Cork Northern Distributor Road

Chris_5339762

Given how Busconnect involved them tying ribbons to trees on the Boreenmanna road, I figure there will be pushback, or the usual "We understand we need this, but we don't want it here". "here" being anywhere near me.

I fear for the North Ring more than this, so this had better be decent enough spec to act as a REASONABLE, perhaps not decent, alternative to the N40 north. Because it'll function as that from Day 1.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119760677#Comment_119760677

No it wasn’t. The section between Knockalisheen and the eastern suburbs has not been reinstated. Therefore there is no feasible way of getting a bus from LIT/Cahirdavin/UL/National Tech Park without going through the tight congested city streets/roads.

Nor is there any way of getting cars off those roads to free up bus space as there is no alternative route.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119760695#Comment_119760695

The Lee Fields will be a battle. That unfortunately is also the key to this roads success.

The NRR is in a state of suspended animation in the current environment. When the penny drops and people realise that it’s a necessity for the city to function it might get built.

hans aus dtschl

I think that the Northern Bypass may well be necessary for the city to function in the future, because of the limitations of the Douglas section of the existing N40. But I'd say the big fear is that if you progress it before the distributor, it will get watered down into a dysfunctional double-jobbing distributor/bypass "ring road" like its southern counterpart. Hence them going for the distributor first. And in fairness, housing is THE top priority right now, and in that context a distributor is critical.

kub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119761260#Comment_119761260

Is there a query here now that the proposed Northern Section of a possible ring N/M40 around Cork City is going to be anything less than a dual carriageway ?

I absolutely agree with you regarding the pinch point that the N/M40 will become over Douglas when Dunkettle and the M28 are complete and I reckon a single RTA along that particular stretch will cause huge issues for traffic miles around it.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119762853#Comment_119762853

The issue is that Cork needs three orbital routes going forward:

1. A motorway grade road from the N22 at Ballincollig to the M8 at Glanmire with full connectivity to the M20/N20 at Blarney/Killeens
2. An urban distributor road with bus lanes and active travel facilities between the northwest and the northeast of the city, specifically addressing connectivity issues around UCC/Sundays Well
3. An urban distributor road with bus lanes and active travel facilities between Bishopstown/Wilton and Douglas/Mahon specifically with the goal of providing east west connectivity outside the N40, and removing short traffic from the N40 where possible by providing an alternative route and more importantly functional east west connectivity in the southern suburbs for pubic transport

These three are needed in a baseline case scenario. CMATS recognises this and proposes all three (one of the northern projects would have been removed from CMATS most likely had it been published during the term of the current government in the usual hope that you can wish cars off the road).

If you build 1 you have no suburban connectivity inside the NRR. If you build 2 you have nowhere for long distance/heavy traffic to go. 3 is needed to complement and improve flow on the south of the city in addition to the PT improvements.

I'd be more than happy if they closed city traffic after that

Imeacht gan teacht ort

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119763504#Comment_119763504

And how exactly would that work?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119763750#Comment_119763750

Slap a big juicy congestion charge on traffic passing through. Close Panna, Grand Parade, South Mall

Whatever they want. If bus connect is in place and full ring road why would you need to drive through?

Imeacht gan teacht ort

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119763845#Comment_119763845

If you're disabled and need car, for example. Or what about deliveries in trucks and Vans?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119764433#Comment_119764433

Delivery trucks and vans outside pedestrian hours.

Disabled people are an exception, but you know that and still would not need to drive through the city rather have easy access parking on the outskirt of the pedestrian area. Or, you know, take public transport like many disabled people already do

No one would NEED a car in the city centre if there is a proper NDR and NRR.

That's always been the killer to a traffic free city, too many people are forced to commute through the city to work. No need at all for them to be there if the roads and PT are built

kub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119764740#Comment_119764740

What about the hospitals in the City Center, I am referring of course to the South Infirmary, The Mercy etc, what about their supplies, what if they are urgent ?

What about out patients attending appointments at same, many of whom are incapable of using public transport.

Your point sounds great in theory but unfortunately reality puts up challenges

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119765025#Comment_119765025

The South is easily accessed, by car, without going through the City Centre. It's also on several public transport routes.

Tell me where people drive to the Mercy, though? It's near impossible to park anywhere near there.

Without cars killing that area buses and taxies will easily cover needs.

kub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119765039#Comment_119765039

I wonder how many of those same parked cars in that area are relatives of out patients or in patients ?

So the rule will be that no one can drive in a car to a hospital any longer, I am sure that will go down well.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119765079#Comment_119765079

Oh boo hoo, relatives in many city hospitals get public transport. There is zero parking around the Mercy so they are already walking quite a distance to get there, getting a taxi, or the bus.

I note that you are not at all worried about all the ambulances which get caught in traffic, during emergencies?

thomil

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119765079#Comment_119765079

As someone who's recently spent a couple of days in the care of the Mercy (emergency vascular surgery followed by recovery), anyone who drives to the Mercy for anything else than dropping off or collecting someone should be admitted to the psychiatric department there. And from my experience, most cars there just use that area as a rat run, I can count on a single hand the cars that dropped someone off or picked up someone at the Mercy whilst I was there. The hospital itself even redirects potential patients or visitors to the car parks at Crawford Quay or North Main Street in their patient booklet.

Imeacht gan teacht ort

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119764740#Comment_119764740

Should people with mental disabilities, or people who are differently able, mentally, such as people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, be forced into public transport against their will?

What about deliveries that aren't out of hours?

What about people who need to drive because they literally have no other option?

I do not see this as progress.

And no; I do not "know that already".

Please don't be so presumptuous.

Pete_Cavan

Some level of car access to particular locations can be maintained without having free for all access to the entire city centre. It's how many cities around the world now operate.

There's always some poor unfortunates to feign concern for when opposing something you don't want to happen.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119766214#Comment_119766214

Bingo.

People so fecking tied to their cars that they cannot understand why a city centre belongs to the people not their chosen mode of transport.

I've been vocal here that I'd campaign AGAINST making the centre car free, simply because pubic transport is a joke and the city is the only way for people to get to work.

Even putting this NDR in would be enough to pedestrianise most of the city

hans aus dtschl

We're a little bit outside of the scope of the thread but just here to say there's no discussion about road types: Northern Distributor is 1 No. Pedestrian+Cycle+Bus+Car each side. Northern section of N40 is dual carriageway (and no sustainable transport) each side. Southern Distributor is 1 No. Pedestrian+Cycle+Bus+Car each side. Very little wriggle room there.

On the banning of cars from the centre, congestion charges is one method, banning through traffic is another, just like has been done in lots of cities. There will be no rules that "nobody can drive...." it will be that you will have longer routes and face higher prices if you're either using the city centre as your car's transport corridor, or storage location. Naturally blue badge holders will be exempt from the "high prices" bit, but will not be exempt from the "longer routes" bit. To get from (for instance) Carrigtohill to CUH, you will be sent around the city centre rather than through it. To get to Apple from Douglas, you will be sent around rather than through, etc. Patrick's street would likely be the first street "closed" to through traffic, I'd expect, possibly followed by Washington Street and other streets on the centre island. I suspect the Distributors WILL get through planning without this "traffic reduction" measure, but the bypass most likely will not. Likely the Northern N40 will also see new train stations and P&R as part of the plan too.

Frostybrew

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119766178#Comment_119766178

I think you are either missing the point entirely with these suggestions, or being deliberately obtuse. One of the main reasons to improve public transport is to free up road space so it can be used by those who need it the most; i.e. people with disabilities, ambulances, commercial drivers, etc. Most traffic is caused by able bodied people who should be using public transport; but instead choose to drive on their own.

And speaking as someone with an autism spectrum disorder, no one is forcing me on to public transport. I actively choose to use it as I can see that it is the best option for commuting for a myriad of reasons, both on a personal level and for society as a whole.

The discussion has drifted from the topic so I will not comment any further.

Imeacht gan teacht ort

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119773486#Comment_119773486

Not at all, I have it myself, and I do not want to use public transport if i can avoid it. I know I'm in a minority but it's my own personal opinion and I'm not trying to upset anyone. That is all. I would like to continue using my car which I already can barely afford to run with the price of fuel, tax etc.

Ah, so it's just selfishness.

Thanks for clarifying that we should all bow down to what you want to do. No matter how bad it is for pedestrians, the city, and environment. As long as Imeacht gets to use his car, even with a NDR/NRR and city centre public transport, screw everything else

KrisW1001

There are two facts that you cannot get around:

1. The city centre is a finite size.
2. There are far more people who want to get into the city than can be accommodated if they all drive.

Road-space in the city is thus a scarce resource. To accommodate additional travellers, you can either maximise road-space to remove the scarcity, or increase the utilisation of what you have already (increasing the number of people transported per lane metre per hour). Or, more bluntly, you can propose any solution you want, all the way from levelling the centre and replacing it with car-parks at one extreme, to closing all the streets and forcing everyone to use a bike or bus at the other. Both of those positions are ridiculous, and anyone proposing them — or claiming that someone else is proposing them — is an idiot.

In any future plans, there will be restrictions on private car drivers who have no good reason not to use alternative methods of transport. Those who insist on driving will not find blocked streets (because blue-badge parking and delivery access is still needed), but they will probably have to pay for the use of the scarce resource that they’re consuming. Follow that principle of resource pricing to its conclusion and you will end with a situation where public transport is a significantly cheaper and faster way of getting around than driving in a private car. That is the case in all cities with well-functioning public transport systems.

But even then, nobody will stop you using a car if that’s your choice - just expect to have to pay more, park further away and walk longer distances when you do.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119775681#Comment_119775681

Well written/explained.

Nobody cares whether any particular person wants to drive for whatever reason. Just that it will become easier to do most journeys by sustainable/mass transport. Most of us have a car so there's very little "us and them" here. I'm about to sit into mine, for a very short journey, so there's no "holier than thou" going on.

cantalach

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119766178#Comment_119766178

So just to name two cities, London has congestion charging and Málaga has an almost completely pedestrianised city centre. Both of those places have people with physical and intellectual disabilities, elderly people, parents with small children, shops requiring deliveries, and all the other whatabouts that you mentioned over a few replies. So I think that instead of you asking the questions, the onus really is on you to explain why you believe these measures wouldn’t work in Cork when there is ample evidence that solutions have been found in other places.

One of the biggest issues is the city has basically zero control once its own public transport systems. That’s highly unusual in any European context. Effectively the management is done by a national long distance bus company, with its management and accountability to central government and key people located in another city 260km away.

That contrasts to small, medium and large EU cities where all this stuff is an urban government competence.

Ireland doesn’t even begin to comprehend how to run urban areas and just centralises everything into national quangos. It’s quite literally the most centralised country in the EU, even more so than several micro states!

None of these grand transit and transportation ideas will be made work properly if the city itself isn’t the driving force behind them. It’ll always be begging for action from a mess of national bodies that aren’t accountable to anything other than national politics.

Got to agree on this a bit.

Look to next weekend; biggest weekend of the year, for the city, and they're interfering with rail travel (for the second year running)

https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40990523.html

Yeah that's petty symptomatic of the kind of lack of coordination. A "down the country festival" is happening and CIE don't give a damn. Zero coordination with the City Council, I doubt the idea of even looking up a schedule of events even crossed their mind, as they likely don't really see it as in anyway relevant to them.

I guarantee you if this were somewhere on the continent there would have been major planning to avoid disruption of big events and local and regional government would have been heavily involved.

It just shows to me how over centralised it is and how these organisations simply don't care. Their schedule is all that matters.

Unfortunately, I think until we can get issues like proper urban, local and regional government to operate on the same kind of basis as it does in other countries, none of our cities will ever thrive, and I include Dublin in that. The Government may physically sit there, but Dublin City has no autonomy itself.

We've a tendency to blame 'culture' or something intrinsic about Ireland and get lost in some kind of weird Irish exceptionalism. The reality of it is we have created a very weird governmental and institutional structure and we continuously ignore the critiques that have come from various European bodies about our over centralisation.

If you look at the last decade, we've actually centralised even more things and moved powers away from local authorities. The government even tried to merge Cork City and County Council (and did merge the Limerick and Waterford local authorities), creating a big amorphous urban/rural mess, yet we see nothing wrong with that. There's a constant notion of efficiency = centralisation and more centralisation.

You can see it in the lack of bus public transit and the weird and unresponsive ways infrastructure gets planned generally.

If you compared Cork or Dublin to similar medium and small European cities, most of them would have complete control of their own transit networks, road networks and all of that. We've got national bodies: CIE, Transport for Ireland, TII, the OPW etc etc and pretty much none of those local transit or infrastructure issues are locally driven. Big capital projects are also really not something local authorities get involved in anymore.

There are quite literally french villages with more powers of governance than Cork or Dublin City Councils.

KrisW1001

Our road management follows the same pattern as other European countries: National routes are planned and managed nationally, with on-the-ground supervision contracted out to local authorities, and local routes are fully managed by the local authorities.

National rail is the same deal too. The difference is that unlike other European countries, we have very few local rail systems, so the issue of control hasn’t come up. But by rights, yes, there should be a Dublin Transportation Office (again - there used to be one, but it was folded into NTA) responsible for DART, bus and LUAS in that city. Similarly for Cork, although Cork’s transportation network is pitiful by comparison.

As the Cork-Dublin service is a national line, no regional authority should be hijacking its operations. Regarding this weekend, there are two possibilities: either Irish Rail didn’t take account of this being a major weekend for Dublin-Cork visitors; or that actually they did take this into account, and realised that the vast majority of rail visitors will already be in in Cork before 14:30 Saturday, the start of these works, and will stay until after the works are done. The inconvenient timing of the works (from IR’s point of view) suggests the second scenario.

Merging of local authorities makes sense in a lot of cases: Waterford City and County are too small in isolation, and had significant duplication of function. By rights, we’d have got rid of the GAA Jersey bullshit, done the job right, and made a Waterford Regional authority with control over Waterford County as well as the city’s hinterlands in South Kilkenny, South-East Tipperary and West Wexford. That’s how other countries do things, but just try it here...