garethace

Pack ’em and stack ’em…

http://www.caledonianrecord.com/pages/local_news/story/fa358f7f4

I never actually noticed them myself, until these past few mornings, when they actually get the road, to perform…. whatever it is they are trying to perform…

Is there any way in the world a future feasability study for a large spend on mass transit systems, could include some study into how we could take more kids to school? Without having mummy and daddy in their SUV clogging up major arterial routeways into the city?

I mean, its a joke. Does anyone notice how little traffic is on the roads around Dublin, since the Easter Holidays for the schools came along? It is like chalk and cheese, particularly around suburban areas.

Look at all the boy racers out there who have open stretchs of road tar mac in front of them these mornings, now that little paul and sarah are ‘having a lie in’ during the Easter Break… boy those guys with the alloy wheels and tinted glass windows in their Fiesta’s really can burn that rubber when they get a chance eh? And give male drivers a bad name into the bargain.

However, the problem with cars is, whenever, you find a solution and free up the roads…. more cars always just ‘come along’ out of somewhere to make it worse than it was before… large Road out to Airport in North side being a classic example of that… if any of you can remember back a few years on that road… it used to be a pleasure to drive on when it was first opened… but now it is far from being that.

I reckon myself, if Dublin city did sort out its traffic problems, you could have more people driving from the outskirts of galway county to work every morning in Terenure. 😉 Landing you right back to where you started all over again. Any benefit at all, which LUAS will provide to freeing up traffic in Dublin city, will very quickly be swallowed up again, by people commuting by car, over further and further distances out into the hinterland, every morning – I can assure you.

I think the biggest problem with LUAS for me, is that it is ‘reactionary’ to a problem created by car conjestion – rather than being its own independent project, with strategic benefit to the city of Dublin and its inhabitants. Any benefit, that LUAS is going to have towards relieving the conjestion, is going to be as short lived as that in the new Airport Road construction 10 years ago.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Was going up Suffolk St, this evening and a taxi drove up it at about 50 mph, blaring his horn at pedestrians… sort of a mess really Suffok st.

No one will convince, but there is some other way of doing things, than the present condition…

I do like where you are going with this argument, it raises the right issues about this competition in general I think. The presentations that I saw at the exhibition in Dun Laoghaire, had an awful lot to do with the issue of parking for sure…

A good quote from this article about Toronto… http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1080774614038&call_pageid=970599109774&col=Columnist969907619189

“These should be the primary focus for mixed-use intensification, because they are the subway routes. The city’s still thinking about this, but so far our land-use patterns and transit planning aren’t in sync. The two must be more closely connected.

I mean, it could be well argued that Carlisle pier is practically on a Dart route etc…. from the amenity, museum function point of view… that would mean a lot of people could access Carlisle pier with families at weekends without having to bring out the car.

In his competition presentation I think, this Carlisle Pier project, was thought of ‘as a big project’ by Daniel Libeskind and that is why he proposed this two layers of underground, sub-plaza car parking in his competition entry I think.

That’s fine for larger projects, when excavating underground garages makes economic sense, but not for smaller buildings of, say, three to six storeys.

While SOM went the more, New York high price of real estate route and submitted a plan to ‘stack’ the car parking within the volume of their very large ‘stena-ferry’ like building whale-form.

In New York, where real estate is too expensive to be wasted on parking lots, you find stacked parking, which allows one spot to accommodate two or three cars.

You have to look carefully a nearby examples too I think, like the Stillorgan ‘Town Centre’ or shopping centre or whatever you wish to call it… and how it has decided to handle car parking and car traffic in general…. it is one of the few places I know myself, where if the ‘green man’ comes on, the car just keep driving past, irregardless of old ladies and gentlemen attempting to cross the road.

I really wonder what Stillorgan house wifes would say, if they were asked to put their cars, into stacked car parking systems! 🙂 Which is effectively what SOM scheme proposed for their scheme only a couple of miles down the road in a place called Dun Laoghaire.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

[font=times new roman:giaw0nqg]Open Home Floor Plans Can Breed Too Much Togetherness
“Great Rooms” and other shared spaces are being replaced by more walls and private retreats.[/font:giaw0nqg]

“After two decades of pushing the open floor plan–where domestic life revolved around a big central space and exposed kitchens gave everyone a view of half the house — major builders and top architects are walling people off. They’re touting one-person “Internet alcoves,” locked-door “away rooms” and his-and-her offices on opposite ends of the house. The new floor plans offer so much seclusion, they’re “good for the dysfunctional family,” says Gopal Ahluwahlia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders.”

http://www.planetizen.com/news/item.php?id=12711

[font=times new roman:giaw0nqg]I mean, just considering the rise in popularity of home entertainment solutions, multimedia, fabulous flat panel displays and the http://www…. will that change how we see/design our living spaces?[/font:giaw0nqg]

Like in the 1980s, the cool thing was to start ‘knocking’ walls all over the place…. will the opposite happen now, with people making lots of little private cells?

Brian O’ Hanlon.