Morning traffic solution?

Confucius say wrote: »

Just discussing this at work. There are currently pretty much no traffic problems on any of our commuter routes in the mornings. I come in from north side Dublin to City centre by bicycle and some of us commute from as far as navan and Louth.

It's all down to schools being off.

Shouldn't we look at this closely and try and find a solution to parents blocking up the roads every morning? Is there any other way to get kids to school? I walked or took the bus.

If the traffic could stay how it is we would have far less stressful lives!

Victor wrote: »

There are Multiple factors.

* Aside from schools and colleges being off, quite a few parents also take the summer off to mind those children.
* The weather is better - there is less desire to be cosseted from door to door leading to more people willing to use public transport, walk or cycle - not every day, but at least some days.
* Less weather-related traffic disruption.
* More people are on holidays.
* Some factories, especially chemical / pharmaceutical plants will have maintenance shut-downs
* Builders' holidays.
* Longer day light hours - this means that there is less emphasis on getting certain tasks done within a short working day.
* Longer evenings - people are more willing to engage in an after-work leisure activity, without going home first.

The primary factor is simply the reality that there isn't a large cohort of people driving their children to school.

I have great trouble accepting that "quite a few parents also take the summer off to mind those children". TTBOMK the only people who can "take the summer off" are teachers and parents working full-time in the home, ie the same ones who cause the traffic congestion during the school term.

Climate and day-length explain very little of the variation. For example, the roads in Galway are clogged with school traffic regardless of the weather, and you can almost guarantee that there will be traffic chaos again in August sunshine when the annual book/uniform buying frenzy takes place.

In Galway the secondary teachers one-day strikes resulted in free-flow conditions, effectively ruling out other factors (such as builders' holidays, weather, day length etc).

School-related traffic congestion can be sorted out by the provision of school buses, school travel plans and active traffic management by the relevant aithorities. Currently nobody in power has the slightest interest in looking at such matters, and they are quite content to let the chaos continue so that they don't have to get off their arses and plan things differently.

In Galway the preferred "solution" is a "bypass", the main purpose of which is to avoid the need for proper planning and provision of public transport.

Buy a motorbike/scooter. Problem solved. Why do people feel like they need a five seat car to drive to work. Unless you are car pooling YOU are part of the problem.

Alter_Ego wrote: »

There are several thing that could be done:

1. Better public transport, including subway. There are cities smaller than Dublin with functional subways, e.g. Lisbon

Lisbon is absolutely not smaller than Dublin.
The official city is calculated smaller because of the administrative boundary. It has a metro population of 2.8 million and is much more densely built due to apartment vs house dwelling.

There are smaller cities with Metros though : Bilbao for example.

The constant issue in Ireland with public transport is that once you get away from City centres there's scatter development and you end up needing park and ride to get people onto systems as stations would be too far away from most homes of you followed a Spanish pattern.

We've made a political and cultural choice to put spread out, low density housing as our lifestyle priority.

That's largely why we struggle with things like public transport but also broadband and other capital intensive infrastructure that needs density of population to make it cost effective.

Our broadband issues for example are only resolving because cheaper, decentralised technology is available now. Eircom is using street cabinets that only need to have 100 homes near by to make them commercially viable.

In the past they needed an exchange with thousands

We also tend to scatter or schools to the four winds and we still segregate a lot of them by gender, especially in urban areas. That means more parents making multiple trips if they've boys and girls.

Then you've religious issues that mean a % of parents can't access local schools due to not having baptismal certificates so, you've long drives to alternative schools

Nobody thinks about these things as drains on the economy or evironmentally damagining.

Big picture and far sighted planning isn't something Ireland does well.

I mean how the hell does a country this wet manage to run out of water in a relatively small metropolitan area like Dublin? Answer : inability to plan, parochialism and rapid development.