Cycling/Walking around the city

Camilo Tight Shrew wrote: »

You could drive a car on the footpath past them trees, what obstruction are they causing. Bah humbug is right!

In Galway if there is room on the footpath for a car, whether parked or in motion, then by definition there is no obstruction.

There's more to street lighting (and lighting types) than meets the eye.

I'll try to post more on this later.

As an example of the way walking is systematically restricted in some areas of the city, it took me 3.5 minutes to cross the road at Moneenageisha Cross last week. The physical distance is just over 20 metres, but crossing in three stages, conscientiously waiting for the Green Man, took an absurdly long time. Meanwhile motorised traffic was whizzing through the junction in all directions, with only short wait times.

They often close off Cross Street on busy pedestrian days / nights with a barrier that they swing closed down at Flood Street. I suppose they'd need that extra sign to stop any cars already on St. Augustine Street from going across Cross Street.

Deleted User wrote: »

You're one awful hard man to please.

First the RAB's are dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, they get replaced and now include measures specifically to make the junctions safer for cyclists and pedestrians.

Now you complain about having to wait just over a minute each to go through 3 junction crossings safely.

I class myself as a pedestrian, cyclist and motorist, in that order, in relation to road usage and road safety and I truly am baffled by your objections sometimes. It's like nothing is ever good enough

The Design Manual for Urban Roads & Streets agrees with me (though I do not agree with all of it).

For example, it deprecates staged/staggered crossings for pedestrians, which it acknowledges are designed for the convenience of motorised traffic.

Another instance of such pedestrian-hostile infrastructure is on the Seamus Quirke Road. Have a look there some morning or afternoon when children are trying to walk to or from school...

Corinthian wrote: »

So some fool didn't configure the traffic lights properly... and now you're being oppressed. Yes, it's annoying and should be fixed, but it's not the boot of the motor industry moguls on the neck of the pedestrian proletariat.

We could choose to believe that traffic signal timings have been set wrongly by mistake, and so pedestrians (and perhaps cyclists) are being held up by accident and not by design.

But what about the junction layout? Did the engineers inadvertently create a junction that requires pedestrians to cross a short stretch of road in multiple stages? And did they apply similar designs in numerous other locations by mistake?

We don't have to posit a conspiracy theory, or introduce spurious references to "motor industry moguls", to point out that transport policies and engineering practices have for decades been oriented towards prioritising the mobility of private motor vehicles over the access needs of pedestrians, cyclists and bus users.

This is recognised in current policy, which seeks to redress the balance. From the Design Manual for Urban Roads and Streets:

A paper given at a ‘Streets for Living’ Conference in Dublin in 1976 stated:

‘We are expecting from our human settlements the characteristics of streets in order to humanise them, particularly in our residential areas, and yet we have set our designers the task of designing and building and indeed maintaining what are undoubtedly roads … traffic taken in isolation can be a totally destructive force in the formation of human settlements.’

The above has remained more accurate than ever, but given the extent to which policy and legal frameworks have advanced in recent years, it is now possible to achieve change.

The Smarter Travel policy (2009) says that it will "ensure that urban walking networks are strengthened by increasing opportunities for walking and removing constraints as part of planning for more attractive public realms" such as by "reprioritising traffic signals to favour pedestrians instead of vehicles, reducing waiting times and crossing distances at junctions."

Smarter Travel also says that

Where staggered/staged crossings currently exist they should be removed as part of any major upgrade works. This should include realignment works to slow vehicle movements, such as reduced corner radii and/or carriageway narrowing.

These policies recognise that traffic signals have been systematically configured to favour motor vehicles, but unfortunately they do not guarantee that local authority roads engineers design new junction layouts accordingly.

Old habits die hard, and it is notoriously difficult to change the direction of decades of engineering practices which have been based not just on the supposed inevitability but also on the desirability of car-based personal mobility. The way road projects are implemented may indicate a dominant culture rather than a dastardly conspiracy.

I came across a policy example recently. National policy is to reduce car dependence as well as CO2 emissions from the transport sector. The ESRI has pointed out that emissions from private cars will be well above the policy target by 2020. Meanwhile the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council sees increasing car sales as A Good Thing, as if tax policy and environmental policy had nothing to do with each other:

Excise is forecast to grow 3.2 per cent, on the back of solid consumption growth and a rebounding car market.

Roughly 3 per cent of annual consumption relates to the purchase of private transport equipment. Having contracted for several years, newly licensed private cars expanded by 30 per cent in the first eight months of 2014. An analysis of the determinants of vehicle purchases can help to shed light on whether or not car sales are likely to continue to improve in the coming years.

That's "improve" and not merely "increase" or "grow".

It's evident that private car transport still dominates not just the physical environment but also the policy-makers' minds. And when road engineers make pedestrians cross three times instead of just once, they're not doing it by mistake.