While it’s good to see brown field sites earmarked for housing it will be an absolute ghetto without the public transport links.
The developers will build the housing but I wouldn’t hold out much hope of the proposed luas extensions coming to fruition.
Certainly interesting concept. Car free streets sounds lovely but multistory carparks that you have to rent sound horrible. So give and take I suppose. All hinges on reliable public transport and that’s just not a runner unless they invest more. I ended up WFH yesterday. Standing at the bus stop and they just cancelled the bus. No notification on the app or the board. I just waited 20 mins and said fuck it and went home. I have that luxury though.
That sounds great and should be the way forward. Won’t suit everyone but there are plenty others like me who don’t want to own a car and cycle everywhere or use public transport. I hope this goes ahead, a car free urban environment would be paradise for me.
Carrigstown?
I really love the concept. However I can’t see enough Irish people buying into it, we are a very car-centric nation.
With our climate, it can be very inconvenient for families without a car. Lugging small children around in the rain is less than ideal. The other time where a car becomes really handy is for the supermarket trip – again for families it can be very difficult to do a weekly shop without one.
I like the idea but would want to see more details and it is something we should have be looking 5-10 years ago. Better now than never. There are potential dangers in the project but hey actual urban planning by the government.
I guess if you work in construction, civil engineering, sales, public health etc, you just cant move there because the car is part of the job? I think going for a mixed style is better, as richer older people who want families would not tolerate a lack of choice.
Are there enough Green party voters to fill out the population of this development?
> The projected population of 85,000 by 2070 will be expected to walk, cycle or use public transport.
47 years to build a town of 85k in Dublin, the success of which is based on building a new Luas line, a new Luas stop on the Red line, and a new train station. Having seen Irish long-term planning, I am more than a bit skeptical about that.
> The first 3,500 homes are expected to be completed by 2030 and, as an interim measure pending the opening of new public transport links, multistorey car parks or “collective parking units” will be built which will later be converted to other uses.
Yeah those multistorey car parks are here to stay.
Would be a fun experiment if they actually have it well designed. Like minimal roads, maybe a mini-autonomous Luas and a train station. I’m sure though it will be a shit show and just is to placate to developers who want to put as many houses in the same place as possible to save on cost.
The govts next social housing project? I mean could they pull it off?
The smell of a recession with all of these new towns.
Well, if it works for those people and they’re happy with this, then fine. I’ve already got my 70s house with off street parking and a large-ish garage for tinkering so it has no real impact on me. (Yeah, I know that sounds a little smug, don’t hate me)
However, what I have seen in suburban apartment developments already before I bought my house is where parking is sparse by design, people still end up with cars for one reason or another and you end up with dumb neighbor aggro and inappropriately parked cars causing a hazard for pedestrians and cyclists. I do think architects sometimes get a little Le Corbusier and think they can change human nature with architecture. You can influence behavior a bit, but often most people don’t completely adhere to their purist intents so the design ends up being a bit unworkable.
You might feel being car free right now works for you, your view may or may not change as your life changes.
What this does smell like to me is developer figuring out they can save a lot of money by not adding underground/ground story parking and dress it up as saving the planet. (I assume ye won’t be using concrete in that building lads? or that the building will be energy self-sufficient? …yeah…) . Big claims about making housing more affordable and you know full well it’s still going to go up for the same sort of money, especially with the transport links, which are a good thing, but should be the norm, not something exceptional to crow about.
People kinda conflate car ownership and use. You can own a car for the handyness and niceness of it when you want it, but still use other means to commute, or better still, not commute at all.
It already exists and it’s called Adamstown
We can’t we just finish what we started
I know the area well, and I’m a big supporter of car free, but this simply will not work.
You can’t build a “car-free town” in the middle of the most car-dependent city in Europe. A few luas lines isn’t going to cut it. This is a going to be a huge built up area on top of the existing industrial estates in the area that have 1 bus and a luas line at its periphery.
You’ll have busses that go from here to the city centre, and maybe one that will go to dundrum if you’re lucky, every other trip you’re going to need a car for, something they’re conveniently not providing parking for with “temporary” car parks. Nice tidy bit of extra profit there for the developers.
Look at the area on Google maps and you’ll easily see the problem, it’s wedged between the M50, the Naas road, and the Walkinstown roundabout. Now imagine you want to cycle somewhere, how safe is it going to be to cycle on those roads out of your new “car-free town”?
What If someone lives here and works in one of the other big Dublin employment centres that isn’t the city centre? How do you get to Blanch, Swords or Sandyford without a car?
You’re on the M50’s doorstep and you can’t use it because you “have no car”? Or do you buy a car anyway because public transport won’t support these edge case journeys so these routes, even if they did exist, will be underserved and functionally useless compared to driving.
Just doesn’t make any sense, this area is an industrial estate, building a load of apartment blocks here with the “promise” of sufficient public transport is going to turn this area into another shithole, and nobody cares because it’s south-west Dublin.
I really want to see this area redeveloped, even with apartment blocks I think that’s good, but we need to be realistic, you can’t just take one part of Dublin and make it “public transport focused” you need to completely overhaul the transport system of the entire city. We need underground rail, we need rail or BRT on the m50 for a true orbital route, we need a public transport first redesign across the entire city, not just in one tiny pocket.
Problem with this is if you need to get to a part of Dublin thats not the city center its an absolute dose of going into the city center, changing and going back out. Its why people end up taking the car and enduring the traffic, its still faster
Nice to see this proposal.
Everything in Ireland is designed for cars, and I’ve often wondered why there can’t be any areas for people who don’t have / want them, so they don’t have to suffer from everyone else’s cars.
If you employ every single unemployed person into a Job Guarantee program (not forced, would be paid at a living wage), expressly for training + building this and all the required infrastructure, _and expressly reserving the housing for those people building it as first priority_ (with a state provided loan for funding it, with Job Guarantee work always available to them for paying the loan, guaranteeing breakeven and even profit for the state) – then it will have a population of around ~150,000 people (i.e. the amount on the live register), in about ~10 years at most – not fucking 50 years like the article suggests.
The only reason any country would run construction projects so slowly, is to enable perpetual fraud and backhanders – and we are gradually seeing the proof in planning scandals lately, that Ireland and its politicians engage in just as much blatant property corruption as ever.
“Will require the development of the Lucan LUAS line”
So, that’s the LUAS line we’ve been told about since 2008. The same line which has been pushed back for another 10 years?
Let’s be real, we’re all mostly too lazy to not do those 5 min drives. I have a bike, I still choose to drive to work when I need to. Shop is 5 mins down the road, 2 in the car.
It’s a great idea, too bad nobody living here had it. Yeah we’re over commited into cars, what country isn’t!? I think the push should be for people to buy smaller and more efficient cars. Imo the real problem, apart from Dublin’s super shitty public transport system, is these idiots driving cars that are larger than their own driving ability should allow them to. Not to mention they don’t need a car so big. All it ever does is the school run and shopping, you could chop a good 3 foot off most of these and still be too large for their needs.
21 comments
While it’s good to see brown field sites earmarked for housing it will be an absolute ghetto without the public transport links.
The developers will build the housing but I wouldn’t hold out much hope of the proposed luas extensions coming to fruition.
Certainly interesting concept. Car free streets sounds lovely but multistory carparks that you have to rent sound horrible. So give and take I suppose. All hinges on reliable public transport and that’s just not a runner unless they invest more. I ended up WFH yesterday. Standing at the bus stop and they just cancelled the bus. No notification on the app or the board. I just waited 20 mins and said fuck it and went home. I have that luxury though.
That sounds great and should be the way forward. Won’t suit everyone but there are plenty others like me who don’t want to own a car and cycle everywhere or use public transport. I hope this goes ahead, a car free urban environment would be paradise for me.
Carrigstown?
I really love the concept. However I can’t see enough Irish people buying into it, we are a very car-centric nation.
With our climate, it can be very inconvenient for families without a car. Lugging small children around in the rain is less than ideal. The other time where a car becomes really handy is for the supermarket trip – again for families it can be very difficult to do a weekly shop without one.
I like the idea but would want to see more details and it is something we should have be looking 5-10 years ago. Better now than never. There are potential dangers in the project but hey actual urban planning by the government.
I guess if you work in construction, civil engineering, sales, public health etc, you just cant move there because the car is part of the job? I think going for a mixed style is better, as richer older people who want families would not tolerate a lack of choice.
Are there enough Green party voters to fill out the population of this development?
> The projected population of 85,000 by 2070 will be expected to walk, cycle or use public transport.
47 years to build a town of 85k in Dublin, the success of which is based on building a new Luas line, a new Luas stop on the Red line, and a new train station. Having seen Irish long-term planning, I am more than a bit skeptical about that.
> The first 3,500 homes are expected to be completed by 2030 and, as an interim measure pending the opening of new public transport links, multistorey car parks or “collective parking units” will be built which will later be converted to other uses.
Yeah those multistorey car parks are here to stay.
Would be a fun experiment if they actually have it well designed. Like minimal roads, maybe a mini-autonomous Luas and a train station. I’m sure though it will be a shit show and just is to placate to developers who want to put as many houses in the same place as possible to save on cost.
The govts next social housing project? I mean could they pull it off?
The smell of a recession with all of these new towns.
Well, if it works for those people and they’re happy with this, then fine. I’ve already got my 70s house with off street parking and a large-ish garage for tinkering so it has no real impact on me. (Yeah, I know that sounds a little smug, don’t hate me)
However, what I have seen in suburban apartment developments already before I bought my house is where parking is sparse by design, people still end up with cars for one reason or another and you end up with dumb neighbor aggro and inappropriately parked cars causing a hazard for pedestrians and cyclists. I do think architects sometimes get a little Le Corbusier and think they can change human nature with architecture. You can influence behavior a bit, but often most people don’t completely adhere to their purist intents so the design ends up being a bit unworkable.
You might feel being car free right now works for you, your view may or may not change as your life changes.
What this does smell like to me is developer figuring out they can save a lot of money by not adding underground/ground story parking and dress it up as saving the planet. (I assume ye won’t be using concrete in that building lads? or that the building will be energy self-sufficient? …yeah…) . Big claims about making housing more affordable and you know full well it’s still going to go up for the same sort of money, especially with the transport links, which are a good thing, but should be the norm, not something exceptional to crow about.
People kinda conflate car ownership and use. You can own a car for the handyness and niceness of it when you want it, but still use other means to commute, or better still, not commute at all.
It already exists and it’s called Adamstown
We can’t we just finish what we started
I know the area well, and I’m a big supporter of car free, but this simply will not work.
You can’t build a “car-free town” in the middle of the most car-dependent city in Europe. A few luas lines isn’t going to cut it. This is a going to be a huge built up area on top of the existing industrial estates in the area that have 1 bus and a luas line at its periphery.
You’ll have busses that go from here to the city centre, and maybe one that will go to dundrum if you’re lucky, every other trip you’re going to need a car for, something they’re conveniently not providing parking for with “temporary” car parks. Nice tidy bit of extra profit there for the developers.
Look at the area on Google maps and you’ll easily see the problem, it’s wedged between the M50, the Naas road, and the Walkinstown roundabout. Now imagine you want to cycle somewhere, how safe is it going to be to cycle on those roads out of your new “car-free town”?
What If someone lives here and works in one of the other big Dublin employment centres that isn’t the city centre? How do you get to Blanch, Swords or Sandyford without a car?
You’re on the M50’s doorstep and you can’t use it because you “have no car”? Or do you buy a car anyway because public transport won’t support these edge case journeys so these routes, even if they did exist, will be underserved and functionally useless compared to driving.
Just doesn’t make any sense, this area is an industrial estate, building a load of apartment blocks here with the “promise” of sufficient public transport is going to turn this area into another shithole, and nobody cares because it’s south-west Dublin.
I really want to see this area redeveloped, even with apartment blocks I think that’s good, but we need to be realistic, you can’t just take one part of Dublin and make it “public transport focused” you need to completely overhaul the transport system of the entire city. We need underground rail, we need rail or BRT on the m50 for a true orbital route, we need a public transport first redesign across the entire city, not just in one tiny pocket.
Problem with this is if you need to get to a part of Dublin thats not the city center its an absolute dose of going into the city center, changing and going back out. Its why people end up taking the car and enduring the traffic, its still faster
Nice to see this proposal.
Everything in Ireland is designed for cars, and I’ve often wondered why there can’t be any areas for people who don’t have / want them, so they don’t have to suffer from everyone else’s cars.
If you employ every single unemployed person into a Job Guarantee program (not forced, would be paid at a living wage), expressly for training + building this and all the required infrastructure, _and expressly reserving the housing for those people building it as first priority_ (with a state provided loan for funding it, with Job Guarantee work always available to them for paying the loan, guaranteeing breakeven and even profit for the state) – then it will have a population of around ~150,000 people (i.e. the amount on the live register), in about ~10 years at most – not fucking 50 years like the article suggests.
The only reason any country would run construction projects so slowly, is to enable perpetual fraud and backhanders – and we are gradually seeing the proof in planning scandals lately, that Ireland and its politicians engage in just as much blatant property corruption as ever.
“Will require the development of the Lucan LUAS line”
So, that’s the LUAS line we’ve been told about since 2008. The same line which has been pushed back for another 10 years?
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/the-luas-was-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-say-disappointed-lucan-locals-1.4723919
Will never happen…….
Let’s be real, we’re all mostly too lazy to not do those 5 min drives. I have a bike, I still choose to drive to work when I need to. Shop is 5 mins down the road, 2 in the car.
It’s a great idea, too bad nobody living here had it. Yeah we’re over commited into cars, what country isn’t!? I think the push should be for people to buy smaller and more efficient cars. Imo the real problem, apart from Dublin’s super shitty public transport system, is these idiots driving cars that are larger than their own driving ability should allow them to. Not to mention they don’t need a car so big. All it ever does is the school run and shopping, you could chop a good 3 foot off most of these and still be too large for their needs.