Honey, They Shrunk The Bus

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The elected members of Dublin City Council should be wary of being influenced by computer-generated images of how College Green might look if proposed changes in traffic management are implemented.

The image [above]  in your newspaper (“City council says College Green changes need to be agreed by Christmas”, September 17th) gives a fish-eye view of College Green that exaggerates the open space, reduces the height of the buildings and shrinks the size of the buses.

This is a ploy that was widely used in the past by car manufacturers but is now mainly used by property developers. It should never be used as a basis for solving traffic problems.
Louis O’Flaherty,
Santry,
Dublin 9.

FIGHT!

College Green traffic management plan (Irish Times)

Pic: Dublin City Council

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28 thoughts on “Honey, They Shrunk The Bus

  1. joj

    You cant just close roads in the blind hope the cars will go away, and an extra luas line isn’t gonna solve it, think of all the commercial traffic, not just delivery but trades, its well over 50% of all road traffic.

    Dublin needs tunnels and overpasses, wide ones, there’s no east west artery which would actually take traffic off city centre streets

    1. meadowlark

      This!

      The transport system in this country is a joke and a byword for inefficiency. There needs to be a radical overhaul of the transport system and major investment coupled with intelligent design and forward thinking. We need an improved bus and rail system, and that’s just to begin with. Removing cars from the city centre is not enough, especially given the lack of infrastructure.

      1. Junkface

        The population boom in Dublin, plus the increase of car drivers means that the problems will only get worse until they create more tunnels, an underground rail system, or a skyrail system like in Bangkok or parts of Berlin. All of the rest of the current proposals are just faffing about, trying to look busy.

    2. Mr. T.

      Tunnel from Heuston area where N6 enters the city to east of Docklands area (north or south) with exits onto Pearse Street and Amiens Street. Continue Port Tunnel under the river and Sandymount to link up with N11.

  2. Spaghetti Hoop

    Much like landscape designer’s artists impression drawings of sweet canal walkways always feature young families enjoying the canal-side recreation and never the knacker-drinkers or the junkies.

    1. Talismania!

      A personal opinion, irrelevant to the conversation at hand – architects don’t lie with pretty pictures only in Dublin.

  3. doncolleone

    won’t somebody think of the taxi drivers? the racist, ex convict, tax dodging taxi drivers. They know what’s best for all of us. Just ask ’em, they are dying to tell you.

  4. pissedasanewt

    There was a proposal in the 60’s/70’s to bulldoze either side of the Liffey and put in a motorway through the heart of the city. If that had gone ahead, we would have lost much of the character of the city.

    Although we made one good decision and followed that up with a series of bad ones.. It could be beautiful along there, but we’ve got that derelict hotel that looks sh1t, the early house with people puking outsize at 7am in the morning, junkie hostel up near wood quay and of course the council offices on the same spot, plus any apartments built along there are kinda maybe supposed to blend in, but they don’t really.

    1. joj

      the motorway idea through liffey would have been poor, but a motorway where the royal canal is now from ashtown to docks was also proposed which would have been actually great. running paraell with the rail. Too much emphasis is put on the canal as an amenity, some parts are nice on the south side, but generally it would not be missed on the north

    2. St. John Smythe

      think that was a proposal in many cities in the 60/70s. It was the climate of the time. Was recently at an architectural history exhibition in Berlin where plans were shown for similar city-centre motorway schemes during that period.

    3. Cian

      The ‘Junkie hostel’ on Merchant’s Quay’s been there, in one capacity or another, since ’69. That predates most of the gentrification of that part of the city by some time. The Church that runs it (and which its attached to) has been there since 1232. It’s as much a Dublin institution as anything else in the city.

      And fundamentally, homeless shelters and drug treatment centres are needed in the city centre. Because that’s where the homeless, and those with drug issues are always going to be. It’d make fuck all sense to put all the homeless shelters in the middle of montrose like.

  5. ahjayzis

    Sure it’s there for all to see. The Central Bank building is in reality many metres taller than the pillars at Trinity’s front gate, yet in this FRAUD of an image they appear only 1.5 times the height?!!!!one!?!!!!11two?!

    Pedestrianising three out of six lanes of a street will give a LOT more open space, that’s not an illusion.

    1. ReproBertie

      Dublin needs the rest of the country to take up some of the slack and provide a few more jobs and a bit more industry outside of the Pale.

      1. ahjayzis

        We need to up our population density so we can afford the services of a city – same goes for developing towns like Cork and Galway into cities.

        Dublin’s a major global whatsit, Alpha whatever, it needs it’s own devolved spending powers so the concerns of Bridget in Ballygohowya who only visits the place every third December 8th don’t come into infrastructure decisions. Dublin’s paying for the rest of the country, rightly so, but that needs to be reflected in policy, with the money it keeps for itself spent by itself, accountable to it’s own electorate only – it needs more of a focus on building a modern, efficient, pleasant place to live and work rather than spreading resources out so thinly based on electoral concerns that we may as well not bother.

        Basically no one from Leitrim should enter consideration when Dublin is planning an underground train line – they’ve had their cash from us, let us get on with growing the place.

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