Interesting Maps
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From a mental health point of view, sitting in traffic for hours every day can't be good for you either (says yer man with a 7 minute cycle to work). And the more northerly countries would be more likely to have worse driving conditions on their commute. I still prefer going to the office, though.
And for the sake of having a map, here's a work-related one, although not very up to date.
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Thoms Directory map of Dublin city, 1890
Dublin was a much smaller city of 375,000 at the time, most of whom lived in poverty in squalid slum conditions in the Georgian tenements and back lanes.
The wealthy were moving out of the city, across the canal ring into the then new suburbs of Ballsbridge, Rathmines and Rathgar to escape the squalour and crime of the city. The built up area of Dublin extended out as far as Terenure by 1890.
Note the separate townships for Drumcondra, Clontarf, Pembroke, Kilmainham and Rathmines - all of which were incorporated into Dublin city borough in 1930.
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These from Patrick Abercrombie (1922), Dublin of the Future. It was a plan to redesign Dublin to both cope with anticipated expansion and to make it more reflective of the ideals of the newly independent state. It won a competition towards that end, and the whole plan is one of the most remarkable books in Irish architectural and planning history.
The most obvious change he purposes here is to move the center of the city to Capel Street, and the idea was that this would be transformed into a very wide boulevard with large monumental buildings at either end, with the city's tram system radiating outwards from there. He also proposed new developments at Crumlin and Marino, and the creation of a radial traffic system with a serious of large spokes emanating from the center of the city outwards.
It's a really amazing book. It's heavily influenced by the transformation of Paris by Haussmann in the 19th century. While the Wide Streets Commission in Dublin had carried out some limited improvements to the city, the general idea of a more general recreation of the streetscape along rational lines with widened boulevard and monumental buildings was very much in fashion at this time.
Abercrombies plan, though, was originally conceived BEFORE the Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, and he made some adjustments to it in the aftermath. Most notably, he describes the destruction of the city in this period both in terms of the kind of evil that results from a lack of rational planning, and as an opportunity, where areas of the city were now a tabula rasa to create that more rational city (and also to occupy its workers in doing something positive).
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