Roads that could be closed/downgraded

marmurr1916 wrote: »

This thread isn't intended to be just about national roads. It would be good if people could post up details of local roads that they feel could be closed to motorised traffic, effectively abandoned as roads and downgraded to paths/trails.

I would suggest O'Connell street in dublin.

Pardon my ignorance of this topic, but what would be the advantages of downgrading or closing roads?

I understand that many such roads have been superseded by new roads of much higher quality and greater transport efficiency, but presumably the lesser ones are still in use to some extent. After all, we have in Ireland what someone rather euphemistically described as a "distributed society".

On repeated trips to France I have noticed that smaller local roads are often extremely quiet. This means they are ideal for tourist use, for example, something we need very badly here right now.

Max Power1 wrote: »

I would suggest O'Connell street in dublin.

Not sure if that's irony, but in truth O'Connell Street was originally built to cater for pedestrians, horses, carriages and cows.

Jayuu wrote: »

I guess the advantage of downgrading (as opposed to closing) roads is that lower speed limits can then be applied to them. So if a road goes from a N route to an R route, the speed limit tends to be lowered to 80kph.

Given the widespread disregard for speed limits evident in this country (or on Boards at least) that would be a hard sell.

I can't see such a systematic regrading being done any time soon, but if such a programme were implemented then a nationwide review of speed limits would be well worth doing at the same time. I have been told that the default limit of 80 kph was applied to all regional/local non-residential roads for reasons of administrative simplicity, therefore the various roads authorities would have to be persuaded or forced to make any recommended changes.

MYOB wrote: »

Roads which just serve a few houses should be removed from the council's property and given to those who live on them to maintain; .

thats such nonsense. If you followed throuigh that thinking, all such roads would have gates on them and noone else would be allowed to use them. Isolated homes in the countryside were the norm before Cities and if people still want to live that way, its not up to some townies to say they cant.

corktina wrote: »

thats such nonsense. If you followed throuigh that thinking, all such roads would have gates on them and noone else would be allowed to use them. Isolated homes in the countryside were the norm before Cities and if people still want to live that way, its not up to some townies to say they cant.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Irish politics and public policy have been going for decades.

Isolated homes in the country was never the historical means of how Irish people lived. We lived in nucleated villages called clacháns, look at the ordance survey map from the 1830's/1840's when the population was close on 8 million. You don't see one-off houses you see clusters of clacháns. This was connected to the rundale system of agriculture which was the predominant system until after the famine.

Kinda. Rundale and Clachan was characteristic of the Western Coastal Fringe and some other parts in the 19th century, but other parts of the country (particularly those that were heavily Norman influenced) had a different tradition of formal villages and towns, with an increasing emphasis on a network of market towns from the 17th century onwards. They also had a tradition of a more formal manorial structure, and so clusters of habitation around the dwellings of 'strong' farmers were common too (due to the larger farm sizes). There was undoubtedly a break from the 1780s onwards though, as higher commodity prices incentivised the breakup of larger units and the parcelling out of land in some regions to smaller tenants - leading to the construction of smaller 'out farms' - this was limited to a small number of areas though.

All of which largely makes your point of course, until the 1880s, Irish people primarily lived in rural clusters, be they clachans, villages, farms or even more formal manorial arrangements. It took the advent of peasant ownership of land to cement the process of population dispersal, and it was really only in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s that urban generated rural housing became prevelant - bungalow blitz was a 1970s term after all. It was the car and cheap oil that made it possible (that and a permissive planning environment).

Without the advent of the private motorcar, none of this ultra low density sprawl could have happened.

The major problem with Irish infrastructure is that it's spread ridiculously thinly.

I know a few people who live in what is basically rural Co. Kildare who continuously tell me that I live "down the country", a short walk from the centre of Cork City and that they live in Dublin and they wonder why they can't get broadband even though they're basically in a small housing estate that's about 20 miles from civilisation (a small town!). Meanwhile, "down the country" in Cork City I can get 100mbit/s broadband without any difficulty and can stroll into work without any need for a car.

Clearly they're delusional, like the Irish planning system.

While the banks may have facilitated the bubble and collapse of our economy, the planning process and the way that people insist on spreading investment so thinly across the country is also a huge part of what happened here.

Instead of creating viable hubs, we spread housing and development in rural areas thinner and thinner. Every local authority and village / farm seemed to think it could just throw up houses and make money out of them.

This complete lack of reality is very much part of the collapse in our economy.

Who in their right mind thought that all of this rural housing that is now ghost estates would ever have a market? It never did and it's now all sitting in NAMA and rotting.

Most of these housing developments are too far from urban centres, they have no employment opportunities in reach of them and they will just never sell.

There are times when I really wonder about this country's ability to organise anything. We plan everything based on some kind of GAA-shirt / parish football team mentality and it is costing us a bloody fortune.

We seem to have no ability to think regionally or to consider that perhaps the traditional 26 counties are not even a viable model through which to deliver services. Most of them are far too low population and should be merged.

The whole country roads and everything else needs radical rationalisation.

• Rural housing issues.
• Sewage in lakes/rivers due one-off-housing & lack of control.
• Poor broadband roll out.
• Excessively huge road system.
• Duplicated/Quadruplicated/Sextuplicated schools - due to archaic religious patronage system that has become a sacred cow and parents who will not cooperate i.e. umpteen varieties of primary school serving single town for no logical reason other than snobbery / weird notions that boys and girls shouldn't mix and old-fashioned religious bigotry.
• Umpteen non-viable airports that are located in stupid places instead of several good quality hubs.
• Sporting organisations that won't cooporate so we have umpteen crappy stadia in most urban areas instead of a few decent metropolitan stadiums. I'm thinking of Cork and Galway in particular in that regard.
• Crazy hospital system e.g. having lots of small hospitals in Dublin and Cork instead of a couple of large medical campuses. Again, vested interests that will not budge.
• Crazy GP system where GPs won't cooperate and form decent medical centres. So, instead of going to a properly facilitated hub, you go to a guy/woman who basically has a pokey office and no equipment and charges you €50 for the privilege of a chat.
• Urban planning that just ignores its own rules and created unpleasant sprawl for no logical reason and in such a way that public transport can't function properly i.e. weird ribbon developments instead of actual dense urban build. If you look at Dublin from a satellite view, the actual urban development ceased in the 1950s and the new development's largely just ribbons along roads / motorways that has no depth.

I don't mean to moan about Ireland too much, it has some positives. However, we need to get our act together and start cooperating and not just bending to every single vested interest as it is just destroying the country.

What we are doing is simply not viable. We have to get realistic about planning and infrastructure or we will never get out of this financial hole that we've dug ourselves.

corktina wrote: »

you cant spread housing thinner and thinner unless you are actually knocking places down. Building houses in the countryside is increasing the density.:D

Not if you're building in the middle of no where instead of building in towns.

We can all be smart and pedantic!

The point is that Ireland's pattern of development from the 1970s onwards is largely economically unsustainable, even in the short to medium term due to lack of density.

Solair wrote: »

Not if you're building in the middle of no where instead of building in towns.

We can all be smart and pedantic!

The point is that Ireland's pattern of development from the 1970s onwards is largely economically unsustainable, even in the short to medium term due to lack of density.

just to be smart and pedantic...please note the

murphaph wrote: »

Agricultural access doesn't require metalled roads that are maintained at taxpayers' expense.

no? Try driving a Milk Tanker up one! Or an Artic delivering bulk feed....