Frank Taylor
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To get back on topic: even if private cars were banned from Westmoreland St, the road would still be handling a huge volume of buses and would be in no sense ‘pedestrianised’. If some means were found to remove buses and taxis, the street would still be too wide for a successful pedestrian environment. Compare its 30m width to Grafton or Henry Street with 12-14m widths. Ignoring the WSC heritage, the street would work better for pedestrians with a narrow row of 4-storey buildings down the centre. Pedestrian streets work better when they have a certain cosiness about them, when the buildings on either side are not much further apart than the walls of a large room.
On-street trams might look nice and give you a feeling of living in a modern city but trains don’t mix well with pedestrians. You have the same stress of crossing at junctions and you can’t let your young children walk beside you as you can in a fully pedestrian environment like Henry street. If you have lived in Amsterdam or Zurich where trams work well from a transport point of view, you will know the downside of losing the freedom to wander without fear of being splatted by ‘light’ rail.
So full pedstrianisation is a long way off, but a possible compromise is removal of cars, widening of footpaths, a bus lane and a light rail track.
Now that O’Connell street has been repaved and replanted you can stand back and say ‘Well, it’s still full of downmarket retail: fast food outlets, Ann Summers and amusement arcades’. Would it really be better to replace all of this with upmarket retail: say Habitat, a few authentic Italian cafes and some bookshops?
A lot of poor people live within walking distance of O’Connell Street. If retail outlets that target them were removed, demand for these outlets would not be extinguished and they would shortly reopen elsewhere nearby. So is it a legitimate aim when cleaning up a street to seek to clean out the poor to the side-streets?
The way I see it, there are negatives and positives to poor and rich cultures. O’Connell street is one large public thoroughfare that celebrates working class Dublin and it would be a pity to go any further than we have already.
There’s something odd but pleasant about Greenore. It’s a bit too developed for its current isolation. Remnants of former status.
Does anyone know the beautiful residences on the way into the town? They look American-colonial style.
@PDLL wrote:
Well, lets summarise the positions – Irish town houses are considered by some to be boring repetitive and lacking in imagination. Others consider Irish country houses to boring repetitive and lacking in imagination. Umm. What does this imply – a crisis of the imagination in Irish architectrue? Time to start making urban dwellings more interesting, more diversified and more habitable socially and physically than their rural counterparts???? In short, time to give people a genuine reason why they might actually want to live in Irish towns because it is quite obvious that at the present moment in Ireland’s architectural history, the seems to be a lack of such a reason.
I completely agree with this. One-off housing is not the answer but neither is suburban characterless tedium. We need some positive suggestions for urban living patterns rather than the emphasis always being on what’s to be discouraged.
I don’t understand why a circle line should be a good thing. By its nature, it always travels by an indirect route when the primary benefit of underground rail is grade separated, straight line travel. It is most useful to those who wish to make a journey between two places that are the same fixed distance from the city centre as the line radius.
Although it provides a direct route between certain locations outside the central core, radial routes do this too (so long as the planners aren’t stupid enough to terminate them in the city centre).
The circle line in london has lower annual passenger numbers than radial routes of the same length
Circle line: 68m
Bakerloo: 95mother radial routes (longer routes)
Victoria: 161m
Piccadilly: 176m
Jubilee: 127m
Central: 183m@tyrrp wrote:
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Maybe you should add a porch
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In financial statements, revenue means gross sales.
Daily traffic on the westlink for first half 2005 averaged 85,000 according to NTR’s latest published numbers.
http://www.ntr.ie/downloads/ntr-roads/25-July-2005-West-Link-First-Half-2005-Traffic-Figures.pdf@Thomond Park wrote:
Frank there are two errors in our previous calculations]I don’t know on which date the concession expires in 2020. in any case it’s not going to change the figures significantly.
Secondly the usage figure relates the bridges so for a calculation a split would be required between both East and Westlink bridges.
Are you forgetting the M1 Drogheda bridge?
Still way off 500-900 m.
Thanks for all the replies.
One more question: would a basement make a house more susceptible to radon gas? Someone mentioned this to me and I don’t know if it’s true. I’m going to ring the RPI tomorrow and ask for some advice. I’m thinking of building a house with a basement to be used for utilities and extra living space.
@ihateawake wrote:
is mayor street intended to become a major population thoroughfare, retail, etc. or is it to remain in the clutches of the banking elite?
The entry to Mayor Street from Busaras is strangely forbidding the first time you see it. you get the feeling you are entering private property. The street is very busy during the day and well worth checking out. It is intended to run the Luas along Mayor Street but the local banks would prefer a bus along the quays. The apartment dwellers along Mayor Street and the future residents of Spencer Dock will probably choose Mayor Streat as a route into town as it is more direct, pedestrian-friendly, commerical and less windswept than the quays.
You are missing
dormer windows
victorian effect PVC bay windows
4 car garage
concrete eagle gate posts
scale model of the 5 lamps
50,000 tons of gravel for your driveAlso it is ridiculously small. What will your neighbours think of you?
I can’t see it ‘blending in’.The dome of the pantheon is not re-inforced! My understanding is that re-inforcing shortens the potential long-term lifespan of the material.
Phil made a list of buildings in the second post that he reckons will stand the test of time, but can any of them physically make it to say 200 years? I imagine that the longest lasting of present day building materials are brick and concrete block (including the type used to build suburban and exurban housing. So I’m guessing that’s our legacy.
A lot of these buildings listed are reinforced concrete construction and the last line of my post ws to ask whether this material can physically last beyond 100 years. This may be a dumb question, I don’t know.
I like the spire because it’s obviously going to be around a long time. Pastiche georgian brick infill such as the stephen’s green end of Leeson street looks pretty long lasting.
In the 90s, I worked in a large office building in a Dublin industrial estate, described in The Irish Times as the highest spec offices in Ireland. It lasted 7 years. The new county plan allowed the owners to build something twice the height.
@a boyle wrote:
Further to my previous remark , if a concensus could be found we could all write to the rpa with a joint point of view. It’s much easier for the rpa to dismiss comments if they are all different!
You are right. Do you want to put together a one page comment on why the metro tunnel should be continued through the centre to the southside? Once we reach agreement on the wording, get as many as people to put there names to it and I’ll print it out and post it in.
@a boyle wrote:
It’s a shame to us a tbm at all. Why not make maximum use of wide long street and simply cut and cover ? gardiner street and the north circular road eventually lead to the old broadstone line why not use this allignment?
Cut-and-cover is better because you’re closer to the street level but
-there is more disruption during build
-and you have to follow street alignments
-and what happens when you reach the Liffey? How do you cross a river with cut-and-cover? Is there an engineer here who knows this? The circle line in London is partly cut-and-cover but I’m guessing it has to tunnel under the Thames.I’ve just found a Dail transport committee debate where the RPA boss is asked why they are stopping the metro in the city centre. The answer seems to be that they plan to try to turn on the machine again years later when they have approval for a new line going somewhere like Kimmage. I reckon they’ll have to call in a conservationist and a technological archaeologist to get it working again. @joint transport committee wrote:
Frank Allen: It is reasonable to state that the continuation of the tunnel-boring machine for another two kilometres is not a major increment, but it is more than this. Describing this as a metro line to Cherrywood would not be accurate and would not reflect the concept we have of the degree of segregation. The location of the gated stations would require a considerable amount of work south of Beechwood.
We would make a decision in consultation with the contractor on whether to leave the tunnel boring machine in the ground. Often the machines are left underground as this is a cheaper option than extracting them. We see this north-south metro line as part of a longer development including an orbital metro line that would connect at St. Stephen’s Green, as envisaged in A Platform for Change. At that stage, it would be appropriate to use the tunnel-boring machine for a line in the direction of Kimmage.
We have described the proposal put to Government and the rationale of doing it on that scale. We concluded the scale was manageable. I note the suggestion that it be extended but these are the proposals before Government.
Deputy Eamon Ryan: If one leaves a machine in the ground, and it makes sense to continue boring in five or ten years time, is it possible to turn the machine on again?
Mr. Allen: Yes.
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/DDebate.aspx?F=TRJ20051027.xml&Node=H2&Page=4
It seems a shame to drive a TBM into the city centre and leave it there rather than continue on to some southside location. Why would a metro line terminate in the city centre? If they can’t convert the tram line to metro because of the at grade crossings they intend to build in Sandyford, then could they not make another southside route for the metro such as Rathfarnham or Templeogue or down the N11 where a lot of apartment development is in progress? If they don’t have the cash they could just bore the tunnel and add the track and stations at a later date. Otherwise we are going to be leaving a TBM under stephen’s green.
