DUBLIN CITY centre will be predominantly for pedestrians, cyclists and those using public transport, with through-traffic discouraged, according to a new strategy developed by city planners.
Titled Your City, Your Space , the draft strategy notes that more than 500,000 people access the city centre daily – 235,000 workers, 45,000 students, 120,000 shoppers or other visitors and 116,000 inner city residents.
Irish Times – Well done all those who campaigned for this!
IRELAND’S ONLY local authority cycling officer is to lose his job before Christmas, after Dublin City Council was instructed by the Department of the Environment not to fund the position any further.
“I am due to leave next Thursday,” said the council’s cycling officer, Ciarán Fallon. A Facebook campaign has been started by outraged cycling campaigners in an effort to reverse the decision.
FRANK McDONALD, Environment Editor. Read more
EUROPE COULD cut its total greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25 per cent if every population cycled as regularly as the Danes, according to a pioneering study which tracks the environmental impact of cycling. Read more
Building more quality safe space for cyclists along main routes will prevent them all crowding onto one path.
“If you build it they will come” has not always been true of the great British cycling facility. The bafflingly inappropriate pavements, muddy tracks and steps are usually no more attractive than riding on busy roads with fast cars and big trucks. Read more
.
IRELAND may get its first “traffic light-free” city centre if the ideas being pitched this week by a UK campaigner come to fruition.
Equality Streets is the brainchild of Martin Cassini who believes that replacing the constraints of traffic light systems with common sense and courtesy will lead to less congestion, fewer carbon emissions, improved road safety and billions of euro in savings. Read more
The myth of ‘road tax’ returns to haunt us again. Comparison website Confused.com seem to think cyclists should be liable for a tax abolished more than 70 years ago
Road tax – two words guaranteed to raise the ire of most cyclists. It’s quite an achievement for something which hasn’t existed for 74 years.
Read more. See also: IPayRoadTax.com
INADEQUATE PUBLIC transport has pushed Dublin down the rankings in a table of Europe’s top shopping cities according to a survey published this week.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Globe Shopper City survey found that while Dublin performed strongly when the number of shops was considered and did well on the length of its sales seasons, the city scored poorly in terms of public transport and this pushed it into 14th place out of 33 European cities.
OPINION: THE PRIORITIES set out in the Government’s Infrastructure and Capital Investment 2012 – 2016: Medium-Term Exchequer Framework report of supporting enterprise, health and education are absolutely laudable. In a time when exchequer revenues are outstripped by expenditure, needs must.
But when one examines the transport stratagem against the three objectives it becomes clear the proposed investment does not deliver, nor on one other key criterion: maximising value for money. Most especially it will not promote public health, something that is increasingly linked to our level of active travel, to the best possible degree.