Cork Northern Distributor Road

Progressed to first stage of planning.

https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40983443.html

Limerick's NDR was reinstated, or rather the bit that improved PT and active travel was. The bit that was canned was primarily about creating distant car-dependent suburbs.

I think that the Northern Bypass may well be necessary for the city to function in the future, because of the limitations of the Douglas section of the existing N40. But I'd say the big fear is that if you progress it before the distributor, it will get watered down into a dysfunctional double-jobbing distributor/bypass "ring road" like its southern counterpart. Hence them going for the distributor first. And in fairness, housing is THE top priority right now, and in that context a distributor is critical.

What about the hospitals in the City Center, I am referring of course to the South Infirmary, The Mercy etc, what about their supplies, what if they are urgent ?

What about out patients attending appointments at same, many of whom are incapable of using public transport.

Your point sounds great in theory but unfortunately reality puts up challenges

I wonder how many of those same parked cars in that area are relatives of out patients or in patients ?

So the rule will be that no one can drive in a car to a hospital any longer, I am sure that will go down well.

As someone who's recently spent a couple of days in the care of the Mercy (emergency vascular surgery followed by recovery), anyone who drives to the Mercy for anything else than dropping off or collecting someone should be admitted to the psychiatric department there. And from my experience, most cars there just use that area as a rat run, I can count on a single hand the cars that dropped someone off or picked up someone at the Mercy whilst I was there. The hospital itself even redirects potential patients or visitors to the car parks at Crawford Quay or North Main Street in their patient booklet.

Some level of car access to particular locations can be maintained without having free for all access to the entire city centre. It's how many cities around the world now operate.

There's always some poor unfortunates to feign concern for when opposing something you don't want to happen.

We're a little bit outside of the scope of the thread but just here to say there's no discussion about road types: Northern Distributor is 1 No. Pedestrian+Cycle+Bus+Car each side. Northern section of N40 is dual carriageway (and no sustainable transport) each side. Southern Distributor is 1 No. Pedestrian+Cycle+Bus+Car each side. Very little wriggle room there.

On the banning of cars from the centre, congestion charges is one method, banning through traffic is another, just like has been done in lots of cities. There will be no rules that "nobody can drive...." it will be that you will have longer routes and face higher prices if you're either using the city centre as your car's transport corridor, or storage location. Naturally blue badge holders will be exempt from the "high prices" bit, but will not be exempt from the "longer routes" bit. To get from (for instance) Carrigtohill to CUH, you will be sent around the city centre rather than through it. To get to Apple from Douglas, you will be sent around rather than through, etc. Patrick's street would likely be the first street "closed" to through traffic, I'd expect, possibly followed by Washington Street and other streets on the centre island. I suspect the Distributors WILL get through planning without this "traffic reduction" measure, but the bypass most likely will not. Likely the Northern N40 will also see new train stations and P&R as part of the plan too.

There are two facts that you cannot get around:

1. The city centre is a finite size.
2. There are far more people who want to get into the city than can be accommodated if they all drive.

Road-space in the city is thus a scarce resource. To accommodate additional travellers, you can either maximise road-space to remove the scarcity, or increase the utilisation of what you have already (increasing the number of people transported per lane metre per hour). Or, more bluntly, you can propose any solution you want, all the way from levelling the centre and replacing it with car-parks at one extreme, to closing all the streets and forcing everyone to use a bike or bus at the other. Both of those positions are ridiculous, and anyone proposing them — or claiming that someone else is proposing them — is an idiot.

In any future plans, there will be restrictions on private car drivers who have no good reason not to use alternative methods of transport. Those who insist on driving will not find blocked streets (because blue-badge parking and delivery access is still needed), but they will probably have to pay for the use of the scarce resource that they’re consuming. Follow that principle of resource pricing to its conclusion and you will end with a situation where public transport is a significantly cheaper and faster way of getting around than driving in a private car. That is the case in all cities with well-functioning public transport systems.

But even then, nobody will stop you using a car if that’s your choice - just expect to have to pay more, park further away and walk longer distances when you do.

So just to name two cities, London has congestion charging and Málaga has an almost completely pedestrianised city centre. Both of those places have people with physical and intellectual disabilities, elderly people, parents with small children, shops requiring deliveries, and all the other whatabouts that you mentioned over a few replies. So I think that instead of you asking the questions, the onus really is on you to explain why you believe these measures wouldn’t work in Cork when there is ample evidence that solutions have been found in other places.

Our road management follows the same pattern as other European countries: National routes are planned and managed nationally, with on-the-ground supervision contracted out to local authorities, and local routes are fully managed by the local authorities.

National rail is the same deal too. The difference is that unlike other European countries, we have very few local rail systems, so the issue of control hasn’t come up. But by rights, yes, there should be a Dublin Transportation Office (again - there used to be one, but it was folded into NTA) responsible for DART, bus and LUAS in that city. Similarly for Cork, although Cork’s transportation network is pitiful by comparison.

As the Cork-Dublin service is a national line, no regional authority should be hijacking its operations. Regarding this weekend, there are two possibilities: either Irish Rail didn’t take account of this being a major weekend for Dublin-Cork visitors; or that actually they did take this into account, and realised that the vast majority of rail visitors will already be in in Cork before 14:30 Saturday, the start of these works, and will stay until after the works are done. The inconvenient timing of the works (from IR’s point of view) suggests the second scenario.

Merging of local authorities makes sense in a lot of cases: Waterford City and County are too small in isolation, and had significant duplication of function. By rights, we’d have got rid of the GAA Jersey bullshit, done the job right, and made a Waterford Regional authority with control over Waterford County as well as the city’s hinterlands in South Kilkenny, South-East Tipperary and West Wexford. That’s how other countries do things, but just try it here...

Yep, it’s the truth, even if it annoys some leisure travellers. Weekend volumes are much lower, and weekend travellers are much more likely to be able to reschedule their trip to avoid works period than someone who relies on the train to get in and out of work/college/school.

It is a joke, but thats for the N40 Cork North Ring (aka Cork Northern Transport project), this thread is for the Northern Distributor urban road. Its confusing that they are both being done at the same time, but both are necessary.

It’ll run completely contra to the people living on the North side who are crying for some sort of infrastructure to allow better east - west transit.

There’s one massive problem with the statement above. You are assuming that the Greens have a brain. Unfortunately they have proven that’s not the case more often than not. Most anti infrastructure party in Ireland. Unless it’s pie in the sky stuff, they are all for it