Dublin ranks 3rd in terms of the amount of time spent in cars due to congestion

We did the cart before horse approach to building.
Major suburbs like Tallaght and Blancharstown were built without any notion of putting in public transport. The first thing that should have been going in was some kind of high capacity rail link to the city and serving major business parks in the suburbs.

Fixing this is expensive or even impossible as you're retrofitting trams or metro to already built sprawl.

It's neither the European approach of putting in decent mass transit from the start nor is it the American approach of accepting it's car dependent and putting in adequate road infrastructure from day one. We seem to have planning that is based on an assumption that teleportation is arriving any day soon.

You're paying for abysmal planning or lack of planning.

We also aren't spending enough on mass transit at all.

Dublin's managed to build two tramlines (one of which was already an old Victorian railway for most of its route) and electrified one heavy rail line that's been running since the dawn of railways. The rest of the commuter network, if you ban even all it that, is diesel!!

Meanwhile Cork, which is growing fast has plans but no realistic finding for any start on tramways or similar.

If we don't put in the planning and resourcing we can't then moan about sitting in cars for hours every day.

What we have is exactly what we've voted for over the years. We tolerated and even actively encouraged bad planning and continue to pay absolutely no attention to local authority elections. Instead we use TDs as fixers and turn urban infrastructure into national political footballs.

Maybe the dawn of executive mayors in Cork etc and hopefully that spreading to Dublin soon will change the focus, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Anteayer wrote: »

We did the cart before horse approach to building.
Major suburbs like Tallaght and Blancharstown were built without any notion of putting in public transport. The first thing that should have been going in was some kind of high capacity rail link to the city and serving major business parks in the suburbs.

Fixing this is expensive or even impossible as you're retrofitting trams or metro to already built sprawl.

It's neither the European approach of putting in decent mass transit from the start nor is it the American approach of accepting it's car dependent and putting in adequate road infrastructure from day one. We seem to have planning that is based on an assumption that teleportation is arriving any day soon.

You're paying for abysmal planning or lack of planning.

We also aren't spending enough on mass transit at all.

Dublin's managed to build two tramlines (one of which was already an old Victorian railway for most of its route) and electrified one heavy rail line that's been running since the dawn of railways. The rest of the commuter network, if you ban even all it that, is diesel!!

Meanwhile Cork, which is growing fast has plans but no realistic finding for any start on tramways or similar.

If we don't put in the planning and resourcing we can't then moan about sitting in cars for hours every day.

What we have is exactly what we've voted for over the years. We tolerated and even actively encouraged bad planning and continue to pay absolutely no attention to local authority elections. Instead we use TDs as fixers and turn urban infrastructure into national political footballs.

Maybe the dawn of executive mayors in Cork etc and hopefully that spreading to Dublin soon will change the focus, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Rail was proposed at the same time that Tallaght and Blanch were being built but commentators and senior civil servants jumped up and down on the notion that suburbs should get rail at all. Even the 1981 Maynooth service sailed past nearly all of Blanch until as late as 1990.