jungle
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They certainly need to be kept accessible to public transport as old or sick people are frequently no longer able to drive. That should rule out Sarsfield Court. If they could put it next to the new train station in Blarney (as if it will ever get built…), it shouldn’t be so bad, but Docklands would still be preferable.
Just after they’ve built the breast check facility next to the South Infirmary :rolleyes:
I hope it’s a Docklands site as I’d like to see a hospital retained somewhere fairly centrally.
He’s doing a bit better than Ned O’Keeffe who has accused the government and local Fianna Fail TDs of lying.
Erm, Ned, that would be you…
I don’t know how much bus design has come on, but the old double-deckers used to have serious trouble with Cork’s hills. They should be OK on the 5 and 8. Other routes like the 2,3 or 7 might be a bit challenging for them.
The description doesn’t inspire, but I suppose I should wait for some kind of visual representation before making too much of a judgement. It just seems that the quays between the Opera House and the Distillery are being developed in a haphazard manner with no discernible pattern. It’s a pity because the quays on the opposite side of the river are some of the most attractive in the city.
On the plus side, it could hardly be worse than North Main St shopping centre and it should block the view of that.
This is a goog news, bad news article.
The good news is that someone is actually making plans; the bad news is the time frame.
@mickeydocs wrote:
He stepped on the toes of those that needed to be woken from their slumber.
His legacy at UCC was mixed.
He expanded the university, oversaw a lot of new building and increased industry links to the extent that UCC’s industry funded research is almost as much as UCD and TCD combined. However, he left it with a massive pile of debt. Although he liked to portray his opponents as old-fashioned academics, the major concern was over whether UCC could service the debt.
Hmmm…
The view from the South Main St side in particular looks very bulky. Tuckey St doesn’t really matter because it’s not wide enough to catch the elevation.
Is Old Post Office Lane to be built on as part of the development or is it retained? There aren’t that many of the old lanes left off North and South Main Streets. I’d hate to see another one gone.
@Radioactiveman wrote:
Not sure why there is such a huge gap between the hospital and the clinic. Must be plans for the site.
You’d imagine so, but if there were plans for infill, why would they put windows on the hospital side?
Sorry for going back to the Pana/Oliver Plunkett St debate so late after it, but I’m just back from holidays. I quite like the new Patrick St. There are some parts where the pavement is a little narrow, but it’s a huge improvement on what was there before. It would help if traffic levels could be reduced.
The problem with Oliver Plunkett St is that the finish looks cheap. The stone and tarmac bits are OK, if a little uninspired, but the bits where there are tiles looks awful. They’re not evenly spaced and the gaps are too big anyway. Many of the new light poles are already looking tatty. I’m waiting for the first person to dig up some of the pavement and just slap down a little tarmac with the back of a shovel (French Church St, anyone?).
I would imagine the T&A site will be fairly sensitive in terms of what goes there. As it fronts onto the Watercourse Road and is in an area of existing one and two storey housing a tall apartment block is presumably unlikely.
The Pope’s Quay plan is only OK. As said by radioactiveman, it could lose a floor. Pope’s Quay is one of the best preserved quaysides in Cork and while there has been an amount of contemporary development, care has to be taken not to damage it (Now, if that was proposed for Kyrl’s Quay, I would be leaping for joy).
A few questions
Is anything happening with the old Irish Rail travel centre on Patrick St? It’s been vacant for a long time and it can’t be part of a site assembly.
Also the Golden Discs store that was up by brown Thomas? That one hasn’t been vacant so long.
Finally, why are there so many businesses for sale on Douglas St at the moment? Is it just coincidence or are a lot of the leases up at the same time or something else?
It’s not so much whether a plane can take off and land (AFAIK the only one that can’t is an A380), it’s what you can have on it. You can certainly get 747s out of Cork. They’ve been used for rugby charters before and there was a KLM one ended up in Cork after a mid-Atlantic emergency.
The problem is that to get a 747 off the runway in Cork, you need to lose passengers, freight or fuel. If you take one of the first two off, you lose revenue. If you take the last off, you restrict your range.
The largest aircraft that can currently fly completely unrestricted from Cork is a 767-200. The A330-200 can take off from Cork with a full compliment of passengers and freight and enough fuel to get to the East Coast of the USA. Extending the runway would probably allow larger variants of the 767 and A330 (and presumably, the future 787 and A350) to use Cork Airport with fewer restrictions. It’s not really worth worrying about aircraft that are bigger than that anyway,
To give you an idea, Cork’s current runway is about 1,500 feet shorter than Dublin and 3,500 shorter than Shannon. Dublin’s runway length poses some problems for services to the Far East. The main thing a 400ft extension would do is allow larger aircraft to be used to the East Coast of the USA (which is by far the most likely long-haul destination). It certainly wouldn’t allow an unlimited range of aircraft or destinations.
The principal reason it’s not used is because it’s too short for the main airlines at the airport. Only Aer Arann and Air SouthWest can use it. For prevailing winds, a North-South runway and an East-West runway are much of a muchness.
What’s crucial with the short runway is that it’s easily extendable to a considerable length, when the long runway can only really have a maximum of 400 feet or so added because of the fall off of the hill on either side.
Exactly.
One a London-Shannon return flight, Ryanair were paying a tenner less than Aer Lingus in charges and that’s before you take into account the higher fees dor landing at Heathrow. That meant Aer Lingus were not making a profit if they tries to charge the same price as Ryanair.
Considering Aer Lingus serve three major hubs from Cork, they’re definitely an airline Cork can’t afford to lose.
Any deal with Ryanair should be dependent on them slying to destinations that aren’t currently served from Cork.
Incidentally, I hear plans are afoot to sell some of the land at the airport. The problem is that it would prevent the short runway (the one that runs parallel to the access road) from being extended. Although that runway is little used at the moment, it would be far easier to extend it to a decent length for long-haul that the main runway. It would be incredibly short-term thinking if it happens.
It was always planned, but then seemed to get dropped as a policy.
TBH It would have been better to have had it as policy when the Grand Parade works were going ahead.
In principle I agree with restricting to public transport and taxis only during business hours; we still need to see the exact proposals for what times they’re proposing.
I suppose some movement is desirable, but that design isn’t the most inspiring. It looks like the sort of thing we’ll be trying to get sorted out in 30 years time.
The most important thing is to overprovide for rail activities inside it. Once the station has been built around, it can never be expanded again.
Access is always going to be a problem with that Nemo site. The alternatives to what was proposed are to put the access between the Cross Douglas Road and Bellair juncions of the Douglas Road (through the FCA site probably), but that leads to three junctions in quick succession on the road, to do a deal with the Southern Health Board and get some of the St Finbarr’s site for access or to access from the South Douglas Road (probably the most likely now).
Anyone have details of what was actually in the plans? 82 houses and 20 apartments sounds quite low density for such a large and central site. I don’t suppose the houses were three storey. It’s the only way to get a decent size house onto some of the plots nowadays. It’s ironic that there were loads built in the 19th century and you scarcely see any now. Maybe they count as high rise…
Short of attracting an unestablished department store (or god forbid yet another Dunnes…) I’d have thought they might have trouble filling the upper storeys.
Considering the incredible lack since the closure of the Capitol, there could be a case for having just two floors of shops with something like a cinema above it.
Any idea how this impacts on the alley that goes into the Market. Someone mentioned that the Oyster Tavern would be retained and possibly the facade of the Vineyard (Slainte). Although if the facade is retained, the entire ground floor of the pub may as well be.
I know it’s not finished yet, but ordinary is the most positive description I can come up with for the breastcheck building.
As regards the area, there’s still plenty of development to come here. The mechanics yard is surely too big a site for it to continue to be used as such given the location. There are also a number of city council yards off Old Station Road where the land value cannot justify the use (but when has that been a consideration with state institutions…). Finally, I seem to rememeber a plan, mentioned on here a long time ago, to build on what is currently the card park of Anglesey St Garda Station. Not sure what became of that, but again surface parking in such a central location is not really justifiable.
As the buildings are put in place, upgrades to the pedestrian environment for the are will become vital (it’s already one of the worst in the city). I assume we’ll see it 10 years after the buildings are in place though…
