Frank Taylor
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The 3 city councils involved have all added it to their development plans.
Here’s a question and reply asked last December in DLR council:
Question: Councillor S. Fitzpatrick
“To ask the Manager for an update on the Sutton to Sandycove Cycleway project?”Reply:
“A second Feasibility and Preliminary Design report on the Sutton to Sandycove Promenade and Cycleway project was commissioned by Dublin City Council some time ago. Officials from Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council were on the Steering Committee overseeing the preparation of the Report. While a draft Final Report was submitted to the Steering Committee this draft was not acceptable to our representatives and other members of the Steering Committee. To date it has not been possible to agree a draft of the Final Report acceptable to all members of the Steering Committee.It is the Council’s view that the S2S project as originally conceived is no longer feasible given environmental concerns raised by the NPWS and that this needs to be reflected in the Final Report.
Dublin City Council have been asked by us to complete a Final Report representing the views of the Steering Committee and make it available for circulation but have not done so to date.”
I guess that the NPWS concerns refer to the Booterstown marsh.
Dublin City Council has an EIS with ABP since June 09 for the 2km Bull Island section.
http://pleanala.ie/casenum/YA0008.htmDun Laoghaire Council recently proposed a contraflow bike lane through Newtown Avenue, Blackrock, as a coastal bike lane would not be feasible at that point. I think this would lead onto a bike lane on seapoint avenue before veering down to the coast again at Seapoint bathing spot. It would continue along the seafront past Monkstown to Dun Laoghaire.
There is a suggestion for a shortcut bridge from Eastpoint to Clontarf that looks nice to me.
http://www.davidwright.ie/s2s.html
(although this may just be fantasy)Realistically, I guess we are 10 yrs away from seeing this complete. It would be great amenity for the city both for practical use and for fun so it’s a pity that everything else takes priority and that it didn’t get more attention during the boom years.
@Morlan wrote:
Battery operated trams/ APS trams:
How much to you think it would cost to retrofit Luas trams with batteries or third rail conductors? The cost would be astronomical.
The new trams lines BXD & F are unlikely before 2020. Vehicle battery costs have fallen by 50% in the last 4 years. The batteries in the new Nissan Leaf are costing around $9,000 for 24 kwh. If you assume that a tram has 20 time the power req of a car, then that’s $180k for tram batteries. As I remember, the luas trams cost €1m a piece so it’s not completely out of all possibility.
The batteries would just be used to get across the central area from Stephen’s Green to O’Connell Street. Many cities will have this kind of requirement for their trams in future so it would be an off-the-shelf product option at that stage rather than a custom development as the French undertook in Bordeaux.
um yes I seem to have wandered off topic from retail provision in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown to ‘Is Dun Laoghaire a declining kip or not?’. In short you get a shrinking of retail demand after a boom and some premises will be returned to office/residential.There is more to the measure of a town than its retail floor area.
Dunnes in Leopardstown/Ballyogan is around 5400 sqm. built in 2006
I don’t think Dun Laoghaire is half as bad as you’re making out. Many things have improved.
- For decades the pavilion lay derelict – now it’s fancy apartments and a theatre and a row of restaurants/cafes facing the sea, with a new small park due to appear over a covered in railway and the statue of two bits of phallic rust consigned to the bin.
- The pier is improved with better paving and rails and a restored victorian canopy shelter and bandstand
- The Marina is tidier than the arrangement before and must generate some local business.
- The national yacht club has been restored and the interior has been done well for the first time in years
- The new shopping centre is very anonymous but at least well hidden unlike the monstrous poo-coloured industrial box from the 70s that badly needs nuking.
- The town hall is beautifully looked after, the extension is not too bad, the new adjacent apartment buildings and offices are well finished.
- The Royal Marine Hotel is way better outside and in since they knocked the horrid extension and replaced it with something far less offensive.
- The original carlisle pier ironwork should have been been retained but it’s a relief to see the harbour vista reopened and the rotten modern sheath removed.
- There are lots of quirky characteristic bits in Dun Laoghaire like the Victoria monument and the obelisk balanced on balls.
- 40ft seems to have failed a few times now. People don’t like going upstairs to a pub and I think it may need a change of use to succeed.
- The seafront walk form the harbour to Sandycove is much improved and has a nice community atmosphere in the evenings.
- There is some very good housing stock close to the town centre along places like Mulgrave Street, Clarinda Park, Crosthwaite Park, Northumberland Ave, Tivoli Terrace
- A few nice building such as the Commissioners of Irish Lights eco building on Harbour Road
The people’s park is in good shape. Sandycove and Monkstown are distinctive more upmarket neighbours in easy reach.
Dun Laoghaire is well connected to the city by rail and bus and has a large, up-market catchment area. I see it as a great location for offices – staff like working there – and I’d expect to see some of the retail converted back to office use.
I think the threat from Dundrum is far overstated.
Second time lucky. Another try at chewing gum tax – six years later!
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0427/1224269159959.html
There is already a Dunnes anchored shopping centre on the other side of Ballyogan Road (less than half mile from the Park, Carrickmines.
http://www.leopardstownsc.ie/list-of-shops.phpThe purpose of new retail zoning is simply to justify new residential zoning.
The sad thing is that Bailey has spent huge amounts over the past decade promoting himself and is now likely to be elected to the next Dáil on a FG upswing. Maybe he’ll be the next planning minister.
If you need some groceries in Foxrock, you just send the au pair up to Thomas’s to pick up some organic champagne or truffle oil. http://www.thomasoffoxrock.ie/index.html There is a pharmacy, dry cleaners, restaurant, boutique, wine bar etc in the village.
If you are a pleb living in postal Foxrock and you need some baked beans or poptarts, your house is likely located beside Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt where your every lumpen need may be catered for 24/7.
However, if you are a speculator, who owns a landbank off Glenamuck Road and you want an excuse to get your fields rezoned for housing, then you will want to make friends with a few of the local councillors so that they can zone you up a bunch of retail in a field outside Carrickmines.
John Bailey is a very decent man with a life devoted to honesty and integrity and you can read his various saintly exploits here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bailey_(Irish_politician)
Nice to hear from some residents. It’s wrong to think that everyone in a street with some social problems is a criminal. Very often there is a small element causing trouble and everyone else would love to be rid of them.
This new apartment scheme doesn’t look great from York Street but it’s really impressive inside. The sunny courtyard works really well with lots of soft planting and reflected light from the windows. High quality materials and no sense of ‘corporation housing’. It just looks very upmarket. Even the lobbies, common areas, stairs are perfectly finished. Can’t fault it.
By comparison, the blocks on the other side of Mercer Street look like prisons.
No railway order yet – although there was a public ‘open day’ this summer and there is talk of an application next year. DCC said last year that they had decided with the RPA to delay line BX until after the Metro North works are finished in the area. Also they want to build their new malborough st bridge. They estimated last year that the metro works would be ready by 2013 – allowing luas BX to start then. I am guessing this is based on the original transport 21 estimate of 2013 for Metro North completion. At this stage, project bidders are expecting that construction will begin in 2012 and take 6-7 years. So I guess that line BXD might complete by 2020/2022.This is an optimistic estimate given our current circumstances.
As we’re 10 years away from high speed/capacity cross-city, public transport, we should really sort out the buses in the meantime.
The new bridge improves the outer orbital city route. Have a look at this map to see how it fits in
http://www.dublincity.ie/RoadsandTraffic/Traffic/Documents/Outer_Orbital_Route.pdf
I’d say the lights do need to be resequenced around Seville Pl, Amiens St
haha foremanjoe very topical.
StephenC, how is the lighting holding up on the Joyce bridge?
@bigjoe wrote:
agree with you 100% SC. I have to get to drumcondra from pearse street. the no right turn onto the quays makes no sense at all. i’ll take a spin down on a sunday morning to have a proper look.
It’s a direct journey…
pearse street, macken st, bridge, guild st, seville place, portland row, ncr, dorset street, drumcondra.It has to be arranged to dissuade eastlink bridge traffic, otherwise it will just suck up all the toll dodgers and congest the city centre with traffic that previously skirted along east wall rd and sandymount strand.
It’s going to be hard to put double deck buses across it with all the low bridges from the DART line. There might be a market for a route that crosses the DART line at Merrion Gates.
Crosbie said he needed to sell all apartments for 1m each to break even. There were 150 apartments planned plus 500 sqm of offices plus rooftop restaurant plus presumably retail at ground level. So does that mean he expected that it would cost 150m to build the 120m tower? Is that about right?
Planned ‘civic space’ made of 40ft containers.
Doesn’t look too promising.
Here’s a rough transcript of an interview with Marian Finucance & H Crosbie about why he cancelled the Watchtower (from last week).
Finucane: There are a couple of things that you’ve decided to say no. You were going to do the two towers on either side of the port so to speak, U2 doing one, you doing the other and then there was the man you could walk into.
Crosbie: Yeah, it was just too risky, because you know when we were doing that the thing was still at the very, very top but anyone who was smart and intelligent would know this doesn’t feel right. You know the way you just, reading in the papers, mad stuff, was happening and I said it’s too -, I’m not doing that. we needed to sell those apartments for a million plus each – every single one of them – with no safety net. we pulled it. But that doesn’t mean- now we’ve the foundations in – we spent 15 million on the foundations. It might all come again.
Finucane: Will your planning permission hold?
Crosbie: Ah, I don’t think there’ll be much problem with getting it again because it was a lovely design and the Point is called the Point because it used to be where the land met the sea and it’s the absolute ideal place to have two of those pillars and the idea was we were replicating the pillars of Hercules, the original classical statue and at some stage maybe not in my lifetime but it certainly will happen again because it would have been the absolute ideal place for a sky scraper and one of the regrets is that I didn’t get to build the first skyscraper and that would have been it and it would have been fabulous. Imagine coming in from the sea and seeing those two 40 storey towers from 20 miles out at sea – it would have been gorgeous and then you come in through them and you come into a low rise 18th century georgian city – beautiful.
Dublin City Council voted on Monday night to allow cars to drive through college green during the evening rush hour for two months from mid nov to mid jan. They also voted to allow free on street parking in 1380 spaces after 2pm in the city centre. The city manager stated in his report that he could find no evidence that the bus gate had been the cause of a reduction in sales in the city centre shops.
So there you have it: Dublin City Council’s plan to encourage people into Dublin is to transfer road space from public transport to cars and to stop charging for parking spaces that were previously filled by fee paying drivers.
In previous years there was an acknowledgement that the roads could not take the Christmas rush and that people were to be encouraged to use public transport during the busy season with temporary P&R facilities created. There was also an acceptance that charging for parking led to a higher turnover of spaces and availability of parking for those willing to pay. The alternative is that the spaces fill with people abandoning their cars for 10 hours+ while they work an evening shift or hang out in their mates apartments. The streets fill with cars cruising around for free spaces.
I’m very disappointed with the council. Motion was carried 35 to 11. Mostly it was supported by FG/Labour and opposed by FF (surprisingly) and some labour reps and independents like Mannix Flynn. The council seems to have caved in following legal threats from car park owners, an unproven fear that some of their larger ratepayers were losing money and pressure on Labour from their Union paymasters, representing staff in Brown Thomas.
I used to live in Smithfield 15 yrs ago. It has certainly improved since then. The horse fair is occasional and I only noticed it on a couple of occasions. It makes the area more interesting although the more ISPCA type policing the better. The children’s court has to go somewhere and many of the attendees are locals.
Not every area has to be a tourist destination. The population has increased greatly with plenty more private tenants. Population and transport links create a market for more facilities. The planners can be blamed for allowing development that is unsuitable for families and resulting in a narrow demographic of young working tenant residents. This leaves the area quiet during the day.
I preferred living there to temple bar where the noise was too much at night.
To improve smithfield in the future, I would like to see new accommodation suitable for families (large 2/3 bed apartments that overlook green enclosed common play areas, segregated from cars).
