How would you improve Dublin?

[Jackass]

Dublin is a great city...it's my home nd i'm proud of it.
But I think everyone who lives here would agree it could use a lot of improvement. So what would you change??

Here's mine:

For a city famous for it's night life....it's actually pretty crap. I think some great changes could be made to make it a great night city, looks great, and has a party atmosphere, and completely different to a great social, trendy and business city during the day. We should have 24 hour everything....we're a major European city ffs...we should have 24 hour Darts, Luas and Bus... and not in a night link service (although that's actualy pretty good), but a every 5 minutes service. Like London, Paris, NY etc...

Also, 24 hour pubs and clubs, not for a piss up element, but so people can come and go as they like, when they like, and i think it would take away the binge drink mentality of get it all down you before 2am, go for a kebab, get in a fight, then find a bird on the street or in the taxi rank and go home!

We should have a more cosmetic approach to the city. Tax levy on all burger joints, packets of chewing gum, soft drink cans etc...5c on each will pay to have massive clean-ups every night, and have the city sparkling during the day.

The spot lights into the sky on O'Connell street were cool, with a big screen also gave the street a great atmosphere, there should be more of that kind of stuff around the city permanantly.

During the summer, open up places like St.Stephens green for small free open air concerts. A small stage in the corner of the park, with local bands would have a good party event each weekend from the early evening to about 10pm.

Make the Carlton into a 4 story casino. It would get away from the crappy small casinos we already have, and with the other things, make O'Connell street a great party focal point like temple bar.

Inflation has gotten ridiculos...government needs to get some balls and take control. Price caps on everything. Max price on pints: €4.50, guide line prices on property and rent which must be followed within a certain bracket.etc. etc.

What would you change about Dublin city or Dublin Life in general?

stag39

Make the carlton into anything better than the crap facade that has been there for how many effing years!!!! it our main street so come on people in the know do something about it!!! :mad:

Stark

Expansion of the LUAS/Dart system and vastly improved cycle network.

As for all the 24 hour stuff, how's the 24 hour lifestyle going to be funded/staffed? Dublin Bus doesn't make that much money off the NiteLink service as it is. And I don't want to see a night-shift culture in Dublin.

dub45

A decent system of sign posts is very badly needed. Dublin must be one of the worst capital cities in Europe in this respect.

Dublin is increasingly becoming a city of rattling manhole covers. For anyone living beside one of these as thousands of cars and lorries rattle over them every day life can be hell.

Dublin has some lovely parks but have you ever noticed how many of them have most of the gates locked?

On a general level the city is pretty filthy.

A traffic police unit is very badly needed - for instance there now seem to be more motorists on mobile phones than off them driving in the city.

Areas like the boardwalks are all well and fine but drinking in the area should be outlawed and strictly enforced.

Stark

dub45 wrote:

Dublin has some lovely parks but have you ever noticed how many of them have most of the gates locked?

That is seriously irritating. I live right next to a park that I need to pass through regularly. They actually get people to come out and lock/unlock gates totally at random. Sometimes you cross the park to find a gate is open, sometimes it's locked and you need to climb over it.

What's the point? Keeping undesirables out? It's the people you want keep out that are the people who can easily climb over the gates. It only serves to discriminate against those less physically able. And if I got into trouble in a park, I'd much prefer to have an easy escape route.

KillerShamrock

TBO level the whole city and rebuild it staring with the infra stucture.
Try weed out all the people that make that place look bad and give it a bad rep.
Dont get me wrong i love dublin it can be great. i know these are extreme measures and will never happen, they are just my two cents

Sarsfield

Cleaner streets.
Cleaner buildings.
Better street lighting (including more floodlit buildings)
More rail-based public transport including the Heuston-Spencer Dock interconnector.
More cycle-friendly facilities including the Sutton-to-Sandycove cycleway.
Better traffic policing.
Quieter manhole covers (I'd never have thought of it, but now you mention it!)
Better road surfaces in general rather than the current patchwork quilt caused by poorly completed roadworks.
A 'theatre district' - theatres and cinemas are too spread out meaning there's no real cultural district. This will never happen as the Abbey won't be moving to O'Connell St.
Chinatown.
Some more ambitious architecture. And build higher in designated areas (with good public transport links).
Improvements/additions to inner city public swimming pools & leisure centres - apart from the Markievicz the city centre is poorly served.
Later city centre shop opening.

I'm sure I'll think of more.

Stark

The city centre shop opening times are very annoying. In Cork, some shops open late on a Thursday night and practically all shops open till 9:00 on Friday night. Having the Friday night shopping facility makes such a difference. I'm living out in Blanchardstown at the moment so it's handy that a lot of the shops in the shopping centre open till 9PM a lot of nights

dub45

Stark wrote:

That is seriously irritating. I live right next to a park that I need to pass through regularly. They actually get people to come out and lock/unlock gates totally at random. Sometimes you cross the park to find a gate is open, sometimes it's locked and you need to climb over it.

What's the point? Keeping undesirables out? It's the people you want keep out that are the people who can easily climb over the gates. It only serves to discriminate against those less physically able. And if I got into trouble in a park, I'd much prefer to have an easy escape route.

I actually wrote to DCC about this some time ago and managed to extract a reply from them after about nine months!! At that time as 'an experiment' they were going to open an extra gate in the park beside Patrick's cathedral.
My attention had been drawn to the number of gates that are regularly closed on this park by a number of English tourists who were standing outside one day and could not figure how to get into it. I think they may have thought it was some form of open prison as there were lots of people inside just no easy way in. The main gate to a lovely park in Pearse Street is closed and so on and so on.

dub45

Get rid of those stupid kiosks on Capel Street Bridge.

Stop the increasing tendency of people to park cars fully on footpaths. (my attention was only recently drawn to the inconvenience this presents to blind people, old people etc etc.).

There is an increasing tendency on the part of DCC to regard us as subjects rather than citizens.

RandolphEsq

i say add more bright,flashy colours to the city. the bridges should be painted in rainbow colours and walls painted in colour as well as trees,buildings etc. u see where im going

Kinetic^

I would knock down crumlin shopping centre

grimloch

In the perfect world, get rid of the Dublin scum, let people have a bit of safety/peace of mind on their way home.

Obviously make it cleaner, make streets wider so people don't moan so much about the foreign student during summer.

Finally finish O'Connell Street.

Somehow lower rent/insurance so that we could all avail of lower prices.

_Turismo4

grimloch wrote:

In the perfect world, get rid of the Dublin scum, let people have a bit of safety/peace of mind on their way home.

Obviously make it cleaner, make streets wider so people don't moan so much about the foreign student during summer.

Finally finish O'Connell Street.

Somehow lower rent/insurance so that we could all avail of lower prices.

Yep, Well said, Also elect better politicians.

Bam Bam

If its possible to get the scum out of the liffey and have a clean river running through the center of the city.

Also skyscrapers surrounded by small parks, Dublin City needs to start building up instead of out, the spidersweb of roads in the city is choking it to death with traffic.

Zaph0d

Build a weir at the mouth of the liffey so it's at high-tide level all the time.

Dave!

Exterminate all the goddamn junkies

[Jackass]

I agree it's time for high-rise buildings. There isn't enough room in the city for the demand of accomodation and office space, and Dublin city is very restricted by the space it can grow outwards as it is surrounded by sub-urbs. My favourite building in Dublin is the millenium tower beside pearce st. bridge. I love that whole dockland development infact...the whole area is excellent, i have to admit it's one thing the government did manage to get right.

I like the idea of a culture quarter (although some people would argue temple bar is supposed to be just that...but Hen nights aren't exactly culture. )

A proper, full on China town would be great. Has anyone been to the asian market? It's brilliant, I would love to see that on a bigger scale.

Infrastructure is a massive problem...we need several light rail lines, expand the dart line, and i would welcome a cycling culture greatly also, but i would be strongly against a congestion charging system simlar to London!!!

Sarsfield

Have a standard livery for taxis.
Have (and enforce - always our weakness) a reasonable minimum standard for taxi cabs and taxi drivers.

dub45

DaveMcG wrote:

Exterminate all the goddamn junkies

While I like to think I am the 'liberal' type have to confess the junky issue brings out the right winger in me. It simply baffles me that the authorities have allowed the open selling of drugs in Thomas St to continue for so long. Thomas St itself is in dire need of a major overhaul particularly given the number of Tourists who frequent it now on their way to and from Guinnesses.

Ithink I read somewhere that the Guiness Visitor's Centre is one of the most visited tourist spots in the country and yet the vast majority of visitors will access it via one of the most run down areas (in every sense) in the entire city - seems incredible.

Funkstard

Hold creamfields in Ballymun and convince Al-Qaeda to hijack a plane full of package holiday tourists going to Majorca and fly the thing straight into the middle of it all. Kill about 7 birds with the one stone.

There's nothing more I'd like to see than some sort of ethnic cleansing for scum. People above a certain income bracket should have the right to a shoot to kill policy

DublinWriter

1) Proper joined up Metro system

2) Functioning Lord Mayorship with real civic power, elected by the people and not the disgraceful junket it now is.

3) Joined up urban planning, i.e. Adamstown, the population of Drogeha on a plot of land the size of an 18-hole golf course without any schools or amenities.

That's it, basically.

AndyWarhol

Maybe finish the O'Connell Street project before the end of the year? This would be a good start.

kawaii

Plant a giant forest around the city...

grimloch

AndyWarhol wrote:

Maybe finish the O'Connell Street project before the end of the year? This would be a good start.

Ha, it's taken two years to get halfway up the street.

Flukey

Public transport is the big thing that needs addressing. Things like more Luas lines and rail links to the airport. Another good thing for Dublin would be to do more things for the regions, to get more people to move out of Dublin and reduce congestion and many other problems.

AndyWarhol

kawaii wrote:

Plant a giant forest around the city...

You mean reinstate the Pale?

grimloch

Flukey wrote:

Public transport is the big thing that needs addressing. Things like more Luas lines and rail links to the airport. Another good thing for Dublin would be to do more things for the regions, to get more people to move out of Dublin and reduce congestion and many other problems.

Maybe get a bit of an underground system going. I'm not entirely sure but I hear we have a pretty extensive tunnel system under the sity for some reason.

kawaii

AndyWarhol wrote:

You mean reinstate the Pale?

No walls or anything... Just a giant impenatrable forest.

With dinosaurs.

Seriously though, a bit of woodland around the city would be very attractive imo

smarties

definitely increase the height of buildings in the city centre, urban sprawl is out of control when i was 2 and moved into my house, there was a farm beside us, now theres **** loads of apartments and and no farm and im 17.
dont think their will ever be big concerts in stephens green, like theyre so into keeping the grass and flowers nice and keeping it clean, and i appreciate that. a cultural area wud be great. we definitely have enough chinese people to make a chinatown! theres so many things that need to be knocked down and redeveloped, going to boarding school on the luas line makes public transport great for me, but it definitely needs a lot of improvement. and just clean up the city in general its pretty filthy.

Dave!

kawaii wrote:

No walls or anything... Just a giant impenatrable forest.

With dinosaurs.

Seriously though, a bit of woodland around the city would be very attractive imo

It would, but because of the rate at which the city is expanding, you'd be cutting the trees down not long after planting them.