That’s grand. I’ll just carry my weekly shopping by myself.
And what are all the larger corporations going to do considering they’re responsible for roughly 70% of global emissions? Why can’t these companies (and indeed, countless others) in Dublin put their best foot forward and actually do something for a change, instead of leaving the onus squarely on its citizens?
You just need to look at the picture on that story to see why people are driving.
Huge sections of dublin outside the canals are dominated by car infrastructure. Pedestrians and cyclists limited to tiny footpaths or “cycle lanes”, the emphasis is on the car driving suburbanite, not anyone else.
We don’t need to do anything as individuals, we will have no effect. People like Taylor Swift create more emissions on their private jets in a year than a normal person would in 500 years and unless corporations causing 70% of the problem are stopped nothing will change. Placing responsibility on regular people is a pointless exercise
So 5 minutes in the car, both ways, 10 minutes, let’s say you do an average of 50 km/h in Dublin, ~8 kilometers covered.
You can do ~20 such journeys a week in a modern small car and it is equivalent to the difference between a vegetarian diet and moderate meat eating diet in that same week [1]. You can offset that “10 minute journey” by skipping meat (especially beef) in **one** meal a week.
If you have a family of four, you can quadruple that impact, and get ~40 minutes of driving for no additional carbon impact. So why don’t we have regular articles up-voted telling us to skip meat in a meal? To cut down on beef?
These articles, I suspect, appeal to people who *can’t* drive, who have never read the environmental numbers on dietary impact vs driving, who like to eat meat, who see cars and smell fumes and think “must be worse than my food choices”, and without a thought will buy beef in the super market.
I ride a bicycle but also have a motorcycle and a car, and my mileage per week means I do less environmental harm than a pedestrian or cyclist who eats meat.
By all means, cycle when you can, walk if you can, but don’t be fooled into thinking private car use is the main cause of climate change just because it is highly visible.
No it’s the people’s fault, no it’s the companies fault, no it’s rich people, no it’s meat eaters, no it’s asthmatics, no no no now it’s the government’s, no it’s the gaa. No it’s people’s fault again.
See you back next month for this argument after another heatwave
This is just another narrative for shifting responsibility away from the government (to e.g. provide proper public transport), and onto ‘personal responsibility’.
Even pointing this out then gets taken over with the ‘but personal responsibility matters too!’ argument – deliberately ignoring the governments primary share of responsibility, for shit infrastructure.
Another “Us V Them” narrative.
Look country folks, it’s dubs that are the problem with their wasteful five min journeys.
Look Dubs, it’s the country folk that are the problem burning all that turf.
Devide and conquer!
Article title: Dubliners Need to Stop Jumping in the Car for Five-Minute Trips
Article content when you actually analyze it: Dublin has a lot of poorly designed roads and lack of direct routes for pedestrians or cyclists due to single entrance housing estates etc.
Anyone else getting tired of the media happy to go along with push-down guilt tripping headlines rather than getting to the root of the matter.?
Also the R139 is crap for motorists too, one of the most miserable sections of road in Dublin. Narrow lanes, a 60kph limit and fish in a barrel area to get done for speeding but hey, some eejits gonna be up your hole anyway even if you stay in the “slow ” lane. The road only starts to make sense when you realize it’s actually part of the M50 that was never completed but it doesn’t seem like they’ve done anything to make it suitable for being “not motorway” either.
The problem is largely the result of urban sprawl. Successive failures in housing mean that people look at the likes of kilcock and Enfield as basically Dublin and the likes of Mullingar and Longford as viable commuter belt towns.
This coupled with a woefully inadequate public transport infrastructure means you’ve pushed people out to places that are far from where they need to go on a daily basis and given them very little option other than cars. Yea five minute journeys are not good, but equally you need to look at the reasons people do them. Laziness is for sure an issue, but it’s only one of a multitude of factors
5 minutes in a car. 1 hr by public transport
This shit needs to stop. Dublin has the best public transport in the country and it is a shit show. The rest of the country simply cannot reduce their car usage.
The public transport in this country is beyond a joke
It’s touched on in the article, but Dublin suburbs are often literally designed as blockades! Estates are designed to stop the public walking through. A journey that could take 5 minutes walk as the crow flies, becomes a 30 minutes or more trek because you have to navigate around an estate rather than through it.
Really noticed this when we were looking for a house, wanted to make sure we were 5-10 walk to a corner shop. Its deceiving on Google maps, where it can look like a house is close to shops, only to look at the walking route and you realise you have to walk out of the estate and around the perimeter.
This is such a small and easy fix which could be implemented next week to add cut-throughs to estates, which would surely see a reduction in short trips.
I don’t doubt that a lot of people would lose their minds at the idea: *”but the little gurriers and **strangers** might walk past my house, oh lord, I feel faint!”*
That’s it – stir the pot between the Dublin motorists and cyclists. Meanwhile the fact there is no metro in Dublin passes beneath both of them unnoticed.
Or the big data centres could just use less electricity
That’s how you designed the city you fuck tits. Do you know how many trips I’d have to take to the shop to pick up a weeks shopping? Everything is just slightly out of comfortable walking distance. Oh also crime, I mean some people don’t exactly feel safe walking into their own estate because of “that house in the road who always has gangs of people and scramblers around it”. Fucking donkey shite
I always love this talk of reducing car usage.
Fix public transport then and people might just do that. The reality is that in many situations a five minute car ride is massively longer or more dangerous if taking public transport.
The production of cement is huge contributor to CO2 emissions. All the cycle lanes you want,and you are just passing into the wind.look at the amount of housing that’s required.
To meet the city’s climate goals, the should get rid of the Green Party and lower their goals.
>In Coventry in the United Kingdom, the local council is trialling a scheme to pay people £3,000 in “mobility credits” to give up their cars – money they can use to buy a bike or spend on public transport.
>In Brussels in Belgium, residents who cancel their licence plates can also get up to €900 to spend on other sustainable ways to get about – and access to a mobility coach to help them work out the best alternatives.
I think this suggestion from the article is missing the point. I live in a town and rarely use my car, but I still keep it because I sometimes need to take a longer trip on a time and route of my choosing. But the town is safe and easy to walk around and things are close by, so I don’t use it much.
What are they talking about??! They’ve created a city totally reliable on cars! I live in the city centre old Dublin Thomas Street and there’s a three lane fucking highway running through it! Can’t wait to rent up and leave this car destroyed city. r/fuckcars
90% of urban children live less than 2km from their school. There is no excuse that any non disabled child in that cachement needs a lift to school. Put a 500 meter exclusion zone around schools where set down or pickup or parking is banned from 8-9.30am and 1.45 – 4.30pm , make it a 400 quid fine for dropping off kids in traffic, put up loads of bollards to stop kerb parking .
If you cut out the school run you’d save so many useless car journeys.
PS – your kids don’t melt in the rain and it rarely snows here, no excuse
21 comments
That’s grand. I’ll just carry my weekly shopping by myself.
And what are all the larger corporations going to do considering they’re responsible for roughly 70% of global emissions? Why can’t these companies (and indeed, countless others) in Dublin put their best foot forward and actually do something for a change, instead of leaving the onus squarely on its citizens?
You just need to look at the picture on that story to see why people are driving.
Huge sections of dublin outside the canals are dominated by car infrastructure. Pedestrians and cyclists limited to tiny footpaths or “cycle lanes”, the emphasis is on the car driving suburbanite, not anyone else.
We don’t need to do anything as individuals, we will have no effect. People like Taylor Swift create more emissions on their private jets in a year than a normal person would in 500 years and unless corporations causing 70% of the problem are stopped nothing will change. Placing responsibility on regular people is a pointless exercise
So 5 minutes in the car, both ways, 10 minutes, let’s say you do an average of 50 km/h in Dublin, ~8 kilometers covered.
You can do ~20 such journeys a week in a modern small car and it is equivalent to the difference between a vegetarian diet and moderate meat eating diet in that same week [1]. You can offset that “10 minute journey” by skipping meat (especially beef) in **one** meal a week.
If you have a family of four, you can quadruple that impact, and get ~40 minutes of driving for no additional carbon impact. So why don’t we have regular articles up-voted telling us to skip meat in a meal? To cut down on beef?
These articles, I suspect, appeal to people who *can’t* drive, who have never read the environmental numbers on dietary impact vs driving, who like to eat meat, who see cars and smell fumes and think “must be worse than my food choices”, and without a thought will buy beef in the super market.
I ride a bicycle but also have a motorcycle and a car, and my mileage per week means I do less environmental harm than a pedestrian or cyclist who eats meat.
By all means, cycle when you can, walk if you can, but don’t be fooled into thinking private car use is the main cause of climate change just because it is highly visible.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1
Ahhh so it begins again.
No it’s the people’s fault, no it’s the companies fault, no it’s rich people, no it’s meat eaters, no it’s asthmatics, no no no now it’s the government’s, no it’s the gaa. No it’s people’s fault again.
See you back next month for this argument after another heatwave
This is just another narrative for shifting responsibility away from the government (to e.g. provide proper public transport), and onto ‘personal responsibility’.
Even pointing this out then gets taken over with the ‘but personal responsibility matters too!’ argument – deliberately ignoring the governments primary share of responsibility, for shit infrastructure.
Another “Us V Them” narrative.
Look country folks, it’s dubs that are the problem with their wasteful five min journeys.
Look Dubs, it’s the country folk that are the problem burning all that turf.
Devide and conquer!
Article title: Dubliners Need to Stop Jumping in the Car for Five-Minute Trips
Article content when you actually analyze it: Dublin has a lot of poorly designed roads and lack of direct routes for pedestrians or cyclists due to single entrance housing estates etc.
Anyone else getting tired of the media happy to go along with push-down guilt tripping headlines rather than getting to the root of the matter.?
Also the R139 is crap for motorists too, one of the most miserable sections of road in Dublin. Narrow lanes, a 60kph limit and fish in a barrel area to get done for speeding but hey, some eejits gonna be up your hole anyway even if you stay in the “slow ” lane. The road only starts to make sense when you realize it’s actually part of the M50 that was never completed but it doesn’t seem like they’ve done anything to make it suitable for being “not motorway” either.
The problem is largely the result of urban sprawl. Successive failures in housing mean that people look at the likes of kilcock and Enfield as basically Dublin and the likes of Mullingar and Longford as viable commuter belt towns.
This coupled with a woefully inadequate public transport infrastructure means you’ve pushed people out to places that are far from where they need to go on a daily basis and given them very little option other than cars. Yea five minute journeys are not good, but equally you need to look at the reasons people do them. Laziness is for sure an issue, but it’s only one of a multitude of factors
5 minutes in a car. 1 hr by public transport
This shit needs to stop. Dublin has the best public transport in the country and it is a shit show. The rest of the country simply cannot reduce their car usage.
The public transport in this country is beyond a joke
It’s touched on in the article, but Dublin suburbs are often literally designed as blockades! Estates are designed to stop the public walking through. A journey that could take 5 minutes walk as the crow flies, becomes a 30 minutes or more trek because you have to navigate around an estate rather than through it.
Really noticed this when we were looking for a house, wanted to make sure we were 5-10 walk to a corner shop. Its deceiving on Google maps, where it can look like a house is close to shops, only to look at the walking route and you realise you have to walk out of the estate and around the perimeter.
This is such a small and easy fix which could be implemented next week to add cut-throughs to estates, which would surely see a reduction in short trips.
I don’t doubt that a lot of people would lose their minds at the idea: *”but the little gurriers and **strangers** might walk past my house, oh lord, I feel faint!”*
That’s it – stir the pot between the Dublin motorists and cyclists. Meanwhile the fact there is no metro in Dublin passes beneath both of them unnoticed.
Or the big data centres could just use less electricity
That’s how you designed the city you fuck tits. Do you know how many trips I’d have to take to the shop to pick up a weeks shopping? Everything is just slightly out of comfortable walking distance. Oh also crime, I mean some people don’t exactly feel safe walking into their own estate because of “that house in the road who always has gangs of people and scramblers around it”. Fucking donkey shite
I always love this talk of reducing car usage.
Fix public transport then and people might just do that. The reality is that in many situations a five minute car ride is massively longer or more dangerous if taking public transport.
The production of cement is huge contributor to CO2 emissions. All the cycle lanes you want,and you are just passing into the wind.look at the amount of housing that’s required.
To meet the city’s climate goals, the should get rid of the Green Party and lower their goals.
>In Coventry in the United Kingdom, the local council is trialling a scheme to pay people £3,000 in “mobility credits” to give up their cars – money they can use to buy a bike or spend on public transport.
>In Brussels in Belgium, residents who cancel their licence plates can also get up to €900 to spend on other sustainable ways to get about – and access to a mobility coach to help them work out the best alternatives.
I think this suggestion from the article is missing the point. I live in a town and rarely use my car, but I still keep it because I sometimes need to take a longer trip on a time and route of my choosing. But the town is safe and easy to walk around and things are close by, so I don’t use it much.
What are they talking about??! They’ve created a city totally reliable on cars! I live in the city centre old Dublin Thomas Street and there’s a three lane fucking highway running through it! Can’t wait to rent up and leave this car destroyed city. r/fuckcars
90% of urban children live less than 2km from their school. There is no excuse that any non disabled child in that cachement needs a lift to school. Put a 500 meter exclusion zone around schools where set down or pickup or parking is banned from 8-9.30am and 1.45 – 4.30pm , make it a 400 quid fine for dropping off kids in traffic, put up loads of bollards to stop kerb parking .
If you cut out the school run you’d save so many useless car journeys.
PS – your kids don’t melt in the rain and it rarely snows here, no excuse