Reworking Dublin's quays

Hilly Bill wrote: »

Grafton street, Mary street, Henry street, Temple Bar. Do you want O'Connell street for pedestrians and bikes only as well? You have bike lanes and pavements, what more do you want? What about the quality of life for the people who lives on the routes that the cars will be diverted through? Extra cars being diverted passed their houses just to please some cyclists and pedestrians who only care about themselves at the best of times.

Yes actually, and while we're at it, pedestrianise Westmoreland and D'Olier Streets and College Green, and push through congestion charges while we're at it. Imagine our very own Las Ramblas on O'Connell Street, filled with bustling coffee and food stands and weekend markets. Imagine Grand Place style events like concerts and weekend festivals taking place on College Green. Instead years of bad planning has left us with a traffic clogged, fume filled dump of a main thoroughfare, it honestly pains me as a proud Dub to call it a dump, but that's what it is.

The part where you say cyclists only care about themselves really irks me, pray tell, what do the people who drive SUVs with no passengers around Dublin care about??

Hilly Bill wrote: »

Trying to avoid cyclists breaking lights and swerving in and out of traffic and pedestrians ignoring those little red men at crossings.

You have your own Las Ramblas, its called Grafton street. Did you miss the recent events on college green?

Cyclists are traffic.

It's called weaving, by the way, and it's often necessary because the roads are clogged with large numbers of motionless or slow-moving motorised vehicles, many of them carrying a single occupant.

Grafton Street is a piddly little pedestrian area, by European standards.

400m of Grafton Street doesn't compare well to 1.2 km of La Rambla, in my opinion.

Hilly Bill wrote: »

What does?

You say extra cars dis-improves peoples quality of life. Therefore less cars improves it.

That first proposal linked previous looks like a disaster. I'm all for cycling lanes on the quays but diverting traffic off the quays and all the way up to Parnell St so it avoids crossing any part of O'Connell Street and then back down Marlborough St or similar to get back down to the river sounds like madness, especially given the volumes of traffic that go down the quays.

It makes sense in any traffic plan that car traffic should flow move as fast as is possible (currently an average of 15kph in the CC). For the flow to be maintained it is important that it continues 'as the crow flies' in order to maintain the already low speed of city center movement. But instead of going straight all the way down the north quays the new route for cars turns to the left four times and turns right 5 times. So now we have 9 extra slow manouvres that cars and delivery trucks would have to make than is currently the case right now. That's 9 extra manovres that tens of thousands of vehicles would have to do instead of just driving in a straight line. I would think that sure a move would cause traffic chaos which would reverberate across the city in no-time. The main reason that the quays work at the moment is that the traffic is reasonably free flowing, if there are 9 turns introduced to the route then it will slow down considerably from an already slow 15kph.

The main problem with cycle lanes along the quays is that there are sections that are so narrow there just isn't the space for two traffic lanes AND a cycle lane. So for cycle lanes to be installed one of the two other main commuting groups (motorists and bus users) are going to have to lose out.

The only other solution I can think of is to build a boardwalk on the south quays running continuously from O'Connell Bridge all the way to Hueston Station. Then dedicate the boardwalk to cyclists only and have two way cycle traffic upon it. The only problem I could see with this is that there are sections where cyclists would have to come off the boardwalk and back onto it every 300 meters as there are bridges. When city bound cycle traffic gets to the end of the Boardwalk at O'Connel Bridge they would obviously have to dismount and walk across as pedestrian crossing before re-mounting, a hassle obviously but at the same time they will have navigated the entire length of the quays without coming in a whiskers breath of a bus, car or truck so not a bad result. Although not perfect it could work and it would be a lot safer than the current situation. Whatever is done it will not be perfect for some group so compromises are going to have to be made- there just isn't enough space on parts of the quays to not compromise.

Hilly Bill wrote: »

Of course, so the answer would be to leave it alone and not divert traffic from parts of the city centre and add to the traffic on smaller roads .

The answer is to remove all traffic...

Hilly Bill wrote: »

Ye, i can really see that one working.

They closed the main road in the park for months it usually has 20,000 cars a day. The closed Henry Street, they closed Grafton Street.

BostonB wrote: »

I don't get why they didn't provide cycle tracks when they were building the luas tracks either.

I don't know that it would be possible to find a good route for cycle tracks around Luas stops that would keep cyclists seperated from Luas users.

BostonB wrote: »

Most of it is wide enough for a cycle track. Theres only a couple of choke points.

It's not a question of width, it's a design issue. How do you route a cycle path around a Luas stop with loads of pedestrians. In front of the peds, or behind them (with loads of peds crossing the cycle path) or what?