Our roads are falling apart

BoatMad

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Hopefully we'll also see such things as cycle lanes and bus routes funded by those who use them and not the rest of us, to say nothing of methadone clinics and the like.

a reductio ad absurdum argument . Ireland has an inordinate amount of bye roads, a legacy of dispersal patterns and a far greater population that was mainly rural based

You have three choices,

dramatically increase the rural population, by large scale one off housing , such that the tax base expands

shut roads

transfer the obligation to those befitting directly by the existence of such roads ( the same could be said of housing estate roads too)

n97 mini

end of the road wrote: »

no no, they should not be prepared to pay for their life style choices. once they pay taxes, they get the services.

That is THE most gobsmackibg statement I've ever seen in this forum.

Banjoxed

BoatMad wrote: »

a reductio ad absurdum argument . Ireland has an inordinate amount of bye roads, a legacy of dispersal patterns and a far greater population that was mainly rural based

You have three choices,

dramatically increase the rural population, by large scale one off housing , such that the tax base expands

shut roads

transfer the obligation to those befitting directly by the existence of such roads ( the same could be said of housing estate roads too)

Solving overcrowding in the south of England by getting a spare two million to fill in our dispersed pattern of settlement will enrage any number of cultural purists and professional class people seeking maximum return for minimum effort, so I won't suggest it here.

BoatMad

Banjoxed wrote: »

Solving overcrowding in the south of England by getting a spare two million to fill in our dispersed pattern of settlement will enrage any number of cultural purists and professional class people seeking maximum return for minimum effort, so I won't suggest it here.

works economically though , My English friends living in a very scenic area in ireland , are terrified the rest of the UK could discover it and move here !!

Charles Babbage

BoatMad wrote: »

works economically though , My English friends living in a very scenic area in ireland , are terrified the rest of the UK could discover it and move here !!

Would you support a tax on foreigners and blow ins to fix the roads?

BoatMad

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Would you support a tax on foreigners and blow ins to fix the roads?

had to determine foreigners and blow ins, on this island, we're here since 1699, a blow in

Qualitymark

end of the road wrote: »

he pays for his roads via his various taxes. there is not enough evidence to state how much if at all we are helping climate change. it could simply be a natural change.

we will if we like. you cannot and have no right to force people to travel via whatever method you wish. the choice must remain, bullying people in this country (rightly) doesn't work.

One solution would be to actually funnel road tax into the roads, and put no other money into them. Road tax currently is a carbon tax, which pays for the pollution caused by the use of the car. But if the cost of keeping the roads was added to this, the tax would rise enormously.

The question is: who's bullying whom? Those who think it's more sensible to have a population that mainly cycles and uses public transport, or those who think their right to drive, pollute and have their roads paid for supersedes all others' rights?

Charles Babbage

The population has no wish to return to the 1930s where you have to hope for a lift on a crossbar of a bicycle. In the 21st century Ireland can afford to maintain its road network, the only obstacle is selfish Mé Feiners whose main objective in life is trying to social engineer other people.

Qualitymark

Charles Babbage wrote: »

The population has no wish to return to the 1930s where you have to hope for a lift on a crossbar of a bicycle.

Scarcely the 1930s - civilised countries like the Netherlands and Denmark run things better.

murphaph

BoatMad wrote: »

transfer the obligation to those befitting directly by the existence of such roads ( the same could be said of housing estate roads too)

This would be fair actually. Of course households in housing estates would pay a tiny fraction of one off households as they only have a few metres of road each to maintain.

Qualitymark

murphaph wrote: »

This would be fair actually. Of course households in housing estates would pay a tiny fraction of one off households as they only have a few metres of road each to maintain.

Seriously, though, it wouldn't be fair. I was joking when I suggested that all "road tax" and only that should go to roads, and it should be raised to the level that would be needed to do so. It would be far, far more than drivers could pay.

In our society, there are certain things that we all pay a little for, and that a-little-from-all provides a service that everyone needs to be there, even if not everyone uses it all the time - libraries, hospitals, roads, piped water and electricity and communications and sewage.

If we start saying that people should contribute only according to their use, these services are going to get worse for everyone.

murphaph

Charles Babbage wrote: »

The population has no wish to return to the 1930s where you have to hope for a lift on a crossbar of a bicycle. In the 21st century Ireland can afford to maintain its road network, the only obstacle is selfish Mé Feiners whose main objective in life is trying to social engineer other people.

Social engineering... Or as other civilised countries call it, planning permission. In Germany and Great Britain they don't levy such charges, they just outright ban housing development outside urban areas.

21st century Ireland has a budget like 1930s Ireland. Spending it maintaining long essentially private driveways means other essential services suffer and your fellow citizens go without these services.

Personally I see demanding roads maintainence at the expense of other services, because you want to live in a one off property as the more selfish attitude.

As Ireland urbanises, the political will to hand over charge of local roads to the residents along them will increase. It'll start with the single property cul de sacs, then multiple property cul de sacs and then on to other local roads. We've already seen this trend in urban Ireland as these days private roads in estates are often not taken in charge and must be maintained by the management company as is right and proper IMO.

bk

BoatMad is correct, Electric Vehicle technology is developing at an incredible rate, we are likely to see a couple of 200mile, reasonably priced EV's launch in the next two years which will lead to the EV revolution.

These vehicles will be cheaper to run then even today with our cheap petrol and diesel and will be much cheaper to maintain.

So unfortunately there is no danger of increasing oil prices effecting peoples choice to live in rural areas. In fact quiet the opposite, I expect EV's to significantly reduce the cost of motoring and to lead to increase in motoring, which in turn may encourage even more terrible one off housing in rural Ireland if the problem is left untackled.

How do we tackle it? Well I believe we have to follow other European countries lead and ban ALL building outside of towns and villages. Yes, even estates and even for the family members of farmers.

Yes I know that is controversial but really it is the only way to stop the madness.

We then need to gradually have people, with the exception of farmers, pay for the true cost of delivering services in rural Ireland.

Increase the cost of electricity to match the true cost of delivering it in rural Ireland. Yes, it is already more then urban, but it still doesn't reflect the true cost, it is currently capped and still subsidised by the urban rates.

Increase the cost of broadband and phone services to match the true cost and thus decrease the cost in urban areas. Eir has already made just such a request to Comreg, to allow them to split urban prices from rural prices and charge more for rural while charging less for urban, to reflect the reality of delivering such services.

Return local roads to the ownership of the homes along the road and let them pay for those roads maintenance.

Realistically the LPT should be based on property size, not a made up "property value" and should probably charge more for rural homes to reflect the higher cost of delivering services to them.

If you think about it, really no different to how we charge more motor tax on more polluting cars to discourage them. Rural one-off houses have far more negative impact on the environment, so they too should be charged more to discourage them.

bk

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Hopefully we'll also see such things as cycle lanes and bus routes funded by those who use them and not the rest of us, to say nothing of methadone clinics and the like.

Let me make a suggestion to you so. Lets change the system so that ALL taxes raised in each county stay in that county. So 100% of what is raised in Dublin stays in Dublin, 100% of what is raised in Mayo stays in Mayo, etc.

Sounds fair and equitable, no?

Then the jackeens in the Pale would only be subsidising their own bus lanes and methadone clinics, right?

That sounds like a very fair suggestion to me and I'd be very much in favour of it. Of course in reality what it would mean is that far less tax money would be available to fund rural Ireland and far more money would be available to fund Dublin, Cork, etc. In fact we would likely be able to start building Dart Underground and Metro North in Dublin and the M20 and NRR in Cork almost straight away (oh and a good few more methadone clinics and council estates as they are at it), as they would have far more money available to them now.

magicbastarder

bk wrote: »

How do we tackle it? Well I believe we have to follow other European countries lead and ban ALL building outside of towns and villages. Yes, even estates and even for the family members of farmers.

Yes I know that is controversial but really it is the only way to stop the madness.

this is simply not going to happen. there's no political party with anything even approaching the will to do this who will get more than a seat or two in the dail.

for example, look at what the coalition (specifically alan kelly) has done; i.e. the relaxation on building standards for one off houses. that's a direct sop to the mindset you'd have hoped he'd be limiting.

murphaph

murphaph wrote: »

Social engineering... Or as other civilised countries call it, planning permission. In Germany and Great Britain they don't levy such charges, they just outright ban housing development outside urban areas.

21st century Ireland has a budget like 1930s Ireland. Spending it maintaining long essentially private driveways means other essential services suffer and your fellow citizens go without these services.

Personally I see demanding roads maintainence at the expense of other services, because you want to live in a one off property as the more selfish attitude.

As Ireland urbanises, the political will to hand over charge of local roads to the residents along them will increase. It'll start with the single property cul de sacs, then multiple property cul de sacs and then on to other local roads. We've already seen this trend in urban Ireland as these days private roads in estates are often not taken in charge and must be maintained by the management company as is right and proper IMO.

Banning new developments in rural areas can be done at any time, as it is, new applicants have to prove "local needs", it's up to the local councils to actually apply the rules. From what I can see around here, the rules appear to have been bent on many of the most recent developments, i.e. houses built by people who are not farmers.

As for handing roads over to locals to look after, most of the cul-de-sac's around here are already "unadopted" and maintained by the householders on them. The remaining roads are between communities, so apart from rationalisation where duplicate routes are downgraded to unmaintained ( there is one such road near here that hasn't been maintained for years), there is not much more that can be done to reduce costs.

The remaining local roads are simply too busy to abandon and would be too expensive to maintain if the locals were expected to finance their maintenance.

murphaph

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Banning new developments in rural areas can be done at any time, as it is, new applicants have to prove "local needs"

Not the same though. In Germany it is explicitly illegal to build housing in the "outside area" (Außenbereich). There's no bending of rules possible.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

The remaining local roads are simply too busy to abandon and would be too expensive to maintain if the locals were expected to finance their maintenance.

Then go with my alternative. Graduated levying of actual costs, triggered by one off house sales.

murphaph

murphaph wrote: »

Not the same though. In Germany it is explicitly illegal to build housing in the "outside area" (Außenbereich). There's no bending of rules possible.

True, but I expect that local councillors will have their doors broken down by local landowners if they were too strict with the rules and the government isn't willing to go that extra step and ban outright.

murphaph wrote: »

Then go with my alternative. Graduated levying of actual costs, triggered by one off house sales.

Probably would be quite an effective method of depopulating rural areas as few buyers would be willing to pay such a levy.

Charles Babbage

The range of ethnic cleansing proposals here and the lack of discussion if transport is remarkable.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage wrote: »

The range of ethnic cleansing proposals here and the lack of discussion if transport is remarkable.

Where!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous.[1] The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), intimidation, as well as mass murder and rape.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.
Initially used by the perpetrators during the Yugoslav Wars and cited in this context as a euphemism akin to that of the "final solution", by the 1990s the term gained widespread acceptance in academic discourse in its generic meaning.[2]

None of these things are being proposed by anyone here.

Charles Babbage

Deleted User wrote: »

Where!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

None of these things are being proposed by anyone here.

OK, there is a measure of using a strong term for this, I'm not suggesting you are ISIS. However, the proposal here is to use laws to eliminate rural society and create a homogeneous urban society so that society matches the culture of the proponents.

IMHO one major problem with this country is the fundamentalist and extremist positions often proposed, which reasonable people don't agree with, which means that moderate and sensible measures fall by the wayside as the fundamentalists aren't happy with anything less than the max. This means that in planning that sensitively designed houses for local people in clusters in the countryside do not come about because people come to associate the very idea of planning with the type of scorched earth policies advocated here. Likewise there are almost no park and ride facilities in Ireland because public transport advocates wouldn't be happy with people travelling only 90% of their journey by public transport, anything less than 100% is condemned.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage wrote: »

OK, there is a measure of using a strong term for this, I'm not suggesting you are ISIS. However, the proposal here is to use laws to eliminate rural society and create a homogeneous urban society so that society matches the culture of the proponents.

IMHO one major problem with this country is the fundamentalist and extremist positions often proposed, which reasonable people don't agree with, which means that moderate and sensible measures fall by the wayside as the fundamentalists aren't happy with anything less than the max. This means that in planning that sensitively designed houses for local people in clusters in the countryside do not come about because people come to associate the very idea of planning with the type of scorched earth policies advocated here. Likewise there are almost no park and ride facilities in Ireland because public transport advocates wouldn't be happy with people travelling only 90% of their journey by public transport, anything less than 100% is condemned.

Is I posted earlier, this is a problem that will resolve itself when fuel becomes too expensive for people to live far away from work & services, rural areas will depopulate as we realise that our lifestyle is unsustainable and future generations simply won't set up home in the countryside.

Don't forget that there are many small towns in the west that are dying on their feet as there are simply no jobs to be had, so this isn't simply a one-offs issue, it's a trend for urbanisation that is evolving and will end up with most of the population in a few cities and a sparse agricultural/specialised workforce living close to work. Just like it was a century ago before mass private transport was available.

It will probably take another century for this process to complete, but it will happen unless someone develops an energy source that can allow the current way of living to continue in a sustainable way.

n97 mini

Deleted User wrote: »

and future generations simply won't set up home in the countryside.

Subsidise petrol/diesel. It has been mentioned before by the rural lobby as they feel it's unfair that they have to rely on their cars/4x4s more.

Dyr

bk wrote: »

ow do we tackle it? Well I believe we have to follow other European countries lead and ban ALL building outside of towns and villages. Yes, even estates and even for the family members of farmers.

Yes I know that is controversial but really it is the only way to stop the madness.

Our very way of life threatened! man the parish pumps! Send for Phil Hogan!

murphaph

Deleted User wrote: »

True, but I expect that local councillors will have their doors broken down by local landowners if they were too strict with the rules and the government isn't willing to go that extra step and ban outright.

At present I agree wholeheartedly that this is where we are at, but Ireland is urbanising like the rest of the world. In previous times this didn't really mean that much as the rural blow ins to urban areas (to borrow a phrase from Charles Babbage) still often considered themselves from "home" and that's where their allegiances lay, but we're now more generations into the process so people like me don't feel that allegiance to where my grandparents came from (all from rural Ireland) and crucially, we now have 13% of the population being foreign born. These people and their children almost all live in urban areas and have no ties whatsoever to rural Ireland. It's programmed into the constitution that (even though rural constituencies have an unfair bias) urban representation in the Dail and consequently in government will continue to increase as a proportion of the whole. Eventually the votes of one off dwellers will be inconsequential to the various political parties and so they won't be beholden to them and a ban on one off development will be introduced.

Deleted User wrote: »

Probably would be quite an effective method of depopulating rural areas as few buyers would be willing to pay such a levy.

The ultimate goal would of course be to make those properties unattractive so the roads they are on could be abandoned/made into farm access only. But it wouldn't depopulate rural Ireland, it would depopulate one off Ireland and populate rural Irish villages with some life once again. The style and size of house could remain unaffected, with the right zoning (eg 50% of zoned land must be given over to one off development and the other 50% to planned estates, or something like that). The only thing that would change is that people built their one offs in clusters as is sensible.

bk

Deleted User wrote: »

Is I posted earlier, this is a problem that will resolve itself when fuel becomes too expensive for people to live far away from work & services, rural areas will depopulate as we realise that our lifestyle is unsustainable and future generations simply won't set up home in the countryside.

As I mentioned above, this unfortunately won't happen, as we transition to EV's it will actually lead to even cheaper motoring costs that are likely to make the problem worse, not better.

If you go over to the EV forum you can read about people who are already commuting 100km+ a day into Dublin City Center in Nissan Leaf electric vehicles for a fraction of the current cost of petrol/diesel!

Allowing the building of one-offs in a village setting is a good idea, but it still leaves the issue of rural employment unresolved. People are still going to have to drive to work in a town far-far away, Rural employment is still declining and businesses have no interest in setting up anywhere else except where it is most beneficial to them, they expect employees to go to their place of work and not the other way round.

It is this trend that will ultimately push people out of the countryside and into the cities.

murphaph

Charles Babbage wrote: »

OK, there is a measure of using a strong term for this, I'm not suggesting you are ISIS. However, the proposal here is to use laws to eliminate rural society and create a homogeneous urban society so that society matches the culture of the proponents.

You're doing it again. You're conflating one off housing with rural housing. Villagers in rural Ireland are part of rural society!! You are the one resorting to extremist terms, as if everyone would be rounded up and brought to Dublin or Cork. People would very gradually move into their nearest village, buying a plot of land in a zoned area within walking distance of the village amenities. All that would change is that instead of you having 300m between you and your neighbour you'd have 50m. The state could even CPO lands adjacent to villages at slightly better than agricultural land prices and zone them for development, so the farmer with grazing land doesn't get to win the zoning lottery (again).

Sometimes I think the real issue here is money and that farmers in rural Ireland want to continue to be able to sell off plots of building land for tidy sums. It has nothing to do with culture or any of that stuff.

bk

Deleted User wrote: »

Allowing the building of one-offs in a village setting is a good idea, but it still leaves the issue of rural employment unresolved. People are still going to have to drive to work in a town far-far away, Rural employment is still declining and businesses have no interest in setting up anywhere else except where it is most beneficial to them, they expect employees to go to their place of work and not the other way round.

It is this trend that will ultimately push people out of the countryside and into the cities.

But that is exactly the problem, many people seem to be quiet happy to commute 100km+ a day from their rural one off McMansion into their office job in the city.

Working in IT in Dublin I know many people who do exactly that and it is madness IMO.

I don't believe it is environmentally healthy, economically healthy, socially healthy or personally healthy.

Until we outright ban the building of rural houses outside of towns and villages and put the real cost of rural living on these sort of people, then it simply won't stop and it is likely to get worse with EV's

Qualitymark

bk wrote: »

As I mentioned above, this unfortunately won't happen, as we transition to EV's it will actually lead to even cheaper motoring costs that are likely to make the problem worse, not better.

If you go over to the EV forum you can read about people who are already commuting 100km+ a day into Dublin City Center in Nissan Leaf electric vehicles for a fraction of the current cost of petrol/diesel!

Not a lot better in terms of carbon footprint, though. Electricity mostly requires the burning of fossil fuels to produce it.