Cork traffic

No what I meant was the pedestrian light is coming on even when there are no pedestrians. It should only come on when the button has been pressed.

You go right at Parnell place, left over Brian Boru bridge and left along the north quays. Simple.

But yes, that particular scenario of picking someone up on Merchant's Quay is problematic, all right.

The answer would be to pick that person up elsewhere, perhaps Parnell Place?

I mean you can't legally pick up someone on Patrick's Street between 3 and 6.30. You'd just need to collect elsewhere. It's just a fact that you cannot drive your car anywhere you want to.

Do you drive through it every morning? I can video it for you if you like. It shouldn’t be coming on without being pressed anyway.

You won't video anything to evidence your every 30 seconds claim.

Unreal. Not a single pedestrian and the lights going every 18 seconds I counted. Madness. Fair play to you for recording it.

Send it to a councillor, their email addresses are on the city hall website I think.

This is by design. I presume they are aping the situation in Dublin where anti-car council officials quite openly exploited Covid to introduce similar light cycles on the spurious grounds of "social distancing" and similar, but really just to frustrate motorists. I imagine the Cork officials would be quite proud of the video!

Despite many public pronouncements, these people could'nt give a toss about emissions, public transport or anything else other than a fig leaf for their agenda which is as below - witness the much vaunted BusConnects programme which actually features more cycle lanes than bus lanes.

1. Punish motorists.

2. More cycle lanes, and God forbid they not be 100% perfect.

3. Go to 1.

These people genuinely believe that making motorists sit in traffic will engender in them a road to Damascus moment and they'll hop out of their cars and onto a bike.

Not strictly true.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40922480.html#:~:text=The%20report%20found%20Dublin%20had,reading%20of%207.5%C2%B5g%2Fm3.

Obviously, it depends on your location and your destination, but for me, right now, I'm the opposite.

I'm travelling from the city centre to Bishopstown at the moment. I love getting the bus. I'm way less stressed and relaxed. I'm not worried about traffic (also, bus lanes mean that busses do usually get through traffic faster). It probably does take a bit longer but I really don't mind.

I get a short walk in the morning and if it's fine and I have time, I can choose to walk home.

For me it's so much better than sitting in my car getting frustrated and angry.

Bus with a Leap card is cheap, now, too.

I'm genuinely enjoying using public transport. Yes, it could be way better, but it's not all bad.

Anyway, traffic. Yesterday North Mall to Eastgate, Little Island at 4pm - 35 minutes (~20 minutes delays). This morning Cobh to North Mall 8am 67 minutes (~35 minutes delays). Fantastic stuff!🙄

Plenty of people gave a shite, and what's worse, as usual, the work has been done there multiple times, causing even more disruption and repeating the cost. Lose lose. The original plans had that interchange, instead they build the giant signalised roundabout bottleneck we all spent time on. Then, what is it, 20 years later, dig it all up again after the ground has started to recover, and do what was on the original plan.

I'd love to see more frequent buses on the roads we have in the short term, while we wait for these enormous capital projects. My local bus went from frequency of 6 to 8 per hour in 2019 to once an hour now. A bus not showing up when there's another one in 8 minutes isn't the end of the world. It's a different story if the next one is an hour later. It's hardly a surprise the traffic increases when the service drops off. We went from a 2 car family to a 1 car family when we were able to use the bus. Service isn't reliable for us anymore so we're considering getting a second car again.

On roads, I honestly can't grasp why in other countries we are well able to cycle/bus beside or around an existing tree, but in Ireland it's some kind of insurmountable obstacle, only resolved by a chainsaw and a bulldozer. I get that there are standards, but there should also be flexibility. We should value the assets we have (whatever they are, built heritage like old walls or buildings, social spaces, trees etc). It takes decades or centuries for those to exist. We could challenge our designing engineers to be sympathetic to what we already value when developing the plans. The italians have managed to maintain large parts of the Via Appia since 300BC, it's still the longest piece of straight road in europe as far as I know. Think of the marina for example. hundreds of years of pedestrian usage there, and they are planning to run a concrete bridge full of HGVs over it.

Delighted to hear this, loads of pedestrian buttons across the city are broken and there's no way for pedestrians to get safely across. They absolutely need to be part of the timed cycle. Same as no vehicle lights should be sensor only, they break all the time.