Fantasy idea - Cork bus-station

Chris_533976

Ok this is something I've been thinking about for a while.

Corks bus-station is located about 200m from Patricks Street, along the quays by the river. The bus station is big enough for the Intercity fleet, but the commuter fleet frequently spills everywhere along the quays and sits there for ages. The station was upgraded recently, and looks fairly reasonable now. Now this isnt to be a thread slamming Corks bus service, it is chronic and needs to be fixed but that can be for another thread.

The area around Corks train station (Kent) is part of the Docklands development, a massive development to be built once the wrangling and red-tape have been overcome. Therefore, there is currently a huge amount of unused land around the train station.

Heres my idea.

I've seen in Galway how well a bus station works right nextdoor to a train station. How about using this opportunity to move Corks bus station and put it right next to Kent Railway station. Integrate the two sites together during the planned (ha) Kent Station upgrade and you have a better arrangement, in my opinion.

Then this setup can easily be served by some future Cork Luas. All intercity buses could use the new site, and all commuter buses could just be moved to the new site without a huge amount of effort. Frequencies could be increased to bring people to the centre of Cork more often and since all services went to the old bus station location anyway, everyone could get into the city without much disruption.

So what do you all think? Is this a stupid idea or would it be an excellent opportunity to integrate Corks transport?? Lets face it, the railway station is isolated at the moment and walking into town is the only sensible option. How about making Corks transport integrated and useful??

invincibleirish

if im not mistaken,wasnt this idea mooted when the original plans for the redevelopment of kent station happened a few years ago?

corktina

in my view the bus station is too far from the city centre as it is....

MLM

The original plans were to move the bus station to where the Eglinton Street tower is now, but were shot down as people said it was too far from the city centre. The funny thing is that when the docklands is finished, this site will be in the middle of an expanded city centre, but people coudn't see that far ahead (or didn't want to wait 20 years or more). The best thing for Cork would be to have a separate transport authority for the Metropoitan area which would oversee all commuter routes, be it bus, train, LUAS, or water bus, providing an integrated urban transport network. Inter city or regional bus services could then be left to their own devices under Bus Eireann at the existing bus station.

bk

MLM wrote:

The original plans were to move the bus station to where the Eglinton Street tower is now, but were shot down as people said it was too far from the city centre. The funny thing is that when the docklands is finished, this site will be in the middle of an expanded city centre, but people coudn't see that far ahead (or didn't want to wait 20 years or more).

The problem is that the docklands development is still many years away and in the meant time you would have a bus station in the middle of nowhere.

Also just because the docklands will be developed, doesn't mean that it will be the focal point of the city. The docks and IFSC in Dublin, while being heavily developed now, still hasn't shifted the focal point of Dublin city away from O'Connell St.