Frank Taylor

A previous thread about problems in Clarion Quay
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2198
The DDDA said at the time they were investigating how to accommodate playing children in future. Does anyone know what they decided?

What exactly is Point Village?
the web site says:

Shopping centre with 300,000 sq.ft of double height retail space.

Is this a ‘retail park’? As in B & Q, PC World, Land of Leather?

When a road is congested and untolled, people still pay to use it – they just pay with their time. They queue in traffic jams. The amount of time they are willing to devote to waiting in traffic is proportional to the value they obtain from the journey and inversely proportional to the value they place on their own time. The perverse result is that an untolled congested road tends to have a combination of people who really need to be there and people who have sod all else to do that day and don’t mind listening to the radio for an hour.

Another way to look at this is that the price paid is determined by the buyer and not by the profit margin for the seller. NTR may only stand to gain 300m by retaining the concession but the government may stand to gain far more than 600m if removing the toll bridge enables them to toll the entire motorway. An analogy is the case where a developer stands to make €1m by obtaining a narrow strip of land that provides access to a building site. If the value to the current landowner of this strip is €1,000, then what is a fair price to buy the land for?

I have another question. As parts of the M50 were supported by European ‘Cohesion Fund’, is it legal to toll those sections?

Today’s Irish Times says that that the plan is to continue allowing cars access to city center car parks such as Fleet Street. Also, I imagine that taxis are included in the phrase ‘public transport’. Buses are visually intrusive and noisy and dirty but they do use road space more efficiently than cars.

If you spend some time in a city with a lot of light rail, it is dangerous and frightening for pedestrians. Crossing the street in Amsterdam or Zurich, the trams are almost silent, and it’s easy for one tram to obscure another travelling the opposite direction. Trains and pedestrians (particularly kids) are hardly a happy mix.

The ideal would be to have enough elevated or underground rail lines crossing the city so that everywhere was within easy walking distance of a station. At that point, you really could ban all road transport from the city centre. We will have three such lines (2 DARTs and a metro) The red line luas could be sunk for it’s cross city portion. If we had one more that would proably be enough.

There’s no point in demonising IRDA, they are a lobby group, representing a widely held view. Their spokespeople make lengthy arguments for their case. Although they say that British planning rules are not appropriate for Ireland, they are not overtly anti-British. Our public representatives have gone far further in their anti-Briish comments. Healy-Rae really goes the furthest in saying “An Taisce has caused more destruction in south County Kerry than Hitler did in Europe during the last war”.

One of IRDA’s arguments is that “Each refusal for a permanent home is both a serious attack on an individual’s constitutional right as well as a personal tragedy”. The personal tragedy arises where someone has the funds to build a house (say 200-250K) but not to buy a house, (say 300-350K). The tragedy is that houses prices are too high. I think this is a temporary situation. We are increasing the housing stock by around 5% per year (100K houses) and this can’t continue indefinitely. Historically, it has usually been more expensive to build than to buy and once we return to this equilibrium, the housing tragedy focus will be on negative equity.

@GregF wrote:

Now under different management, would anyone class Temple Bar as a success now after all these years. It kinda has lost its sparkle I think. Does anyone now if they have still the Halloween Parade and fireworks or has this died a death too.

Temple Bar was a decrepit slum 20 years ago. Many of the buidings were derelict. It is now considered a huge success in urban renewal terms – in the 1990s, Temple Bar Properties welcomed a constant stream of curious city planners and TV crews from around the world, interested to discover the secrets. While there is a lot of boozing, there are a large number of successful cultural venues, some streets have been beautifully restored such as Eustace and Crowe St. Plenty of high end residential units, many without parking. It is a lively area and a tourist magnet.

It was natural that Laura Magahy gained a reputation for a Midas touch even if it was not to be repeated.

You can declaim the tax incentives but property throughout the country was tax incentivised with little to show for it.

@Morlan wrote:

I’m disappointed with this street and in particular the central median. Isn’t it meant for people to mingle and chill? At the moment it seems like a safety corridor for people to walk through quickly – “Take your photos of the Spire and then you’d better be on your way”.

Out of all the cities I’ve visited, Barcelona’s main though fare “Las Ramblas” has a lot in common with O’C St.

Las Ramblas is more like Henry Street (with seating). It is a place for strolling and lounging in the sun. O’Connell Street is a main vehicle traffic thoroughfare more like Avenue Diagonal. Las Ramblas has a single lane of traffic on each side. Also Barcelona doesn’t have doubledecker buses. It might have been an idea to make the street single lane in each direction with bays for buses to pull in at the sides.

I can’t make it on wednesday so I am going to offer some ideas here:
I don’t want to see the baths restored because I don’t think anyone would use it. I doubt people would hang out in a concrete box to swim in cold water any more.

The surface car parking should be removed and instead a multistorey should be built at Booterstown where there is plenty of space and traffic is not forced through a village.

The area used by surface parking should be a pedestrianised extension of blackrock village with shops at ground level and plenty of apartments overhead with no parking places provided. residents would have to use the train to go to town.

The narrow laneway to blackrock park is dangerous for pedestrians as it is not overlooked and provides a perfect venue for muggers. I imagine it would be hard to improve as the land to one side is railway while the other side is a garden. Ideally, the end of the garden would be built on with some mews dwellings with ground floor windows and the lane widened but I guess this is unlikely to happen unless the landowner was up for it.

Nice to see someone cares about it.

Yes, maybe it is more Hampstead Garden Suburb than Hampstead (I’m never quite sure where I am when I drive through North London). Here’s a web page with some photos from a street in HGS
http://www.hgs.org.uk/mystreet/turner%20close/index.html
I find them depressing. Middle England awful suburbia with money. They just seem so featureless and unhappy with their blank brick walls and empty surrounding lawns. No love.