Frank Taylor
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@Telemachus wrote:
According to Frederick O’Dwyer in ‘Lost Dublin’ the Bowl of Light (basically a plastic coal-effect fire set on tubular steel arches) was unveiled in April 1953 as part of a series of events to attract exiles home under the title of An Tostal. It was soon infamously dubbed ‘The Tomb Of The Unknown Gurrier’ by Jimmy O’Dea. It met it’s end when a group of undergraduates hurled it into the Liffey a fortnight later. The fountain was subsequently drained and turned into a flowerbed known as ‘The Thing’ until the Corpo reinstated the lantern sets in the mid-60’s
I always wondered what it looked like.
They need to get sign off on a 3.4 billion euro plan (to be spent over a number of years). That’s always going to be hard to do. It’s not clear that the minister for transport or the taoiseach think it’s worth spending so much money on rail transport. Bertie publicly stated that the airport metro was too expensive even though it was to go through his own constituency. Improving life for people living along the Kildare and Maynooth lines must be somewhat further down his priorities.
I’d guess the government sees more votes in a short term spending of the same money on current expenditure in health and education. I doubt they will ever reject the plan but rather do nothing and keep saying that a decision is imminent.
If they haven’t approved the plan by the next election, you know what to do.
@jungle wrote:
They may be allowing for a lot of non-staff parking because of the motor tax and driving licence centres being there.
Motor tax and driving licences are just forms like income tax or TV licence and there’s no reason to provide parking merely because the forms concern motor vehicles. I doubt it ever occurred to anyone to provide public parking in Dublin 7 for motor tax renewals. These services are increasingly handled by post or internet. Dublin City Council runs a few shops in suburban estates that just process these forms so you can park in Nutgrove shopping centre for example. No need to build 700 parking places for your staff at public expense and come up with such a crap cover story.
Dublin City Council also provided themselves with extensive underground parking under the Civic Offices in Wood Quay, next to Temple Bar. Thus indicating that they believe public transport is a great thing and that everyone else should use it so that they can drive to work more quickly. Could Cork County Council not place their offices next to one of the planned commuter rail stations on the Midleton line?
@Diaspora wrote:
Good to see that the planners are leading by example in encouraging sustainable transport modes in Cork, 700 spaces on 7,000 sq m is excessive by any standard.
By comparison, Citigroup IFSC, 35,000 square metres, 1,200 employees, approx. 100 parking places. Local government employees are human and by ensuring that all of them can drive to work, the car dependent mindset will spill over into their public policies.
Aerial photo of the GPO attached.
Could they dig a hole in the courtyard and put the theatre in there?Diaspora wrote:Thirdly that it will set a dangerous precedent]I saw no reference to bulky goods in the DoE press release. The Irish Times reported today that CostCo could now open in Ireland. If we can have CostCo why not Walmart?@shaun wrote:
This is great news, at last an IKEA store in Dublin, it’s going to regenerate Ballymun too.
How does it regenerate an area to site a retail warehouse there? It certainly provides employment but will the jobs will go to disadvantaged locals when educated Eastern European workers can be had for the same money? It also creates a huge amount of traffic.
It doesn’t exactly contribute to the aesthetics of an urban area to drop a humungous yellow box surrounded by acres of car parks.
As IKEA has a more efficient business model than smaller furniture shops, you would expect the result to be an overall reduction in employment in the sector. IKEA is getting to leverage the billions spent on the port tunnel and M50 upgrade without having to worry about the external costs generated by the increased traffic. It’s not their job to think about the greater good to society, that’s for Dick Roche to do when he considers the results of different land use policies.
Still, I’ll be shopping there in my car, regenerating Ballymun by driving through it.
Check out North London IKEA from the air – note the vast proportion of land taken up with roads and car parking and how inhospitable this area would be to anyone who can’t drive a car such as the young, old, poor or disabled.
I like the Swedish.
These are quotes from IKEA’s own social and environmental responsibility report
http://www.ikea-group.ikea.com/corporate/PDF/IKEA%20Report2003.pdfTraffic to and from the stores
Most IKEA customers travel to and from the stores in their
own cars. IKEA studies show that only about 10 percent of
visitors use public transport.Public transport
Several stores are carrying out trials to encourage coworkers
to use public transport, to share cars to and from
work, or to cycle in order to reduce journeys by car to the
store.
Some IKEA stores have their own shuttle buses linking
them with the city centre. As a general rule IKEA endeavours
to locate its stores in areas served by efficient public
transport. IKEA has formulated its own list of requirements
for what constitutes “efficient public transport”:- public transport, preferably rail transport or equivalent,
linking the store to the city centre or to a regional transport
hub - there must be an embarkation/disembarkation point
within 150 metres of the store exit - timetables must be clearly displayed at the exit to the
store - there must be at least one trip in each direction every
hour during store opening hours
Home delivery
IKEA customers can use the home delivery service for
goods. In most stores this service is provided by an independent
company, and in most instances IKEA has started
to put environmental demands on these contractors as
well.IKEA has decided to focus on:
- Investments in renewable energy.
- Further actions to reduce the amount of waste and increase
the amount of reclaimed/recycled materials. - Continuing with projects to contribute to reducing the
environmental impact of co-worker and customer traffic
to and from the stores. For example, public transport needs
to be more readily available, and customers should be offered
more help with home delivery of their purchases at a reasonable price.
and
The target is,
by the end of financial year 2005, 75 percent of
IKEA stores should have efficient public transports.
For financial year 2003, 77 percent of IKEA stores had efficient
public transport links.
IKEA are currently on the target set up and are investigating on
how to improve the situation further for new and existing stores.
This includes to define a new target.and
What are the biggest challenges for IKEA as far as
increased social responsibility and environmental protection
are concerned?
The environmental impact of our transport requirements is
a huge challenge. We’re doing all we can to pack more
products into every shipment and to increase our use of
rail transport. IKEA customers drive to our stores, so we
need to be better at creating the right conditions for more
of them to use public transport when they visit us. On the
social side, the top priority is to create good conditions for
our suppliers’ employees in countries where human rights
are still in their infancy. One thing is clear. We still have a
great deal to do.”The above photo looks really pretty! The inside of this building is pure slum. Long straight narrow corridors like a crap motel, paper thin walls, tiny rooms. I can’t imagine anyone living there who wasn’t a student or an alcoholic or both.
Maybe one day it will be pulled down and the facade kept intact like a prop from a wild west movie, while the rear is converted to something better than a battery farm.
In other art forms, pastiche is not such a pejorative term as in architecture. A literary pastiche is just a work ‘in the style of’ another author, and need not be a pale imitation. Indeed what work of art is truly independent of all its predecessors? Plot constructs, literary devices, srchitectural proportions, compositions of form and musical rhythms may all be ‘inspired’ by previous works. If there’s nothing new its fair to deride a work as derivative, but critics more often praise a film or book for drawing on previous classics.
Often the reason given for not creating buildings in a pastiche style is that it is never done quite right and that the skills used to create the originals are now lost. I don’t buy this.
What does anyone think of this super pastiche ‘Regency style’ development in Donnybrook?
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/property/2004/1111/1099561049502_1100112183421.html@Graham Hickey wrote:
Frank you make a good point about communities fragmenting in housing estates, but then this is the case across the board if not more so with apartment living and higher density developments. Just the way people are nowadays.
You’re right, high density developments do not, on their own, lead to a greater sense of community and rural townlands can be very close-knit. However, I don’t agree that people have changed and become inherently more atomic. I believe the change in behaviour has come about as a result of higher levels of car ownership. With the car
- there’s no need to shop or go to school locally – so you don’t meet your neighbours in the shops or through your kids’ friends’ parents
- You meet nobody by chance during your journey so no catching up with your neighbours on the street
- you have little sense of attachment to your area, it’s just somewhere you live off the N4
These things are not all bad: schools now compete over a far greater catchment area, ALDI and LIDL bring us low prices and too much community is a bad thing when your neighbourhood resembles Coronation Street where everyone’s ugly and nobody swears.
The county development plans are now starting to recommend architecture that ‘promotes a sense of community’. How is anyone interpreting this? You can’t and wouldn’t want to stop people owning cars, but you might design a suburb in a fashion that made car use very unattractive for short journeys or trips into town.
@Graham Hickey wrote:
Is there any example of this kind of development, the conversion/removal of housing estates, elsewhere – in the UK or Europe?
Surely something along these lines has been attempted somewhere to offer us some indication as to how this problem may be dealt with.I’d be interested in this too. I lived in a densified estate in London for a couple of years. Lots of infill, extensions and (well executed) subdivision. The result was a more lively area, but choked with traffic even on the inner housing estate roads. A lot of immigrant kids were killed in road accidents because they weren’t used to the dangers.
One other possible future for housing estates would result from a rise in oil prices. If you can only afford to heat two rooms and you do a lot of journeys by bike or on foot as my family had to during the 70’s oil crisis, you lose the benefits of having a big house, miles out of town. I have fond memories of the oil crises as a kid: cycling with my parents on the weekend instead of ‘going for a walk in the car’, or the morning my dad couldn’t get to work because a thief had siphoned the fuel out of his car overnight.
The suburbs have already changed from the 70’s. Looking back at early photos, the housing estate was very bare without all the mature trees there now. As single car families were the norm, the kids went to the local schools on foot or by bike rather than being ferried by mammy in the MPV. People went to mass more often and the women in the area (mostly non car-owners) had a fairly broad network through schools and church. My mother once told me she knew over 100 women locally. There were shops in the centre of the housing estate, grocery, newsagent, chemist: all now gone. Now I’d say I know maybe 30 of the 2,000 residents in the estate- not much of a community.
I don’t think anyone would have predicted that houses would one day sell for half a million in the local council estates, that we feared so much. Those fears were imaginary and have now been replaced with fear of paedophiles and traffic accidents, which is maybe why kids don’t play football on the cul-de-sacs anymore.
I don’t buy into the idea that oil will run out soon and kill the suburbs. People who propound this remind me of the Jehova’s witnesses warning of impending doom for those who fail to repent. If oil does run out in our lifetimes, I guess we’ll starve and urban land use will be the last thing on our minds.
The High Court has just ruled that Roscommon council misconstrued the scope of their function under the Planning Act in denying an extension of planning permission to McDowell
costs expected to be awarded to McDowell@kefu wrote:
Just out of curiosity, how exactly would Dublin function without the M50. For instance, should somebody living in Dundrum travel through the city centre to get to the airport?
He has to drive because we chose to build motorways rather than rail lines. The plan was to build a metro between Shangannagh and the Airport via Dundrum. He could have completed his journey without generating traffic.
Should a truck driver going from the Airport to Dun Laoghaire use the quays?
For the last few miles of most freight journeys trucks have to be used – there’s no getting away from that. The major freight hubs, ports and airports should be connected by rail. We made a strategic decision to run down railfreight in favour of road.Hauliers are not expected to pay for the port tunnel and motorways.
Are you furthermore suggesting that these “residential and work places that were only built because of the ring road” would not exist if not for the M50.
If so, where exactly would these people and businesses have based themselves. Another country perhaps?The land area taken up by building car dependent Tallaght, Clondalkin and Blanchardstown was wasteful. In hindsight it would have made more sense to develop smaller denser towns along the Maynooth, Kildare and Northern rail lines leading into Dublin. This is what I suggest Cork does rather than follow Dublin’s lead.
What is the purpose of a ring road?
I would have guessed it was to allow the city to be bypassed by traffic crossing through at any angle. In a small town on the junction between several roads connecting larger urban centres this makes sense as the majority of cars are through traffic. But Cork is on the South coast so the only major through traffic flow direction is East-West and this has already been bypassed with the southern motorway and JL tunnel.What proportion of traffic on the M50 is really bypassing Dublin? Much of the capacity of this road is taken up with local journeys between residential and work places that were only built because of the ring road. Building the road created the demand for its use by encouraging unsustainable, car dependent housing estates and warehouse retailers.
Many US cities have built ring road highways with junctions to several interstates. They have found that this is a recipe for sprawl as the city starts to develop along the spines of these roads.
As an alternative to building a northern motorway in Cork, I’d suggest spending the money on high-density, low-rise pedestrianised towns along the Cork-Midleton rail corridor. No cars within 5 minutes walk of the stations and parking around the periphery. You could also extend the line West past Kent Station so that it had a more central terminus.
@lexington wrote:
The NRA, Cork County Council and Cork City Council have held a public consultation seminar (15th December 2004) in the Kingsley Hotel regarding the proposed 500m euro 17km North Ring Motorway.
Nice. A €500m subvention to the developers who will build warehouse retailing at the motorway junctions and Tallaght-style sprawling housing estates. When it fills up with traffic about 30 minutes after it’s been constructed you can then plan for adding the extra lane and butterfly flyovers at a cost of 9 trillion or whatever. Does Cork have the self confidence to be different from Dublin rather than slavishly repeating the capital’s mistakes in slow motion?
@asdasd wrote:
The reson we have problems in Dublin with “sprawl” can hardly be divorced form the number of people living in the city, and the increase in the population.. The main reason for population increase is mass migration into the city. Planners could hardly have planned for the number of people who are now coming to live here since it is unprecedented.
Immigrants are one factor leading to extra demand for new housing but there is also: lowest mortgage rates ever, huge increase in average earnings, huge reductions in income tax, collapse in equity markets and interest rates making property a more attractive investment, demographic bulge in the 20-35 section due to higher birth rates in the 70s, a reduction in average household sizes due to Irish social changes, availability of buy-to-let mortgage products … But increased demand doesn’t have to mean sprawl. It’s not as if the planners had great sustainable plans for new housing that were knocked out of kilter by the arrival of immigrants. We had already built dismal, low density, sprawling housing for 300,000 in Clondalkin, Tallaght and Blanchardstown by the time the first immigrants were arriving in the 90’s. Whose idea was it to build car-dependent housing for people who couldn’t afford cars? Was this some kind of a joke?
contemporary – @anto wrote:
On the design of the centre, a council report on the plan says: “A contemporary feel is desired for all buildings, while pastiche proposals should be avoided.
@P11 Comms wrote:
Tonight Waterford Council outlined a plan for a new town of 12,000 people based entirely on a new ring road as the only transport access.
To be fair to the council, I’m not sure that there is any rail in the city boundaries: I think it’s all just North of the river in Kilkenny. The planned town is to be fairly high density, allowing for most local journeys to be completed on foot. As regards public transport, they just need a good link into Waterford city. Maybe the council could reserve some of the land going into the city for a right-of-way bus corridor to be upgraded to LRT once the demand is there.
As for the article, I guess that sprawl has been the result of well intentioned but mistaken planning policy rather than anything else. Presumably developers would have been happy to continue building additions to old towns at the existing densities, had it not been for 4-to-the acre planning rules.
Sprawl puts a massive gulf between the city residents and the countryside. Bring back walled towns! City or country and nothing in between- certainly not 8 miles of ulta boredom.
@mickeydocs wrote:
I think you missed my point. I take the train everyday over my car because I believe that if we are to champion a solution we should use the solution.
Very few people base their decision to choose a method of transport on environmental or safety grounds. Nearly everyone is concerned with cost and convenience. I can dig up a UK survey showing this if you really want. This is why carfree day failed spectacularly.
@mickeydocs wrote:
Traffic in Dublin/Cork/Limerick/Waterford…etc, etc is a nightmare. We are over-reliant on the car. Enough of the clichés. My point was that if reliability is the reason why people returned to using the cars then we have a very difficult battle on our hands getting the Irish commuter public to use trains.
Yes, it’s very important for Irish Rail to improve reliability and publish targets and performance and outsource the bits they can’t manage themselves.
The Luas was a very expensive joke. I do not want to see another cent spent by these buffoons. This will be a case of throwing more good money…
Luas cost 31million per km. This was close to the original tendered contract price as distinct from estimates bandied about before the routes were even chosen. By western international standards this was high but not off the scale – Strasbourg and Rouen paid about the same for their light rail systems. During the public consultation and appeals periods land and wage costs increased enormously. It is early days to judge Luas yet but if it meets its passenger targets and costs close to its tender price, it will be hard to call it a failure. Those living along the lines have seen their property values increase by an amount which may well exceed the cost of the project.
1. Why not make these people accountable for the vast sums already spent. Let’s start by using capacity on the commuter trains as part of the ‘metro’ dart solution.
The Irish Rail interconnector plan involves increasing greatly capacity on existing lines
2. Why not insist on improving tax deductions to commuters. I previously lived in Belgium, where I commuted 100Km each morning. My monthly train ticket cost 40 euros and included metro, light rail, bus and commuter rail!!!!!!!!!!
Annual commuter tickets are fully tax deductible. I agree that subsidising fares is a good way of attracting people away from cars.
3. Why not put regional development back on the agenda. Why do people living in Drogheda or Kildare have to travel to Dublin. Why does the government not actively promote Drogheda as a good location for fdi?
The National Spatial Strategy and decentralisation attempt to do this. IDA Ireland is tasked with trying to get FDI away from Dublin:
http://www.idaireland.com/uploads/reports/Annual_report_03/fdi_contribution.html
I expect these initiatives to fail. It would make more sense to develop Cork, Waterford, Galway and Limerick.- public transport, preferably rail transport or equivalent,
