s not what I meant. People regularly get the tube and then switch to buses. It’s why your day pass on the underground is valid on the buses.
Integrated ticketing now that would be something; how would that affect the maths behind the viability
PVC i wasn’t referring to land values forecasts, lanmd use forecasts – ie the size of the catchments
Idaho 1928 please discuss land use
@alonso wrote:
PVC how are you saying it clearly does not stack up. Have you got the exact costs and the land use forecasts for the corridor? Wthout these we’re all just throwing out suggestions and conjecture. Both sides have valid arguments but without the figures no-one can state something as fact,
Land values are irrelvant as development land only has a value when their is demand fr the end use product. The figures demand side are truely terrible; the worst we have seen for decades take for example retail sales down 6% yoy; the banks on their knees and unable to lend for all but the securest propositions.
The three top banks have fallen in value from €30bn 18 months ago to about €5bn today. Where have you been for the last 12 months? Retail yields a year ago were 2% this week a building will be released on Grafton Street but since you are such an expert on the property market I’ll let you clarify the yield quoted.
When the banks are again lending for spec dev you will have a point but that point is years away and the type of scenario seen between 1995-2005 where any development stacked up is never coming back.
I disagree, like in London people will get crosstown buses to use it, people will drive from Dundalk to the first stop (wherever it is in the end) as will people from Drogheda and most of Meath. People from Finglas to Coolock and possibly Darndale will get buses to it because of regularity of service and journey time.
People in London don’t use buses to cross town; a typical journey would be Heathrow – Canary Wharf which involves Heathrow Express; change to Hammersmith & City line and then Jubilee Line which takes an hour; cross rail will cut this to 30 mins; its alignment has a number of brownfield sites capable of releasing 5,000 units each where significant development contributions will come from. I further don’t buy that someone from Dundalk is going to park North of Swords vs the Airport and even if they did would you want the park and ride facility clogged up with long stay parking?
This project needs to be assessed on the basis of current demand and contemporary development levels; above all it must be assessed on the basis of capital cost per annual passenger and ranked against all other transport projects on the table. Blind faith predicated on 90,000 home per year output is so out of date reality now exists for the first time in a generation.
I have no doubt you are right that more people will use the service than currently use buses. However the catchment for a metro will be c1 mile or 15 minutes walk and with the exception of say Swords, Airport and possibly Drumcoundra I can’t see the 10m pax stations required to make this stack up at the projected costs.
In London Boris Johnston axed £4bn of previously announced transport projects such as the Thames Gateway Bridge and Docklands Light Rail extension to Dagenham. The reason given was that they weren’t economically viable and weren’t sufficient priorities to be delivered before 2020; this followed a thorough review of the entire TfL programme and a ranking of projects with Crossrail coming top and other projects granted delivery on a sliding scale thereafter.
Would an early 2009 review of all Transport 21 projects and the announcement of revised delivery dates or a ranking based on importance and a sliding scale of dates for delivery based on the health of the fiscal position.
What would be crazy is if intergration of the two seperate commuter networks as centred on The Heuson routes and Dart/Northern Commuter networked were sacrificed to deliver a scheme that clearly does not stack up on financial grounds unless a Reganesque supply side view is taken. The days of development levies are gone for at least the medium term this needs to be assessed on real economics and take its place in the que.
@alonso wrote:
PVC we have to remember the Metro North Economic Corridor Plan as well. There will be a degree of intensifcation of the existing urban footprint but we have to look at the route as a whole, and the entire network itself as a whole.
Alonso
I’ve no doubt you support rail travel to the exclusion of road transport you have a long track record on this site in that respect. I do not accept the Metro North Economic Plan as it lists a very optimistic view of both macro economics and how nimby’s (local objectors) impact the planning system and delay the delivery of construction projects for years.
The Irish economy must be taken in the context of the figures below and not a report that is historic; even 2 months ago you could argue that construction and securitisation were the only problem, unfortunately the malaise has now spread right accross the economy; hard choices need to be made and Metro North is now even less viable than before; other methods of linking the Airport and Swords to the City Centre need to assessed.
Retail sales slump 6.2% in September
Friday, 14 November 2008 12:48
The latest figures from the Central Statistics Office confirm the slowing Irish economy. It says the volume of retail sales decreased by 6.2% in September compared with the same time last year, while there was a monthly decrease of 0.5%.The CSO also says that provisional figures show the volume of retail sales slowed by 5.6% in the third quarter of the year. It says this was the largest annual decline in the volume of quarterly retail sales since the second quarter of 1983.
It is also the third quarter in a row showing an annual decline.
AdvertisementBreaking down the figures, they show sharp falls in areas linked to housing – with furniture and lighting sales down almost 20% while sales of electrical goods slumped by 15.7% and hardware, paints and glass sales fell almost 12%.
Motor sales dropped another 7.4% in the month, while bar sales were down 2%. After increasing in August, sales at department stores declined by 1.4%.
Today’s statistics also show that the value of retail sales fell by 3.8% in September of this year compared to September 2007. They increased by 0.6% in the month. The CSO says this is the sixth month in a row of declining values in retail sales.
In the months from June to August, the largest volume decrease was seen in the furniture and lighting sector, with sales slumping by 14.6%. Sales of textiles and clothing rose by 1.1% in the quarter.
Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers, said the figures proved the Government had missed an opportunity to stimulate the economy with last month’s Budget
He said: ‘All in all, the retail sales figures for the year to date are extremely disappointing, and suggest that the risks to GDP forecasts remain clearly to the downside, and all the more reason why the Government should have introduced fiscal stimulus measures in last month’s Budget.
‘Instead, what we got was an income levy and increase in the standard rate of VAT, which will make Irish goods more expensive at a time when there is already a mass exodus from the Republic across the border to avail of cheaper prices in the North.
‘This trend is set to increase in the run-up to Christmas, especially now as the euro is at record highs versus sterling with the British pound effectively at a level of almost 1.09 to the old Irish punt.’
Construction has started on the check in building (facing the main T2 structure) the alignment for the road to T1 between the two structures is now clearly visible.
@Rory W wrote:
Seamus – your arguments for the alignment of the interconnector via college green seem to be wholly based on the 1970s plan – I’d like to think that Dublin has changed since then.
I totally agree; virtually all the big office hubs in Dublin were built early 1980’s or post 1995; long gone are the days of upper floor offices in a terrace of interconnecting Georgians. The real traffic generators are the large office complexes such as Harcourt Centre, IFSC 1, etc with pre 1999 development plan parking restrictions.
What surprises me most about this discussion is that people seem to think that the area between O’C St and the Airport is suddenly going to densify to support a €4bn rail. To make a mile stretch of underground and a stop viable you would expect c200,000 passengers a week or 10m a year.
Three stops at best on the proposed metro have that St Green, OC St and the airport which assumes that 50% of passengers using the airport will use metro a statistic not acheived by any European airport. Add another 20m passenger journeys for Swords, Ballymun and you get 50m journeys or 1 journey per week for the entire population of County Dublin which is optimistic.
50m passenger trips a year at €2 a ticket only generates €100m in gross income take off energy costs, ticket issuance, cleaners, maintenance and Health and safety etc and you would be lucky to net €20m of this figure and this assumes that you continue to fry users of other networks by continuing not to introduce integrated ticketing.
To service the debt on the capital costs at Government bond rates would cost in excess of €200m a year.
All so Notjim has a convenient commute to TCD;
€4bn invested elsewhere could provide a sustainable transit network for the entire East Coast region so that the growth of the city is not dependent on going from an unsuitable start of two storey density patterns to waiting for devlopers to errect 8-9 storey schemes with every nimby in existance placing banners titled developer don’t put my castle in the dark. This can be done on commuter rail in a hub and spoke development pattern with a fraction of the difficulty and at a fraction of the cost.
Dublin is a great City but it isn’t Tokyo
@notjim wrote:
You appear to have forgotten about the hospital and, um, my house.
Glad to see you moving up in the World!
In comparison the Mater probably employs the same number of people as Stephens Green Shopping Centre and the HBoS offices next door; it would attract a similar number of patients / visitors as the shopping centre but owing to the number of staff that work unsociable hours I would estimate that a large number of them live within walking distance and would not be tied to a single transit route.
hmm dunno about that. Theatres, Cinemas and all the good pubs that good citizens drink in are nowhere near Temple Bar
That is probably correct in terms of indigenous Dublin patterns but I think it is fair to say that if you remove drinking / dining from Temple Bar / College Green that there is no predominate use and that the land usae intensity in pedestrian terms drops off significantly.
I have a GAA frog in my mouth
You can reasonably give the most successful sporting organisation in the land a €20m grant towards their stadium in the context of double digit GDP growth; you can’t build a €4-6bn metro line to serve say 19 GAA weekends, 4 rugby matches and 3-4 Soccer matches the latter 2 which were always served by rail whilst the majority opted for the walk from the city centre and will move back to an almost completed stadium.
Yeh some fair points there PVC but you are, in my opinion, mistakenly assessing the Metro Corridor as it is today rather than the corridor in the future. Ballymun will not be low density in a decade and without intimate knowledge I’d profer that Santry has potential to intensify. DCU certainly has. In any case given the admitted need for Metro at various locations along the route, how does one tighten the belt, quite literally, in the middle? The solution is to identify sites along the route in existing suburbs and build on them. Had your argument applied no suburban rail would ever have been built.
Most rail was never suburban rail to begin with but intercity rail where mostly Victorian developers persuaded rail companies to open additional stations to facilitate the exodus of the midddle classes from slum city centres to model towns which were created. The costs in providing rail to these new suburbs were marginal as the railway companies were buying farmland and only needed to build stations.
The Metro is a multi-Billion euro project which will require over 50% of its Dublin City Council area route underground; the end result being a few stations which are predominently low/ medium density and will have significant nimby brigades who if they have their metro will be hell bent on preventing further development.
In the context of falling GDP and renewed growth from 2010 – 2020 being in a range of 2.50 – 5.00% p.a. the idea of spending €4bn -€6bn on intensifying land use at Santry, Ballymun, DCU is a nonsense.
€1-1.5bn would connect Swords and the Airport to the existing rail network and four track the northern line from Spencer Dock / Connolly to the point where the airport line would depart. This would also release a lot of development land between the existing rail line and the airport.
We are in a much more disciplined fiscal environment where viability is no concept it is the kernal of all investments. Has one study ever been produced that the Metro breaks even on an operational basis and this is excluding the 8% annual funding cost where debt would mature 20 to 30 years down the line.
There are as you say a number of key segments of usage to be considered and as you say replacement of car usage has to be the objective.
There are to my mind four key user segments to be considered
1. Commuter of which there are two waves, office and service the former being concentrated in narrow slots and the latter dispersed
2. Retail
3. Leisure
4. Service consumers
Considering mode use is where the observations of DC3 come into it; many people simply don’t use public transport and have very little interaction with the city centre and many of those that do tend to do so in terms of leisure uses which generally tend to be concentrated in the burbs where car use still dominates or temple bar where taxi use or tourist use dominates.
The key uses are I think Commuter as this body of people essentially provide the design parameters for maximum loadings and retail/service consumers who if the right connectivity is provided will use the city centre and public transport or if not use similar facilities on the periphery.
The main office sub-districts are
1. Harcourt / Adelaide Rd
2. Dawson St / Baggot Street / Stephens Green
3. IFSC
4. South Docklands
5. Civic Offices / 4 Courts / Smithfield
6. Burlington Road / Wilton Place
7. Spencer Dock / North WallIf the interconnector route is assessed against these locations you get the following walk times
1. 3-10 mins
2. 0 -10 mins
3. Interchange at Pearse Station existing rail link
4. 5 – 12 minutes
5. 3 – 10 minutes
6. 10 -15 minutes
7 Interchange with Luas BXTo consider the locations that an inner metro alignment would offer the distances would be
1. College Green 5 – 7 minutes from both High St and St Green
2. Connolly a further 5 – 7 minutes interchanging at PearseI can appreciate it is easy to talk about walking times of 10 – 15 minutes when one is fit and a parking space beside your office costs €6 an hour with a futher €10 congestion charge; but I have no doubt that if direct trains ran from places like Adamstown and if significant park and ride sites fed the Kildare and Nothern lines in people would go for conveneince and employers if given the choice would not give their staff free parking.
When you compare the route of the interconnector to the metro you have to wonder why the metero was ever prioritised
1. Stephens Green – good location
2. O Connell St – good location
3. Mater – medium density inner suburb
4. Glasnevan or Drumcoundra – low – medium density greying suburb
5. DCU – sprawling suburban campus
6. Ballymun – low – medium density new town
7. Santry – sprawling suburb
8. Airport – good location
9. Swords – good locationThe bit in the middle doesn’t stack up for significant underground sections; this is luas or qbc territory; I think we need a repeat of the speach CJ gave in 1980 in his blue Charvet shirt
@Seamus O’G wrote:
What still doesn’t seem to be clear is why the interconnector – if it is to be built and if it is to be run at the currently proposed fraction of its capacity – needs to be built through St. Stephen’s Green.
As was previously illustrated on this thread, a much shorter (and cheaper) route would achieve exactly the same purpose.:confused:
Stay on point
@missarchi wrote:
mark what do you think the drop shaft size required is?????
I have photos but mabye you could provide all the information I think you would be suprised???Mark I know you know what you are talking about given your background and that is what concerns me most.
If a 300m run from Benneton to Eircom isn’t enough then just how far into Stephens Green are they planning to go; more than 300m would almost take the excavation as far as Leeson Street.
Dublin traders want Metro North hearing
Friday, 7 November 2008 15:50
Dublin traders want a public hearing into the Dublin Metro North project, claiming that disruption costs to the city could total €2bn.The Rail Procurement Agency has applied to An Bord Pleanála for a railway order to start the project but there is no obligation to hold a hearing.
Tom Coffey of the Dublin City Centre Business Association welcomed the concept of the Metro North but said a public hearing should still be held due to the public importance of the project.
AdvertisementMr Coffey said: ‘We are concerned that this project (in its current guise) may well prove unnecessarily damaging to the existing economy as well prove to be the least cost efficient means of achieving what we all agree is a necessary project.’
Mr Coffey said there are concerns about the adequacy of the Environmental Impact Assessment and that it was unfair that the public sector were given extra time to study its 3,000-page report while the private sector was not.
An RPA spokesman said it was expecting a public hearing to be held around February 2009.
Surely if the TBM is to be encapsulated in the medium term then all they need to put in are entrances; if the project were to involve encapsulating the machine and if they built 3 entrances then none of them would need to be much more than 1,000 sq feet each. The way that Oxford Circus has been done could be very effective with say 4 exits at various points i.e. one for Luas, one for Grafton Street and another for Dawson St which would involve minimal disruption based on small scale interventions vs a cavernous entrance; what would be required would be to have a significant interchange with interconnector underground and then three sets of escalators to the three seperate entrances with both networks merged at the higher of the two platform heights.
Presumably the TBM would be equivelent to one of the Dublin Port Tunnel directions and that the spoil would all be removed en route to Stephens Green and not from Stephens Green; which if that is trhe case you would wonder why there was ever an idea to trash the green in the first place. Preserving the park and the retail environment during the construction phase are very important.
If legislation were passed requiring reinstatement of the external elements of listed buildings with direct frontage to public highways Noel and other errant land-owners / leaseholders would be compelled to act.
My fear in this is that Noel holds an interest worth what DCC will pay him and little else which must be say €25,000 but the longer he allows the railings to deteriorate the less incentive there is for DCC to buy due to the rapidly increasing remediation costs. Something requiring people like Noel to have real fear of crawling into a growing liability if they continue to deliberately allow period railings to deteriorate into a dangerous condition is required. The current set up does not use market forces to defeat annoying little speculators who target fantasy development versus those property people who can create real market products that pass through planning, funding and occupier stages.
@markpb wrote:
your second option is not only infeasible given the size of drop shafts required for TBMs, it also makes the Luas even less useful if it’s terminus is moved further from buses coming from the northside.
The TBM is to remain under the green so i presume it is to be sunk at the other end, and come on, an extra few hundred metres walk for a few years won’t kill anyone.
