Why do we build suburbs like this? A big fence around an estate turns what should be a 20 second walk to a bus stop into a 7 minute detour
Why do we build suburbs like this? A big fence around an estate turns what should be a 20 second walk to a bus stop into a 7 minute detour
29 comments
There’ll be a hole in the fence in no time so you’ll have a shortcut
Why dont they just add gates?
So stupid.
Always found it to be real stupid
Security
You could buy a cheap ladder and a bike chain and solve that problem.
Are the houses there longer than the bus stop?
I’d put money on residents refusing to let one go in, for fear of foot traffic walking by their window.
But could you imagine the horror of saving for years and years for a deposit on a house in an estate of semi-ds only to find that any of the unwashed carless masses could simply alight from a public bus and be standing right outside your door without a fence in between?
Irish people love copying all the terrible shit Americans do
I’d fix that problem with a con saw, steel blade, diamond blade & a sledgehammer in 10 minutes. Call me for a quote.
They used to design estates with cuttings and laneways between them for pedestrian access but they provide an easy route to escape from the cops which I assume is why they no longer do.
A lot of the laneways and short cuts where I grew up were walled off completely due to anti social behaviour.
It does have the benefit of protecting young kids from wandering onto the main road.
Parkour planning
The term is “urban permeability”. Or in this case, the lack thereof
We had residents who didn’t want a playground for kids because they did not want kids walking past their homes . Some weird world.
As an immigrant to this country, I find this so unnecessary and frustrating. Massive pet peeve.
Begrudgingly, I’ve moved into an estate where I’m in a back corner, so to speak, with a reasonable “detour” necessary to walk almost anywhere. The neighbours all seem surprised when I bring it up. In fact, they all love being deep into the estate because it’s perceived as a security measure – the extra inconvenience is a deterrent to transient thieves who can’t get in and out as quickly. I have to admit that I kind of get this point, but I also don’t see any crime near the entry points to support the concerns.
Moreover, when I was looking for housing, there were just so many examples of homes where a 5 minute straight line walk to a public transit station became a 25 minute walk because of estate walls. This is a massive deterrent to public transit use and just entrenches people further into car use. I get that if a path was opened up, particularly to a quick escape route like a Luas stop, the NIMBYs would be up in arms that their home becomes more susceptible to danger. So it would never happen. But it’s just nonsensical when you’re trying to get people out of cars and into trains.
But it also seems to me like this city just isn’t bothered, and that what seems like a frustratingly slow life to my mind is a perspective that doesn’t even cross the minds of some who live here. There’s a ton of manufactured traffic, from inexplicably single lane roads, extra cycles at traffic lights for pedestrian only crossing (rather than in parallel with traffic), and bus lanes only necessary to get around traffic caused by…bus lanes. And all you hear is attempts to increase pedestrian and cycle access, but it’s completely impractical for the thousands living in urban sprawl with no reliable public transit or other option to consider than the car. There’s just no easy way to get places here.
And it’s not like it’s caused by Dublin being a medieval European city. I know there’s a bit of that in town, and that there was a history of villages that got stitched together over time (plus the natural barriers of the sea and the rivers). But it’s more down to post-WWII urban sprawl, and a lot of it probably could have been avoided.
I’ve even heard stories of an offer by an company out of Asia (can’t remember what country) offering to fully finance and build an underground subway/tube system in the 70s being declined by the City, because they felt they could build their own. I can’t imagine anyone having faith that it could get built today, let alone back then. If the walls aren’t literally in the way, they’re figuratively everywhere between the politics and mentality of the place.
Talk to your council. They’ve started taking complaints on things like walkability and active travel quite seriously these days.
My solution is invest in one of those extendable ladders or a angle grinder and cut a hole.
This is Ireland, a Country full to the brim of dickheads and knobends who come up the greatest ideas..
I think it’s mostly to stop cars driving *through* the estate. Ridiculous that there’s no access through that fence though. I would be calling the local council. It’s a ~~20min~~ 7min walk for a fit/healthy person. A mother with a buggy or an old man with a Zimmer frame would **greatly** benefit from a 1m gap in that fence.
So that the kids don’t run out on the road. So that they don’t have through traffic. So they don’t have pedestrians walking through their street. It’s a NIMBY. It’s American and so it was implemented here as well.
It’s done for security. Anyone scouting the area or hanging about has to walk through the main entrance. If they’re not too determined they won’t come in. It also reduces foot traffic through the estate so it’s safer for kids and accessible belongings.
To make people learn to drive so they can fund the motor industry and other associated industries.
It’s one of the reasons public transport is deliberately kept shit, and only motorways get major investment – there are a lot of powerful lobby groups who’ll make sure it stays this way.
Our politicians are happy salesmen for enacting policies that please such lobbyists, so they can receive their bribes through being employed on company boards/directorships etc. that their lobbyist mates organize later (or, like many ex-politicians, become lucratively paid lobbyists themselves after office).
It’s actually not current planning politics build like this. It’s called permeability and currently planning should be rejected if estates are designed like this. Write an email to you local council and ask for a new pedestrian route. Then email all your local councillors about it. No harm in linking them to this Reddit post.
Ah yeah it’s ridiculous. There’s a Tescos ten minutes from my house that actually takes 35 minutes to get to because of all the fences and walls around the various estates. It’s insane, really
Because this country hates pedestrians.
This is a perfect example of how design in Ireland is not car centric, but rather anti everything else.
They want to live in an enclosed area. It’s more secure with less traffic. Seems fair enough and I’m sure this is way more important than the walk to the bus stop.
I lived in a new build estate and the layout was sold to us like this. A year later, they decided to put 3 additional entry points into the surrounding wall. When the additional entry points went in, litter became a big problem as it would blow in through those entry points. People would also dump bags of litter into the estate at these entry points. Anti-social behavior also became a big problem, as groups of teenagers started drinking / hanging around the estate. Smashed glass and cigarette ends contributed to the new litter issue. We also had a lot of incidents of cars being broken into in the middle of the night. The estate was very quiet and dealt with none of these issues before the openings went in.