Our roads are falling apart

magicbastarder

John_Rambo wrote: »

As pointed out, the one off housing phenomenon has had a very negative effect on the country. It's particularly bad for communities, bad for health, bad for the environment and the cost to service these houses is sucking up money that needs to be spent on public transport and infrastructure in villages, towns and cities.

myself and the wife were up in gweedore a couple of months ago. and we drove straight through it, abandoning our plans to stay there. it's awful; there's no such thing as going for a meal, then wandering to a pub, and then back to a hotel. that would imply some form of nucleation. it's the most incredibly dispersed (but still heavily populated) landscape i've ever seen. the place is absolutely ruined.

if you do want to stay up in that end of the world, you can stay in a barn which serves as the pub/hotel/restaurant, and if you want to go for a pint elsewhere, you can travel the mile and a half up the road to the next pub/hotel/restaurant.

granted, we arrived just as the off season was beginning, but we wouldn't have stayed anyway. we drove south to ardara, which is a proper village.

murphaph

magicbastarder wrote: »

myself and the wife were up in gweedore a couple of months ago. and we drove straight through it, abandoning our plans to stay there. it's awful; there's no such thing as going for a meal, then wandering to a pub, and then back to a hotel. that would imply some form of nucleation. it's the most incredibly dispersed (but still heavily populated) landscape i've ever seen. the place is absolutely ruined.

if you do want to stay up in that end of the world, you can stay in a barn which serves as the pub/hotel/restaurant, and if you want to go for a pint elsewhere, you can travel the mile and a half up the road to the next pub/hotel/restaurant.

granted, we arrived just as the off season was beginning, but we wouldn't have stayed anyway. we drove south to ardara, which is a proper village.

Yeah I was up that part of the world for the first time in August. Will never go back...totally suburbanised landscape. They're ruined the greatest asset they had.

PCeeeee

ezra_pound wrote: »

Motor tax along with vrt and other motoring taxes does not come anywhere near providing funding for maintaining roads.

The journal reports here that motor tax brought in €1.159 billion in 2014 up by €41 million (3.65%) on 2013 (€1.118 billion).

http://www.thejournal.ie/how-much-does-the-government-make-from-motor-tax-2168197-Jun2015/

This IT article details the budget for 'for the maintenance and improvement of our national, regional and local roads' for 2014 as being €598 million.

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/transport-and-tourism/spending-on-public-transport-roads-in-budget-largely-unchanged-1.1963186

PCeeeee

murphaph wrote: »

If the true cost of infrastructure provision to one off properties was actually levied, very few would get built.

Infrastructure in terms of what exactly? Could you list the items you mean?

murphaph

PCeeeee wrote: »

Infrastructure in terms of what exactly? Could you list the items you mean?

Off the top of my head:
-Roads
-Electricity
-Telephone
-Schools (Ireland has hundreds of tiny schools because of our dispersed population)

Others can add to the list as they like.

magicbastarder

was it here i read that footpaths cost half a million per kilometre to resurface, and minor roads a million per kilometre?
so if a 1km road serves ten houses, that's 100k per household per resurfacing.

PCeeeee

murphaph wrote: »

Off the top of my head:
-Roads
-Electricity
-Telephone
-Schools (Ireland has hundreds of tiny schools because of our dispersed population)

Others can add to the list as they like.

Thanks Murph I wasn't sure what you meant. However if you are referring to things like schools I will leave it there. I'm afraid that we are ideologically too far apart.

I am, I should admit, a rural dweller. Good luck with yere quest to herd us all into the cities. That should help with road maintenance and isn't that the main thing....

murphaph

I suspect those figures aren't a million miles from reality.

murphaph

PCeeeee wrote: »

Thanks Murph I wasn't sure what you meant. However if you are referring to things like schools I will leave it there. I'm afraid that we are ideologically too far apart.

I am, I should admit, a rural dweller. Good luck with yere quest to herd us all into the cities. That should help with road maintenance and isn't that the main thing....

You're doing what you guys always do. You're equating me saying one off housing is unsustainable with some sort of plea for a mass repopulation to the cities.

Nothing could be further from my mind. I have no qualms about saying that one off housing outside town and village boundaries should be banned as it is in Germany and Great Britain. I however know that this would actually strengthen rural communities as villages and hamlets could once again flourish with life injected back into them.

Not building one off properties does not mean no rural dwellers. It means no more one off dwellers. Please don't confuse rural with one off.

mfceiling

I don't know if anyone here has driven along terenure road West especially from the garda station and past the lovely food Co. The road is in bits...and I mean in bits. Lumps and bumps and chunks out of it. I swear that the back roads in beirut are in better shape. Talking to the lad at the doe centre recently and he was telling me that the amount of vehicles with broken springs, ball joints and track rod ends are increasing steadily. He told me it's the state of the roads...plain and simple.

magicbastarder

murphaph wrote: »

Not building one off properties does not mean no rural dwellers. It means no more one off dwellers. Please don't confuse rural with one off.

here's a statistic which would be fun to see - the number of ride-on mowers per capita in ireland compared with other european countries.

i'm constantly bemused by irish people who want to live on their half acre of land, but won't contemplate much beyond a lawn for their half acre, because other options are too labour intensive.

HIB

murphaph wrote: »

Off the top of my head:
-Roads
-Electricity
-Telephone
-Schools (Ireland has hundreds of tiny schools because of our dispersed population)

Others can add to the list as they like.

Telephone is not a publicly provided service anymore so theres no cost to the public coffer in providing that.

As for ESB, they do charge quite handsomely for connecting rural houses to the network so I'd say ita possible they're even profiting from one off housing.

In the issue of roads. I imagine the planning contributions must cover a lot of that cost. I know people who paid in the regin of 10k...that's a lot of tarmac.

I'd agree with you on the decline of rural villages. That is a crying shame. But if they want people to live in villages, they're going to have to offer them something that's attractive. 3 bed terraced houses in a crummy architecturally alien housing estate dumped on the outskirts of a village, with back gardens the size of a matchbox, are not remotely attractive for people born and bred in the countryside.

magicbastarder

HIB wrote: »

In the issue of roads. I imagine the planning contributions must cover a lot of that cost. I know people who paid in the regin of 10k...that's a lot of tarmac.

based on this link:
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwim-ovM7YPKAhXBOQ8KHUzrCU0QFggmMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.manchester.gov.uk%2Fdownload%2Fmeetings%2Fid%2F13572%2F6_-_maintenance_of_roads_and_pavements&usg=AFQjCNEXgmRGRZSNn_CVbL0gI1Rb69EyOQ&bvm=bv.110151844,d.ZWU

it says the cost in the UK (specifically, manchester) for resurfacing a road is £16/sqm. let's say €25/sqm. a 4 m wide road would then cost €100,000 per km to resurface, so your friend's contribution would cover resurfacing 100m. there's obviously loads of caveats with that calculation, but possibly a ballpark figure to use.

magicbastarder

Cllr O'Meara said part of the problem is the Council doesn't have enough funding. 'Per year we only have €1.8 million to repair roads from here to Newport. That is a huge amount of road and the funding is woefully inadequate. The ten kilometre stretch of the Coolross road would cost €800,000 alone to resurface. The Council's roads budget has been cut by €10 million during the last five years.
...
The Chairman said he recently drove the 25 kms of bad road with a roads engineer, and the engineer estimated it would cost €700,000 to resurface the roads.

http://www.midlandtribune.ie/articles/news/50211/long-neglected-rathcabbin-community-demands-action-on-appalling-roads/
my emphasis.

HIB

magicbastarder wrote: »

based on this link:
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwim-ovM7YPKAhXBOQ8KHUzrCU0QFggmMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.manchester.gov.uk%2Fdownload%2Fmeetings%2Fid%2F13572%2F6_-_maintenance_of_roads_and_pavements&usg=AFQjCNEXgmRGRZSNn_CVbL0gI1Rb69EyOQ&bvm=bv.110151844,d.ZWU

it says the cost in the UK (specifically, manchester) for resurfacing a road is £16/sqm. let's say €25/sqm. a 4 m wide road would then cost €100,000 per km to resurface, so your friend's contribution would cover resurfacing 100m. there's obviously loads of caveats with that calculation, but possibly a ballpark figure to use.

Your calculations would make sense if the council did actually fully resurface roads with one off houses. But in my experience they don't. The rural road I live on has never been resurfaced fully. Occasionally they fill the potholes. That's it. To be fair therea realy no need for it. Too little traffic. Filling the potholes is all thats needed. And 10k covers a heck of a lot of pothole filling.

murphaph

HIB wrote: »

Telephone is not a publicly provided service anymore so theres no cost to the public coffer in providing that.

Eir has a USO to comply with. They are obliged to provide telephone service to all these one off houses. The true cost is not passed on to the end user. It is spread among all the other customers. That's the reality.

HIB wrote: »

As for ESB, they do charge quite handsomely for connecting rural houses to the network so I'd say ita possible they're even profiting from one off housing.

The handsome charge is nowhere near the real cost. There is no profit in it for them. The costs, once again, are covered by other customers.

HIB wrote: »

In the issue of roads. I imagine the planning contributions must cover a lot of that cost. I know people who paid in the regin of 10k...that's a lot of tarmac.

10k comes nowhere near covering the costs of providing roads to a one off house. It's not a lot of tarmac at all. The costs of providing these local roads, which provide no function to anyone except those living along them, is borne by others.

HIB wrote: »

I'd agree with you on the decline of rural villages. That is a crying shame. But if they want people to live in villages, they're going to have to offer them something that's attractive. 3 bed terraced houses in a crummy architecturally alien housing estate dumped on the outskirts of a village, with back gardens the size of a matchbox, are not remotely attractive for people born and bred in the countryside.

People are free to buy sites inside village boundaries. They buy the ones outside because they are substantially cheaper because the general taxpayer funds the cost of the infrastructure. I do believe that a certain proportion of zoned lands should be reserved for one off development. This hardly ever happens in Ireland, but is the norm here in Germany where "housing estates" are much less common.

As for "architecturally alien", well, your average Irish 1960's bungalow or 2000's McMansion is hardly in keeping with its surroundings now is it? Outskirts of a village (say 10 mins walk) is sustainable development as the local school, shop and pub are reachable on foot. 1km out of the village on a road with no footpath and the development is no longer sustainable. That's the reality Ireland has chosen to ignore.

murphaph

HIB wrote: »

Your calculations would make sense if the council did actually fully resurface roads with one off houses. But in my experience they don't. The rural road I live on has never been resurfaced fully. Occasionally they fill the potholes. That's it. To be fair therea realy no need for it. Too little traffic. Filling the potholes is all thats needed. And 10k covers a heck of a lot of pothole filling.

Roads do get resurfaced and when they do the price of the entire house is spent doing it, but the urban taxpayer is covering it. That's the reality or rural one off housing. It's an uncomfortable reality for many, but reality it is.

deathtocaptcha

this is what our roads need to be made of:

Del2005

HIB wrote: »

Telephone is not a publicly provided service anymore so theres no cost to the public coffer in providing that.

As for ESB, they do charge quite handsomely for connecting rural houses to the network so I'd say ita possible they're even profiting from one off housing.

In the issue of roads. I imagine the planning contributions must cover a lot of that cost. I know people who paid in the regin of 10k...that's a lot of tarmac.

I'd agree with you on the decline of rural villages. That is a crying shame. But if they want people to live in villages, they're going to have to offer them something that's attractive. 3 bed terraced houses in a crummy architecturally alien housing estate dumped on the outskirts of a village, with back gardens the size of a matchbox, are not remotely attractive for people born and bred in the countryside.

How much where the people you know who paid the €10k levy charged for the concrete/tarmac around their home? Doubt that they had much change from €10k.

frozenfrozen

How much would roads cost if there weren't 15 lads standing around scratching their hole for half the working day? Serious question. Imagine how much money would be saved if they were any way efficient with their time or actually did a bit of planning. Look at buttevant. They've resurfaced that street how many times and it's still F**KED. Imagine how much that cost each and every time they had those geniuses standing around with their tape measure pretending they had a clue what they were doing.

Just like every other facet of Ireland, money is pissed out of every orifice at every step of the way. No doubt probably only 10% of the money spent on roads actually goes to tarmac. and 60% goes to feckless gomes who destroy the road by getting the drainage wrong.

On the road just outside my house which is fairly rural, about 300 houses along the whole stretch, 15 minutes outside of Limerick. There are humongous potholes which every couple of months just get a couple of buckets of gravel thrown into them by the council. I'd say the cost of them doing their awful maintenance over the past number of years would probably have paid for the road to just be redone completely, a couple of times over at this stage. That's probably happening on every single rural road in the country.

Could someone give an example of a 'one off house' that we can all refer to from here on because it seems some posters are equating anything outside of Dublin city as being a leech on their tax money.

Charles Babbage

PCeeeee wrote: »

Good Lord. What are you proposing? A mass relocation of those who can't pay to the cities. Removing them from their homes, their communities, their families? These people are from the countryside by and large. Born and raised there. They are people not some inconvenient units to be moved around because their way of live is now deemed too expensive.

Also how far would you propose that an individual be allowed to commute to work? Should there be a cutoff point?

Nicolae Ceaușescu had a similar policy, for which his people thanked him appropriately.

John_Rambo

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Nicolae Ceaușescu had a similar policy, for which his people thanked him appropriately.

Except nobody on this thread suggested anything of the sort.

murphaph

John_Rambo wrote: »

Except nobody on this thread suggested anything of the sort.

Indeed. Not a _single_ contributor has suggested anybody be forcibly moved anywhere, yet infamous dictators are brought into the discussion. It beggars belief.

The most anyone (me included) has called for is a banning of further one off development of the countryside, something several western European countries did decades ago...but Ireland is different of course and all those countries are wrong and one off rural housing as practiced in Ireland is right.

I would then like to see a gradual introduction of passing the true cost of roads maintenance on to the residents who benefit from it. Perhaps an amnesty for all existing home owners, with the start of the charges being triggered by a property sale.This would devalue one off housing stock for sure, but this would be correct as the stock is only worth the currently inflated price because everyone else picks up the tab for the provided infrastructure, an unfair situation to begin with.

However, I accept that planning was so lax, that a scale, gradually tapering up to 100% of the true costs over several decades would be more appropriate than a short sharp shock to current owners of such properties.

magicbastarder

murphaph wrote: »

I would then like to see a gradual introduction of passing the true cost of roads maintenance on to the residents who benefit from it.

i am very wary of the notion that (non-destructive) use of public services should be charged to the users; there are lots of examples i could give where important (and generally obvious) public services are provided which are clearly unaffordable to the users. much of the damage has been done though - if a council has allowed several new builds on a public road which basically just services those houses, the council are responsible for allowing the builds, knowing the maintenance costs to themselves.

marmurr1916

eezipc wrote: »

You have got the whole thing backwards my friend. Most people who live in the country don't want to work in the city. They work in the city because they have no choice. So maybe people who live in the country should be compensated for having to drive to the cities for work....

If there are little or no employment opportunities in rural areas, we should discourage people from living in those areas.

If people who were considering choosing to live in rural areas (e.g. my sister and her husband, neither of whom are from the area they chose to live in) were required to pay higher charges and/or taxes to reflect the higher cost of providing services and infrastructure they might choose differently.

marmurr1916

PCeeeee wrote: »

Good Lord. What are you proposing? A mass relocation of those who can't pay to the cities. Removing them from their homes, their communities, their families? These people are from the countryside by and large. Born and raised there. They are people not some inconvenient units to be moved around because their way of live is now deemed too expensive.

Also how far would you propose that an individual be allowed to commute to work? Should there be a cutoff point?

Hysterical gibberish doesn't help your argument. I didn't propose any mass relocation. Anyone would be free to live in rural areas so long as they were prepared to pay for it. Neither my sister nor her husband have any connection with the rural area they chose to live in. They previously lived in a small town, only a few miles from where they live now, both having moved to the small town from other locations.

As I said, about 25% of the population of Ireland has chosen to live in rural areas without the need to do so. If you chose to live in a location which results in extra harm to the environment and costs more money to provide services and infrastructure to than alternative locations, you shouldn't get other people to subsidise your lifestyle choices.

Why should people who live more sustainably have to pay higher taxes and higher bills than they would otherwise have to pay because somebody prefers to live in a house in the countryside rather than one in a small village?

Living in a small village is hardly the same as living in inner-city Dublin or suburban Cork city or any large urban environment.

But it's significantly more sustainable than living out in the middle of nowhere, several kilometres drive from the nearest shops and other services.

Rural living for the majority was fine when most people in rural Ireland actually worked in rural occupations and used considerably less resources than they do now.

If Ireland wants to make a genuine contribution to tackling global climate change, the results of which are now clearly evident across Ireland in the form of destructive storms and floods, then Irish people need to start realising that environmentally unsustainable ways of living need to change and change fast.

marmurr1916

magicbastarder wrote: »

i am very wary of the notion that (non-destructive) use of public services should be charged to the users; there are lots of examples i could give where important (and generally obvious) public services are provided which are clearly unaffordable to the users. much of the damage has been done though - if a council has allowed several new builds on a public road which basically just services those houses, the council are responsible for allowing the builds, knowing the maintenance costs to themselves.

Whatever other posters may have said, I haven't called for the full cost of public services and utilities to be charged to users. I have called for choose to live in areas where the cost of providing those services and utilities is significantly higher to pay extra contributions towards them.

This could be done through a mixture of higher LPT charges for houses in rural areas, higher rates for commercial premises in rural areas, and special contributions to councils for road maintenance etc.

In return, the roads and other infrastructure will be maintained to legally mandated minimum standards. If the minimum standards aren't met, people get a refund of the extra LPT (or rates) and special contributions plus 10% - an incentive for councils to meet the minimum standards and not just use the extra money as a cash cow.

questionmark?

I grew up in a rural area, when I was a wee lad I remember there was always one council worker that would spend his time maintaining the roads as in, cutting back the vegetation near cross roads and road signs, clearing the drains, digging inlets to let the water off the road etc... nowadays none of that is done. Every road in rural areas all you see is the water running down the road as there is no inlets for the water to run off and the drains are no more as they are completely blocked, the result is more water on the road and potholes everywhere. If you see the council doing something they are in big groups standing around doing nothing and then back to the depot for tea and then again for lunch.

marmurr1916

Charles Babbage wrote: »

People who live in the country might be happy to pay for these things if they did not have to subsidise council houses in central Dublin, for instance.

The total amount of taxes and other state income collected in Dublin is significantly more than the total amount of state spending in Dublin.

Cork and Limerick cities also provide more to the state in taxes than the state spends on them.

There is no subsidy whatsoever from rural areas of Ireland to urban areas - the opposite is the case.

For example, in 2009, average household income in Co. Donegal would have been over €4,300 per year lower without subsidies from Dublin.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=78277405&postcount=46

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=78277405#post78277405

marmurr1916

magicbastarder wrote: »

myself and the wife were up in gweedore a couple of months ago. and we drove straight through it, abandoning our plans to stay there. it's awful; there's no such thing as going for a meal, then wandering to a pub, and then back to a hotel. that would imply some form of nucleation. it's the most incredibly dispersed (but still heavily populated) landscape i've ever seen. the place is absolutely ruined.

if you do want to stay up in that end of the world, you can stay in a barn which serves as the pub/hotel/restaurant, and if you want to go for a pint elsewhere, you can travel the mile and a half up the road to the next pub/hotel/restaurant.

granted, we arrived just as the off season was beginning, but we wouldn't have stayed anyway. we drove south to ardara, which is a proper village.

Here's the sprawling mess of parts of Co. Donegal in all its appallingly ugly 'glory'.



Imagine how beautiful that photograph would be if there was a compact, nucleated village in the middle, instead of the sprawling mess of ugliness there in reality.