Cork city car ban set to be parked after just 3 weeks

roadmaster

bk wrote: »

I was reading a very interesting article on the effect that ecommerce is having in the US.

Shopping malls are being decimated their due to ecommerce. However interestingly they found two exceptions. High end shopping malls (think like Dundrum) and vibrant city centers.

Those two are actually doing very well and going from strength to strength!

The reason being they had a lot more then just retail like the more old fashioned shopping malls and were places people go for socialising, entertainment, etc. with a side of shopping.

Increasingly retailers are using these places as show rooms for their products. Fancy destination stores (think Apple Stores) where people can demo the products, get support, but might actually end up buying the product online for delivery from warehouses. A hybrid approach.

No one wants to spend their Saturday in some boring big box retail park getting dragged long distance from one big box to another. On the other hand, heading into town and getting some brunch/coffee with friends, then spending a few hours strolling around a nice city center, perhaps buying some jewellery/clothes, maybe even ordering a nice new sofa for delivery from Arnotts and then finishing off the afternoon in a nice pub. This is the type of shopping experience that is attracting people away from ecommerce.

But that requires attractive city centers which people actually want to go too and spend their time at. And that will usually mean lots of pedestrianisation. Wide easy to walk footpaths. Street entertainment, mix of nice coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. in amongst the shops.

Cities like Cork and Dublin can certainly survive and even grow is this sort of environment, but they will absolutely have to change to match peoples changing tastes and preferences.

Should planners at this stage not be trying to get more business in to towns rather than outside them. Aldi have being given permission to build a new store outside kinnegad . The councils should be encouraging them to build in the center of these small towns to help them grow again . I drove through Kinnegad recently and there seams to be plenty of abandoned buildings that could be knocked and developed, i am not saying CPO a row of houses for aldi etc but surly we should be getting these type of shops to build in towns as they will bring shoppers who may then use other services in the towns.

Beta Ray Bill

We are VERY different people!

bk wrote: »

No one wants to spend their Saturday in some boring big box retail park getting dragged long distance from one big box to another. On the other hand, heading into town and getting some brunch/coffee with friends, then spending a few hours strolling around a nice city center, perhaps buying some jewellery/clothes, maybe even ordering a nice new sofa for delivery from Arnotts and then finishing off the afternoon in a nice pub. This is the type of shopping experience that is attracting people away from ecommerce.

^^^^^^^ Sounds like Hell to me! ^^^^^^^

Zebra3

grahambo wrote: »

Ireland has a love affair with the Car! But there is nothing wrong with that.

If you ignore the stats that show how many people are killed by accidents and through air pollution caused by cars, and all the money that flows out of our economy because of cars, yeh there’s not much wrong with them.

bk

grahambo wrote: »

^^^^^^^ Sounds like Hell to me! ^^^^^^^

Really, you'd rather spend the afternoon walking around Blanchardstown, then spending it is a pub in town watching a Rugby/Soccer match while the missus shops with her friends! :P

Beta Ray Bill

bk wrote: »

Really, you'd rather spend the afternoon walking around Blanchardstown, then spending it is a pub in town watching a Rugby/Soccer match while the missus shops with her friends! :P

I'd rather be out on my bike than anywhere near shops/pubs!
I don't have a misses anymore either!

bk

roadmaster wrote: »

Should planners at this stage not be trying to get more business in to towns rather than outside them. Aldi have being given permission to build a new store outside kinnegad . The councils should be encouraging them to build in the center of these small towns to help them grow again . I drove through Kinnegad recently and there seams to be plenty of abandoned buildings that could be knocked and developed, i am not saying CPO a row of houses for aldi etc but surly we should be getting these type of shops to build in towns as they will bring shoppers who may then use other services in the towns.

Absolutely. The current approach by county planners is destroying our towns and villages.

While far from perfect, at least down in Cork the City Council is at least trying to make the city center more attractive for people.

A problem though with a lot of towns (and cities too) is that the available shop spaces are too small for modern retail demands. Small, old Irish shop buildings are just too small. So yes, ideally you need to be CPO'ing them and knocking them into larger units. Of course you run into listed building issues then, but that can be worked around (keeping facades, etc.). But if we don't do something about it, our town centers will continue to die.

bk

grahambo wrote: »

I'd rather be out on my bike than anywhere near shops/pubs!
I don't have a misses anymore either!

Sorry. Yeah, me too, I hear you, though hiking for me.

Though of course you do sometimes have to do it and when you do, I much prefer a city center then a big box retail park. And the point is that most people seem to prefer that too, going by what is happening in the US.

Frostybrew

bk wrote: »

I was reading a very interesting article on the effect that ecommerce is having in the US.

Shopping malls are being decimated their due to ecommerce. However interestingly they found two exceptions. High end shopping malls (think like Dundrum) and vibrant city centers.

Those two are actually doing very well and going from strength to strength!

The reason being they had a lot more then just retail like the more old fashioned shopping malls and were places people go for socialising, entertainment, etc. with a side of shopping.

Increasingly retailers are using these places as show rooms for their products. Fancy destination stores (think Apple Stores) where people can demo the products, get support, but might actually end up buying the product online for delivery from warehouses. A hybrid approach.

No one wants to spend their Saturday in some boring big box retail park getting dragged long distance from one big box to another. On the other hand, heading into town and getting some brunch/coffee with friends, then spending a few hours strolling around a nice city center, perhaps buying some jewellery/clothes, maybe even ordering a nice new sofa for delivery from Arnotts and then finishing off the afternoon in a nice pub. This is the type of shopping experience that is attracting people away from ecommerce.

But that requires attractive city centers which people actually want to go too and spend their time at. And that will usually mean lots of pedestrianisation. Wide easy to walk footpaths. Street entertainment, mix of nice coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. in amongst the shops.

Cities like Cork and Dublin can certainly survive and even grow is this sort of environment, but they will absolutely have to change to match peoples changing tastes and preferences.

Very interesting. This would suggest that Cork's city centre traders are actively rejecting measures that will help them survive the rise of e commerce. I suspect this is down to them being poorly advised either by their business representatives or some other entity.

Stephen15

bk wrote: »

Sorry. Yeah, me too, I hear you, though hiking for me.

Though of course you do sometimes have to do it and when you do, I much prefer a city center then a big box retail park. And the point is that most people seem to prefer that too, going by what is happening in the US.

Big box has it's place if you want to buy furniture, large electrical appliances, gardening stuff anything that's bulky and takes up a lot of space and difficult to carry if getting public transport or cycling. If I'm buying clothes r anything I can easily carry I'd go into the CC or Dundrum. Any bulky items I'd go to Ikea for furniture or another big box shop for anything else.

Actually I think big box retailers keep cars out of the city centre ie there's not many furniture shops in the city centre any more all in retail parks on the outskirts.

bk

Stephen15 wrote: »

Big box has it's place if you want to buy furniture, large electrical appliances, gardening stuff anything that's bulky and takes up a lot of space and difficult to carry if getting public transport or cycling. If I'm buying clothes r anything I can easily carry I'd go into the CC or Dundrum. Any bulky items I'd go to Ikea for furniture or another big box shop for anything else.

Actually I think big box retailers keep cars out of the city centre ie there's not many furniture shops in the city centre any more all in retail parks on the outskirts.

With the exception of Ikea, most bulky item shopping is also increasing moving to the showroom/demo model.

Buying a new sofa, it is very rare these days for the store to actually have any in stock. Normally you order it and it arrives from China a few weeks later. The little stock, just in time model. Ironically even the big, out of town box stores rarely actually have stock these days!

Of course it still exists, but internationally it is definitely shrinking.

BTW this doesn't mean large amounts of stock will be kept in the city center. Think of Arnotts, they have an extensive, electrical, white goods and furniture departments. They don't actually have much stock if any in store, you just pick out what you want and they deliver it next day from their warehouse, etc.

SeanW

Frostybrew wrote: »

Very interesting. This would suggest that Cork's city centre traders are actively rejecting measures that will help them survive the rise of e commerce. I suspect this is down to them being poorly advised either by their business representatives or some other entity.

Not only is this claim bizarre in the extreme, but it also fails Occam's Razor. I.E. if there are multiple competing hypotheses to explain something and each appear equally likely, the simplest hypothesis is most likely the correct one. So we have two, to explain the Cork Business Alliances' 200 member unanimous stance.

1. They're all being lied to for by unknown 3rd parties for undefined, possibly nefarious reasons. And none of them are smart enough to smell a rat.
2. Their business is genuinely being hammered and they are acting accordingly.

Zebra3 wrote: »

If you ignore the stats that show how many people are killed by accidents and through air pollution caused by cars, and all the money that flows out of our economy because of cars, yeh there’s not much wrong with them.

Cars also have enormous social benefits, extremely enormous social benefits that dramatically outweigh those social costs. By a wide margin.

Frostybrew wrote: »

It goes on to say that the strategy the Cork City traders have chosen is doomed to failure and all international studies support this.

Yet the unanimous account of 200 traders is that the car ban is what is dooming them to failure.

The contrasting fates of Leeds and Bradford city centres is used to show what happens when a city chooses the wrong option. Leeds went for a pedestrian friendly approach while Bradford chose the car option.

Umm ... you do realise that these cities are nothing like Cork at all, right?

Subsequently Leeds City Centre has thrived and Bradford is in rapid decline. Cork is enthusiastically following Bradford's approach. Both Leeds and Bradford are very similar to Cork in many ways with similar economic histories and population sizes relative to their hinterland.

Baahahahahahahahhaahhaa ... oh wait, you were actually serious?
Cork city has a population of about 125,000. You have to include the metro area to get any significant population figure, of nearly 400,000. Bradford has a City population of over 500,000 and Leeds has a City population of 781,000. I don't have metro area populations for Leeds or Bradford but I suspect they are significant. It literally took me two minutes on Wikipedia to confirm that Cork is way smaller than either of the two above.

Each urban area is different and has different solutions to a given problem. If you have a traffic snarl up in a little village or small town, the solution is probably to bypass the village. A traffic problem in New York, London or Tokyo probably could never be solved by adding more roads, so that's when you'd look at building new Tube/Subway/Shinkansen lines etc.

Cork is also significantly different to Dublin in that Dublin has a massive city and Metro population, in excess of 500,000 and 1.3 million respectively, which is why Dublin City Council can do all the anti-car stuff it wants, there is sufficient footfall in the city and barely but adequate links from the metro area into the core to sustain it (Dart, commuter lines, 2 main luas routes and so on) that "big city" approaches will work for it.

Cork is smaller, with a much poorer transportation system (no trams and a heavy rail system centred around Kent station which is nowhere near Patrick Street). Because of all this, it stands to reason that the 200 traders who voted in unison to object to the car ban are relaying their experience accurately. It's also very likely that a lot of the discounting of the traders' position comes from ignorance or ideological foundations.

Unfortunately it is not always the case - people don't know what is or will be better for them. Especially in medium to long term.

What if there is no long term because the medicine kills the patient?

Assuming you have a job, say your boss said to you "we have this great initiative but it's going to mean cutting your salary by 50% for the foreseeable future - but you'll still have to pay all of your current expenses including income tax on your current salary" How long would it be before you object/quit? If you wouldn't put up with your income being hammered, why should the 200+ members of the Cork Business Alliance?

What's more the city is for more people than 200 traders...

The phrase "canary in the coal mine" comes to mind. If you let the 200 traders go under, what replaces them?

grogi

SeanW wrote: »

What if there is no long term because the medicine kills the patient?

Chemo kills some patients, that's true. But now we are treating cancer with concealer.

Virtually never I get to the city to get my shopping/go out in my car. Parking has been a hassle since I remember. I'd take a taxi - with family of four it turns out cheapest, easier and faster. If I take the car, I go to Mahon... Ban actually did bring me to the city, not keep away...

The phrase "canary in the coal mine" comes to mind. If you let the 200 traders go under, what replaces them?

I come from family of coal miners and don't get what you're trying to say. That those 200 are the litmus paper?


If the traders don't want to adapt and start delivering what a modern city needs - then fare well. You provide service to the city, not the other way round.

SeanW

grogi wrote: »

I come from family of coal miners and don't get what you're trying to say.

Historically, canaries were used as sentinel species in some coal mines.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine

has since become an idiom for anything that warns of danger. I put it to you that 200 traders seeing their business drop off a cliff qualifies.

If the traders don't want to adapt and start delivering what a modern city needs - then fare well. You provide service to the city, not the other way round.

The traders represented include a wide variety of small business normally found in any town or city centre. If a City Centre is so badly mishandled by blind ideologues that it cannot (as a result of said mishandling) support a mens clothing store, Chinese take away, a cafe or a butcher, (and if said failure is caused solely by an abdication of responsibility for bad policy) then what exactly do you expect will work there?

Frostybrew

SeanW wrote: »

Not only is this claim bizarre in the extreme

There's a big difference between poorly advised and 'lying'. You're trying to put words in my mouth. I suspect there's a touch of herd mentality underpinning the trader's actions.

SeanW wrote: »

Umm ... you do realise that these cities are nothing like Cork at all, right?

You seemed to have ignored the term 'relative to their hinterland'.They are actually very similar, being second tier regional cities with a long successful industrial history and subsequent rustbelt style decline. Yes Cork's population is lower, but's it's influence in a wider national and international context would be similar.

SeanW wrote: »

Baahahahahahahahhaahhaa ... oh wait, you were actually serious?

Interesting style of debate. Do you find this technique works?

SeanW wrote: »

Cork is smaller, with a much poorer transportation system (no trams and a heavy rail system centred around Kent station which is nowhere near Patrick Street). Because of all this, it stands to reason that the 200 traders who voted in unison to object to the car ban are relaying their experience accurately. It's also very likely that a lot of the discounting of the traders' position comes from ignorance or ideological foundations.

The traders and the CBA provided no evidence. They made claims, but had no evidence to back them up. Can you prove your 'ignorance' claim? Where is your evidence?

grogi

SeanW wrote: »

Historically, canaries were used as sentinel species in some coal mines.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine

has since become an idiom for anything that warns of danger. I put it to you that 200 traders seeing their business drop off a cliff qualifies.

As mentioned before - I know exactly what it means. I just don't know what you are trying to say...

The traders represented include a wide variety of small business normally found in any town or city centre. If a City Centre is so badly mishandled by blind ideologues that it cannot (as a result of said mishandling) support a mens clothing store, Chinese take away, a cafe or a butcher, (and if said failure is caused solely by an abdication of responsibility for bad policy) then what exactly do you expect will work there?

Every Wednesday I would get my car at 3:30, drive to the city to get two pounds of minced beef and a suit... Ah, old times... /s

Regardless what kind of business you are, you need to know your customer.

If you are a suit specialist - who buys there? Is it someone that would be dropped of from Patrick Street? Don't think so...
If you are a butcher - who buys at your place? I guess it is someone that lives in the area or works in the area. Nobody in their sane mind would drive to a particular butcher shop, unless it is some very specialised shop, exp. who sells only meats from Minnesota.

Same logic can be applied to a cafe, a pharmacy, a bakery and an optician etc. Know your customers and understand what they need. Why the hell a bakery is closed when I am walking to the office in the morning? Make your stuff early morning and sell fresh to office rats when they go to the office.

SeanW

grogi wrote: »

As mentioned before - I know exactly what it means. I just don't know what you are trying to say...

I thought my point was very simple, just as the canary wheezing in the coal mine warns of danger, so to do 200 traders simultaneously seeing their business fall off a cliff are also warning of danger. If you're in a coal mine and your canary dies, you need to do a 180 turn and get out of there. Likewise, if you're running a city and you enact a bad policy that results in 200 traders seeing their business fall off a cliff, that's also a pretty good indication that something is badly wrong and corrective action is required. Fortunately it seems that is now happening.

If you are a butcher - who buys at your place? I guess it is someone that lives in the area or works in the area. Nobody in their sane mind would drive to a particular butcher shop, unless it is some very specialised shop, exp. who sells only meats from Minnesota.

Funny, you're actually wrong about that. When I lived in Cork there was butcher shop in the English Market that made a mean batter burger. Don't recall ever going into town specifically for that but I used to visit the English Market on a number of occasions, how often exactly I cannot recall. And yes, I drove most times, parking in the Grand Parade parking garage. It wasn't that much more hassle than driving to Wilton, so I'd nearly as easily go there as go to Wilton.

Same logic can be applied to a cafe, a pharmacy, a bakery and an optician etc. Know your customers and understand what they need. Why the hell a bakery is closed when I am walking to the office in the morning? Make your stuff early morning and sell fresh to office rats when they go to the office.

Patrick Street a graveyard, South Mall a dysfunctional mess. That's the evidence presented by a local reporter Eoin English.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/ghost-town-cork-traders-threaten-rates-revolt-over-city-centre-car-ban-469377.html

I cannot think of many types of businesses that could thrive in that.

Frostybrew wrote: »

There's a big difference between poorly advised and 'lying'. You're trying to put words in my mouth. I suspect there's a touch of herd mentality underpinning the trader's actions.

Forgive me but I cannot keep up with these ridiculous and overly-convoluted theories. Who is poorly advising who? And for what reason? And why does such a convoluted theory make more sense than that the traders are simply telling the truth?

You seemed to have ignored the term 'relative to their hinterland'.They are actually very similar, being second tier regional cities with a long successful industrial history and subsequent rustbelt style decline. Yes Cork's population is lower, but's it's influence in a wider national and international context would be similar.

I'm sure there are similarities between Bandon and Tokyo, but the fact that one is tiny and the other is huge means it's a bad comparison.

Interesting style of debate. Do you find this technique works?

Again, sorry, but I just couldn't take it seriously. Cork vs. the Leeds-Bradford Metroplex? You cannot possibly be serious. I thought this was ridiculous when I first saw it, what with both cities having main train stations in their city centres and both cities being many multiples the size of Cork, but then I took 2 minutes to look up Leeds and Bradford on Google Maps and found that the two cities are actually conjoined into a single metroplex! Literally, if you look at the A647 West from Pudsey (like in this screenshot) can you tell me where Leeds ends and Bradford begins? The only way to know is that Leeds has a Bradford Road, and Bradford has a Leeds Road. Where the Bradford Road becomes the Leeds road, so Leeds ends and Bradford begins. Because they are a conjoined metroplex, that's the only way to know.

This makes the argument about Leeds-Bradford even more ridiculous because where comparing Cork with even one of them would be questionable in the extreme given that Cork is only a fraction of the size of either of them on their own, the fact that the two cities you mentioned are a conjoined metroplex, each in each others hinterland, makes it beyond ridiculous and just plain bizarre.

The traders and the CBA provided no evidence. They made claims, but had no evidence to back them up. Can you prove your 'ignorance' claim? Where is your evidence?

First of all evidence has been provided. This is a recent 4:30PM weekday shot of Patrick Street. It's dead. I lived in Cork a few years ago and I can confirm that this is not normal. Something is badly wrong.

Secondly, you only need evidence if you have reason to doubt the word of the people involved. But why would they lie? To suggest that they are not telling the truth about their experience when they have no rational reason to be untruthful is to raise two possibilities:

1. There's something going on and they're telling the truth but have not proved it to your satisfaction.
2. Their business is fine and they're just making it up or something. All or most of 200 of them, acting in concert (conspiracy?). For some mysterious reason, maybe nefarious, maybe not, no-one knows. Or they're just all being mis-advised. By whom, why and for what reason? again no-one knows.

In trying to decide which is correct, I refer to Occam's Razor, a philosophical device used to make decisions in these cases: generally it says that among competing hypotheses, the simpler, the more reliable.

The first hypothesis is simple - the traders have suffered and they're speaking out accordingly. The other hypotheses given by the anti-car people here are bizarre, ill-conceived and incomprehensible. The only thing that is clear about any of them is that they are designed to support an already predetermined conclusion and that they are subordinate to it. Therefore, Occam's razor suggests that the first possibility is probably the correct one.

As for ignorance, I'm suggesting that it's easy to say that a bad policy should be continued when the person doing so is not suffering the ill effects of bad policy. If you just stick your fingers in your ears and purposefully ignore the problems because your conclusion is predetermined, that's being ignorant.

Podge_irl

https://www.independent.ie/archives/flashback-the-pedestrianisation-of-grafton-street-began-45-years-ago-today-35022278.html

Despite continuing protests from local traders the Street was formally pedestrianised in the early 1980s. At first thought to be unsuccessful, the subsequent paving of the street benefitted the area.

Traders dislike any short-term interruption to the regular flow of business that they are used to. Their concerns should be listened to but they can be phenomenally short-sighted and not necessarily a bell-weather of anything.

Some of them quite possibly will also go out of business but they will be replaced and the world will keep turning.