Micko

Hate to keep asking questions about different project, but anyone have any info on the office development beside Penrose Wharf in the present car park ?

@Hafez wrote:

Halford, PC World and Currys (I think) are all opening after November 10th in Mahon Point Retail Park 🙂

About time.

BTW, anyone know whats doing into those huge warehouse sized buildings behind Pizza Hut in Little Island

@THE_Chris wrote:

No, the lowering of the speed limit is because since the Primary Route, the N8, is now not passing through the town, that road has now been reclassed as an R road. So a lower speed limit. Simple as that.

That’s true. But there are a number of by-laws which can be brought into action to bring the speed limit back up to 100kph. The whole point of these by-laws was so that R roads which are of a very good quality can have a 100kph limit. If this road isn’t good enough I don’t know what is.

I drove through Watergrasshill tonight and the traffic was very heavy. Prob more on the old road than on the new bypass.

Anyone know what Fermoy was like during the week ?

Also, bringing down the speed limit on the old rod to 80kph is a farce. Why were the by-laws for speed limits on local roads brought in if they aren’t going to be used.

Hmm, just a thought.

I see that certain bye laws can be used to bringing the speed limit on Dual carriageway roads up to 120k/h,

Any hope of this happening on either the Watergrasshill bypass, the new Road to Midleton or the Ballincollig bypass ?

@a boyle wrote:

this whole population thing is pathetic.

the cso figures are.
dublin city : 505,739
cork city : 119,143
galway city : 71,983
limerick city: 52,560

dublin in at least four times bigger than cork which is one and half times the size of galway which is one and half time the size of limerick.

Each city can push it’s boundaries out and come up with a bigger number .

if you do that with dublin you get 1,186,159 living in dublin county. tops a million people are living in a surburb which is contiguous with dublin ,

as for the other cities it is difficult to say since the urbanisation is so recent.

but cork could believably claim to 200000 galway 100000 and limerick 750000.

Just so we know where we stand.

You could reasonabley expect at least 250,000 out of cork if the likes of Glanmire and Ballincollig was included. I’m guessing you mean 75,000 for Limerick. 😀

Greater Cork is 186,000 according to 2002 cencus. That doesn’t inclue Douglas which has 20,000 people. Glanmire another 15,000. Ballincollig 15,000 and sundry others which might add up to 10,000.

That would be 256,000.

Add in Midleton, Blarney and Carrigaline you get to 274,000 which is the figure stated in the Cork Housing Strategy for the Metropolitan Cork Area.

@jungle wrote:

Future proofing doesn’t have to involve building a dual carriageway in case it’s needed. All you have to do is reserve enough land to build a dual-carriageway, make sure all bridges can handle a dual carriageway and build a single-carriageway (or 2+1) road where one of the carriageways would be. That is enough to future proof and is substantially less costly than building the entire dual carriageway.

Again, it looks as if the NRA are not going to use 2+1 after all due to safety issues. A lot of reported crashes where the end of 2nd lane comes up. People trying to get past others before the lane ends and then crash into the barrier before making it.

For the sake of a few million euro, the Cork Dublin road has to be completed in dual carriageway.

The 2+1 was primarily going to be used on the Galways to Sligo and Midleton to Waterford sections of the Atlantic Corridor. The Cork to Galway section is and was always going to be full dual carriageway.

Now, if 2+1 isn’t going to be used on the other 2 sections, what will they use ?

BTW, as I have pointed out already, in very heavy traffic, 2+1 is a worse setup than single carriageway. This is due to the fact that every 4 miles you will have 2 lanes converging into 1. This would be traffic chaos. This is reportedly another reason why the NRA has scraped the idea of using 2+1.

@a boyle wrote:

well a 2+1 with slip roads on and off would certainly be much safer than other roads. And building such a road would a lot cheaper.

The reason i started this was to at least get somebody thinking . a easy billion is being spent building the road to cork. what other things might that have paid for ?

if the train had a very large capacity and was substantially faster than the road , how many would be left driving ?

Duilding a dualcarriage way does not future proof much at all, as i have repeatedly tried to explain. What it does is fuel the city sprawl, generating useless commuter traffic. I am not trying to blame the people who do live in the outer suburbs. They are caught in the difficult position of having no options.

As a country one ought to be putting in place group transport before individual transport.

Now were are stuck with trying to entice a quarter of a million people into cork and dublin, because it will never be possible to service them adequately whereever they are, or at least at any reasonable cost.

IIRC, 2+1 is only used in Sweden in Europe. Take a look at Denmark which is of a similar size to Ireland. They have a sizeable motorway network coupled with a decent rail network.

I’m not saying that 2+1 shouldn’t be used on other routes, but Ireland must be the only country in Western Europe not to have a motorway between its 2 largest cities.

I think you are wrong.

There was no traffic at all from Dublin down to Portlaoise due to the quality of the roads.

If you had 2+1 you would have madness everywhere, especially where the road would reconverge into 1 lane. It would be complete madness on a day like yesterday. Just imagine the backlog caused by 2 lanes of slow traffic merging into 1 every 2 to 3 miles. Crazy. if their was all dual carriage way to Cork, there would be no heavy traffic whatsoever. none at all.

The cost of 2+1 isn’t that much cheaper.

BTW, there is only so much capacity on the Cork to Dublin line, with only a limited number of trains. You would need 10 times the amount of trains to make a dent in yesterdays traffic.

How do you
1. Deal with all the trains when they wouldn’t be in usage for 99% of the year and justify their cost and
2. Deal with the fact that their is only one line going into Dublin from kildare onwards. no way could it handle the train traffic.

Boyle, do you even Drive ? your arguements are bizarre.

Boyle, 2+1 isn’t good enough for Cork Dublin and recently has been shown that it will not even be good enough for the Cork to Galway western corridor.

In fact the NRA are now even reviewing the usage of 2+1 roads and their the possibility that 2+1 roads may not be used at all.

Cork to Dublin needs a full motorway. Not the the mish mash that we are getting, while the Dubs are getting motorways EVERYWHERE.

And the last thing this country needs is another roundabout.

You mightn’t, but I have to go through the Dunkettle Interchange each day. The roundabout is a joke. Traffic lights and roundabouts is a uniquely Irish phenomenon. If the NRA had done it right from day one, then the Tunnel roundabout would have been nothing but slip roads.

Same goes for the M50. the reason the M50 is blocked up is due to the poor usage of roundabouts in the M50’s interchanges. If the the road building authorities had any idea at all, the M50 would have been built with no roundabouts at its junctions.

Boyle, you also do realise that Irish Rail have announced that the Cork – Dublin trains will be travelling at 200k/h once all the track upgrades will be completed by around October ?

I also have to agree with Angry Rebel that there is no subsidy on the Aer Arann Cork Dublin flight route. Why would you actually want to go by train if you could fly for half the price ?