I read the following article this morning. "From August, bus gates will be in operation on Bachelors Walk and Aston Quay in order to restrict drivers from travelling through the city centre."
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/major-changes-to-dublin-city-traffic-to-come-into-effect-in-august-1610937.html
The quays have always been a pain in the a$$ to use, no matter the time of day… So, how will this effect people?
If there are so few people who will need to make those journeys outside of the 7am - 7pm peak, then what difference does it make if they are forced to use the longer detour route? Only adding 5-10 minutes to their journey.
Unless, of course, you acknowledge traffic remains extremely heavy outside of 7am to 7pm, including people using public transport.
I was referring those who would be using buses to commute during 7pm and 7am - which arguably is outside peak commuting times, and again, I simply don't believe there would be so many doing so that it justifies closing off the quays to car traffic during those hours.
But I'm sure you knew that.
And no, I don't agree that traffic remains "extremely heavy" between 7pm to 7am. Certainly not in my personal experience and I commuted in and out of the city centre every day for most of my life, including 10 years in an office located on the Quays and another few more recently, in the Custom House.
Glad I'm not based in the Custom House any more. I'd be looking for a transfer.
The days of traffic evaporating by 7pm are long gone - it lasts far later than that.
As I mentioned already the buses serving the Navan Road, Lucan, Ballyfermot and Crumlin Road corridors (which will benefit from these measures) are anything but empty post 7pm. They stay pretty much full for most of the evening.
I do sympathise with disability groups in terms of the impact that any changes have, but you are grossly underestimating the numbers using the buses post-7pm. They aren’t empty.
This is as much about trying to change a mindset where Irish people have been conditioned into driving everywhere through an appalling lack of public transport investment over several generations, as well as improving reliability of public transport.
We have to start somewhere in that regard, and that means investing in priority for the backbone of our city’s public transport network, which is the bus service, recognising that rail improvements won’t happen anytime soon.
No one likes change, but as the old saying says, you won’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and sometimes you just need you just make the changes and assess the impact afterwards.
In my opinion, we have got to that point, especially in the context of moving the D Spine routes from Dame Street onto the Quays.
Thanks, but I remain unconvinced.
what is the use case where people with disabilities are disenfranchised more than others, were the restrictions to be put in place?
are there any precedents where disabled people are allowed use streets or similar which are closed to non-blud badge holders?
I am not sure that is the bar that should be used to decide this to be fair!
The loadings on those bus corridors don’t lie!
The numbers using the bus service within the canals has increased year on year throughout the day and that isn’t a point up for debate.
There comes a point where that has to be recognised in terms of the levels of priority for public transport.
We are approaching that point rapidly, and certainly will have reached it when College Green closes.
It just comes across as throwing toys out of prams because the vote didn't go the way they think it SHOULD have. Yet of course, if it had, the same posters would be telling everyone that it was the will of the public etc…
The vote did go the way they want. It is the unelected executive who are trying to backtrack.
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It is more than those going by car. The 24 hour routes are busy throughout the night - they have been a huge success. You have already highlighted your assumption that they are "mostly empty" buses and night, but that is incorrect. The downside is adding a slight detour when traffic is light, so why is that such a big deal?
There is also nothing remotely unique or unprecedented about any of this. We are being quite slow to catch on to things that have been done all over Europe without the sky falling in.
What's the big issue then? If traffic isn't heavy after 7pm, it will be very little inconvenience to avoid OCS bridge, like 5-10 minutes longer in a car. Why is that such a big issue for you?
By your own admission though, you’ve not used the city bus service in Dublin regularly for quite a while.
There aren’t many core bus routes that “wander” any more since the Network Direct changes over a decade ago, but rather they use the main corridors, and at the same time the numbers using the bus service have increased dramatically. BusConnects is reinforcing that even more and will see some stop reductions as the infrastructure element of the project starts to be rolled out.
There does come a point where the balance starts to tip the other way, and where priorities need to shift. In the 2023 canal cordon count, the numbers using the bus service now exceed those using all forms of motorised transport and those using bicycles added together.
Re the other poster calling out Larbre34 - to be fair Larbre34 vehemently predicted on boards.ie that the North Strand traffic restrictions introduced to facilitate the water mains replacement and subsequent cycle lane works would be reversed within days, and they weren’t. I think it’s perfectly fair to call Larbe34 out on that, given they went into complete radio silence on that topic.
Protest tomorrow outside City Hall at 5:30 pm organised by the Dublin Commuter Coalition. I'd urge anyone who can be there, to be there and help stop tricky Dicky Shakespeare from interfering with a decent plan that would benefit vast swathes of public transport users, cyclists and pedestrians as well as make the city centre less of a car park than it currently is. We've seen this car hysteria when the luas was being proposed, when Capel Street's partial pedestrianisation was proposed and again now with the bus gates. Luas and Capel St were huge successes and so will the bus gate if given a proper shake.
It's depressing reading some of the comments here. People who have clearly not used a bus in years confidently declaring buses are empty in the evenings (try getting on one of the C spine or 39a's at 7/8/9/10pm on a weekday evening and come back to me with how empty they are!) and see no problem with the quays being choked with traffic, traffic which is only going to get worse unless something is done to discourage it like this plan would do.
Anyone who thinks buses are empty or that traffic is light after 7pm - go to Aston Quay or Bachelor's Walk at, say, 7:30pm. I hope the people who actually decide whether the plan should go ahead or not are not as dishonest as some of the comments here.
This will come across as ableist and apologies for this, but it's unavoidable in this context. I'm all in favour of accommodating disabled driver's access to the city centre, but surely we can't focus this largely around a relatively small group of people who need to access the city centre, can we?
We have thousands of people coming into the city on public transport, on bicycles, walking - all of which will benefit from these proposals. There will also be thousands of more people who will likely take up public transport or cycling because of the scheme. It's a huge benefit to so many yet we seemed to be focused on the slight disruption (5-10 minute detour) for blue badge holders which seems crazy to me.
Don't get me wrong, if I was a blue badge holder I would be annoyed that my journey into the city centre is getting longer, but unfortunately this is the cost that needs to be paid to make this proposal work. There is no perfect plan in any big infrastructure scheme. Someone is always going to be inconvenienced and unfortunately for this one it's disabled car users.
There's likely a bit of tip-toeing around this subject because of the fact that it is a minority group, but you simply cannot make significant progress if you're trying to appease everyone. Ultimately the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Must be people who don't know the area, or think they know the area because they frequented it 40 years ago. A former colleague of mine had cause to go to the theatre midweek, having not normally been in the city centre late for some decades and expressed utter shock that streets and busses are completely rammed at 10pm of a Tuesday.
The car park lobby uses the disabled as a human shield for its profit generation. You are right of course. There are about 40,000 wheelchair users in Ireland. 25,000 of which live in nursing homes.
IntInterestingly there are 60,000 blue badges, which suggests that the vast majority of blue badge holders are not wheelchair bound but rather they have some reduced mobility.
The car park industry also seems to have forgotten and wants other people to forget that the Dublin Bus and Luas network is fully accessible.
Not to be flippant, but how many blue badge holders need car access to the city centre? What I mean by this is would an improved public transport system and pedestrian access decrease their reliance on car usage?
I wouldn't want to assume anything about wheelchair users and their access needs but I wonder if there are any improvements that could be made in public infrastructure that would make this scheme more attractive.
Well no the numbers having to access the centre are small, and under the plan all access is maintained anyway, only through journeys are blocked. It's a straw man for the motor industry that's all.
The main reason why busses are difficult for wheelchair users is cars blocking bus stops and overcrowding on buses, a direct result of cars also.
Do shops, restaurants, fast food places etc., where the lower paid work, close before 7 pm every day?
For the privileged high-paid who work in offices, 7 am to 7 pm may be fine. For the disabled driver who can afford a car, it might well be a good idea.
But for those with mobility issues who use public transport, for the lower-paid, for those without access to a car of any kind, then 24 hour is needed.
I haven't seen any coherent case put forward on the disenfranchising of people with disabilities. People with disabilities are actually more likely to use public transport than the general public. Those who are visually impaired, for example.
There is a very limited lobby of people with disabilities who drive who claim that they will be prevented from using the city centre. It doesn't stack up as an argument.
Una Mullally has an opinion piece in today's Irish Times on this…
Higgins has made a reactive punt based solely on vibes from a few disgruntled business owners; not research, not data, not the public, not the countless people who have worked on this plan, nor the councillors who have acted relatively rationally with the little power they have to get something positive over the line for the city.
The best thing for Dublin city centre is for Fine Gael decision-makers in Government to abstain from any of the serious and mature decisions that need to be made so that the people who know what they’re talking about can get on with it.
I was in Brussels last week and there's huge portion of the city centre pedestrianised with no apparent access for blue badge holders or equivalent. I'm sure this is mirrored across the continent, I can't fathom why it is so difficult to implement any kind of traffic ban here.
That's interesting. I just had a look at the website for these areas and they restrict access simply by having a pass which is read either using an electronic badge or reading the number plate of the car. Seems like a great idea.
Was there with the rest of the deplorables. Decent crowd but will make feck all difference to Shakespears decision probably. I was also just around wicklow and St andrews streets. Tonnes of pedestrians having to make way for the odd car driving past that takes up the whole street. It's scandalous that area still allows cars ffs.
Would have gone in but am currently in Westport. Which, aptly, is a town screaming out for traffic to be removed from the streets.
I frequently spend about 3-4 mins trying to cross over at the James Joyce Bridge. Standing there, tapping my foot at all the cars. It's funny that Joyce and Shakespeare come into play.
Was there too. If any decent journo was there they would see how ludicrous private cars have a stranglehold over the city. Trying to even cross at the lights across to City Hall from Dame/Parliament Street is a nightmare due to traffic, mainly single-occupant cars. But that won't be the angle of the protest spun in the media if they even bother reporting on it at all that is. Billy Hann, the CEO of Dublin Bus has come out guns blazing in support of the full implementation of the the original plan, to his credit. Tricky Dicky Shakespeare has now agreed to meet the Dublin Commuter Coalition too.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/07/08/dublin-bus-chief-urges-city-council-executive-not-to-water-down-dublin-city-centre-transport-plan/
It's all really about accommodating the brainless closure of College Green, having to redesign and redirect access to and from the quays and OCS.
I did note his explicit reference to the election, he didn't shy from hinting this is just a vote getting stunt.
Plenty of people would see the plaza as a good thing, it’s hardly “brainless”, and to be fair there are reasonable changes to the bus routes that currently use Dame Street and College Green that don’t involve massive doglegs.
Yes the extra 25 buses an hour in each direction along the Quays is a major part of it, but there has also long been a desire from DCC to eliminate right turns at O’Connell Bridge and thereby facilitate longer pedestrian light sequences.
With the “watering down” proposals, the latter is being thwarted somewhat.
There was anti democracy nutter at the protest yesterday who tried to grab the microphone. Protesters had to surround him and usher him away. Gardaí done nothing.
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