A simple solution to a complex problem

jetsonx

A simple solution to a complex problem....has anyone thought of this before.

Why can the government buy about 8 large plots of land around alll the traffic choke points around dublin and set up extensive park and ride facilities....so huge car parks in places like meath, wicklow and kildare.

Then a public / private partnership could then operate the buses into the city centre....

The buses would enable to get people into the city centre in half the time as
a car.

opinions ??

ballooba

Why not just get the bus in the first place then?

seamus

How many cars are we talking? What infrastructure is going to be able to handle (presumably) thousands of vehicles pouring in/out of these giant carparks all at once?

People won't park their car, only to be surrounded by thousands of other people all looking to get a bus. You'd need to have at least one bus there for every 50 people constantly at peak times to make it an attractive option.

The problem with removing a lot of cars from the road is that people's selfishness clouds their ability to see cause and effect. Imagine if half of the people stopped driving to work tomorrow, and for the next week. Everyone would see that the traffic now quite light and free-flowing, and everyone will hop back in their car, oblivious to the fact that this caused the inital gridlock.

There will *always* be traffic unless people have to pay to drive through an area.

strassenwolf

The plots of land wouldn't need to be so big if you were to use something like this:
http://www.inter-roller.com/Tower%20Park%20System.htm#tower

I'd heard about these. I think you drive your car in to a sort of box and get out and leave the box and pick up a ticket. The box gets lifted by pulleys and shifted around until it goes into an available slot in thebuilding. When you're ready to pick up your car, you feed back in your ticket, pay the money and your car is delivered to you. I think that's how it works.

ciaran76

Won't this just move the traffic problems somewhere else up the road

jetsonx

strastenwolf, the design for that was copied from Matchbox!

ciaran, yes but the problems will be away from the city at least!

cyclopath2001

jetsonx wrote:

Why can the government buy about 8 large plots of land around alll the traffic choke points around dublin and set up extensive park and ride facilities....so huge car parks in places like meath, wicklow and kildare.

Tackling the choke-points would be a good idea.

There's plenty of road space, it's just not being used efficiently. Smaller, more space-efficient vehicles, & no on-street parking would free up a lot of valuable road space.

But we also need to look at how the way people drive causes traffic jams.

Every evening, on the Customs House side of Busaras, the road is grid-locked by selfish drivers who enter and block junctions they cannot exit from. I easily filter through this stupid mess on my bike & find empty road beyond from Amiens Street to Fairview.

What's needed is some intelligent Garda intervention, no need to waste time writing tickets, just make the blockers go round the block as punishment. Why a handful of thoughtless drivers should be allowed cause a tailback inconveniencing hundreds of people is something I will never understand.

John_C

UCD have plans to dig up the front of the University to put in an underground car park. It seems to me like it would be a good idea for the government to put in an extra few hundred places for a park and ride. The busses all half-empty in belfield so no extra capacity would be needed there, it could be accessed straight off the dual-carrageway and is about a mile before the road goes from three lanes to two in Donnybrook.
The demand for the facility can be judged by the number of people who risk the clampers to use UCD as a park and ride at the moment.