https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g235330eeo
As heavy traffic congestion continues to impact across Belfast city centre, the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) has asked people to work from home one day per week.
The road network is over capacity and traffic congestion could be reduced by walking, cycling, taking public transport or working from home, the department has said.
Alongside these measures the DfI are looking at road engineering measures, public transport interventions and providing the public with information.
"There isn't the physical space to try and put as many vehicles down these roads as possible so… the answer is to get more people onto public transport or to walk or cycle," Colin Woods from the DfI told the BBC.
Road closures
Speaking to BBC Radio Ulster's The Nolan Show, Mr Woods responded to queries on various road closures across the city.
With regards to Durham street Mr Woods said: "I have acknowledged that the closure of Durham street has had a significant impact on traffic and so we have taken a number of actions to try and make changes where we can."
Sydenham Bypass
Mr Woods said the Department was concerned that the Sydenham Bypass would need "emergency closures" over the winter if the work didn't go ahead this year.
He continued: "We have delayed that work from previous years precisely because we wanted to try and avoid the traffic impact, but this year we did not believe we could wait.
"We will always act where we think it is necessary from a structural integrity perspective of the road and to protect safety."
Mr Woods accepted it was challenging but said the Department kept the closure to the weekends.
What actions is the DfI taking?
Road engineering measures, such as:
How the junctions operate
Adjusting light sequences
Physical changes on the ground and in the areas that are worse impacted
Public transport interventions, including:
Increase in service frequency
Moving services to better departure points
Providing public information to help journey planning by using:
Traffic Watch X account
Park and ride advertising
by mathen
36 comments
“Oh hey boss, the DfI asked me to work from home today”
We’ve moved on from
“You are the traffic” to “Work from home one day a week”
Maybe deciding to prioritise public transport around the city was the problem.
Yes all the retail , hospital , cafe workers will lose pay if they didn’t show , seriously this is what Doe recommend s oh and have they thought about what day , or just everyone random days and no difference? They made this mess grand central , buses moved to plug up the roads as usual no thought , works fine to fill their own pockets
If they had built the fucking westlink interchange years ago, this wouldnt have been an issue
Civil servants are being pressurised into more office days on the grounds that city centre businesses need the footfall, so at least that’ll be parked due to the traffic shitshow.
Taking the train costs me £11 return for a 30 min journey.
To take a car costs £3.
When they make the train as cheap as a car I’ll take it.
The elephant in the room is will someone from Portadown or Larne pay £200 per month for a daily commute monthly ticket to Belfast for work on a train that airs its septic tank in the carriages with very possible delays along the way, or will they pay £2-300pm to use their car?
I’m no expert but this is what I would have done:
step 1. massive park and rides at each main access point to the city with free buses every 10 minutes.
Step 2. A year later introduce congestion charges.
Step 3. A year later AI powered machine gun turrets to target cars
Step 4. Profit.
You wouldn’t steal a bike, you wouldn’t break into a car, you wouldn’t steal from a shop so why go to work…
Work from home.. it’s the law. A new advert by DfI.
[But we know the solution:](https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge) ban the poors, same as usual.
Why is penalising people who park in bus lanes/stops not on the list?
They keep saying to use public transport but they keep increasing ticket prices and reducing the frequency of buses/trains for park&ride. There has to be a better alternative to Translink please
And if that doesn’t work we should start looking at buying a helicopter
Decades of prioritising car centric infrastructure from DFI has led to congestion?
Shocked Pikachu face
All the pay rises in the world wouldn’t tempt me to return to the office and face that shite on a daily or even weekly basis.
If you can’t increase capacity you have to reduce demand, and short of levelling the city centre and rebuilding the road network from scratch I don’t see how we can increase capacity.
We need a proper, long term, thought-out plan to fix this, the sticking-plaster solutions aren’t working. We need to get people living in the city by building affordable housing in the derelict buildings in the city. For commuters we need a big surge in train services, including reopening of closed lines and stations. Strictly enforced bus lanes for in-city journeys and expansion of Glider RTS, then once those are in place we need a congestion charge in the city centre.
But our politics is so short-sighted and insular there will never be the political will to make something like this happen, so the problems will persist until Belfast dies as a social and commercial location.
We already have half of Belfast office staff still WORKING FROM FUCKING HOME and only go up at most 3 days per week. The city is still a car park every single day.
What will a bus fix, when on the off chance it actually shows up on time, you get raped for the price of it driven by a grumpy old fucker who would drive over a baby deer just to get ahead of a car, that’s if its moving at all.
This place is ran by utter clowns
School children back in buses would go a long way to fixing the issue.
Tomorrow’s story – people encouraged to go to office to help boost dwindling Christmas trade.
I’m a security guard for a shopping centre, so I have been walking round my house looking for shoplifters. I live alone so haven’t caught anyone yet!
I’m on a fucking train right now Bangor-Belfast line running 25 mins late already because of signalling errors. We’re sat here in the train that’s not moving. Partner was an hour late this morning.
If Translink gets it shit together maybe more people would hop on the train.
Use public transport… £43.80 a week for a 3 day Flexi train ticket from Portadown.
Nah.
NI Public Transport is terrible. That’s why so many use the car.
Some of the issues include regular delays, cancellations, very slow journey times, regular strikes, anti social behaviour. Why anyone would trade a warm quiet car journey to sit in a slow dirty bus is beyond me.
just give us Hover cars already
Peelers on yellow box junctions, you block it you get fined and a kicking. Or junction cameras, you block it and auto fine, you can appeal it if something weird happened that you blocked the box by accident but there’s a lot of people who aren’t doing it by accident, they do it so they don’t have to sit at lights.
I see it constantly, blocked boxes mean that one or more light sequences are wasted, it’s an easy , immediate and palpable fix for traffic problems but they won’t do it.
Took me 45 minutes to drive from the car park where Boots, Next etc. on boucher to the McDonalds last Friday 😑
I only work one day a week in the office, sometimes not even that. When I do go into the office on the odd occasion, I use a bus-lane-using, traffic-weaving scooter that doesn’t clog up traffic.
Would be lovely if there was a reliable public transport network. The buses are every hour into town and not reliable. I can’t wait till i pass my drivubg test.
That’ll be handy for the plumbers and joiners
As someone who used the trains for over a decade until recently I was absolutely sick of them. Late, signal problems, constant price rises etc I was lucky my manager was understanding or id have been sacked they were so unreliable. I drive now and I’m saving money and don’t have to play the lottery every morning hoping the train isn’t late. Public transport is a joke and overpriced here, if it was affordable and somewhat reliable I’d use them
But I luv teh hus3le and bussel of Xmas time m8.
We can do fuck all about it. Any chance you can just work from home?
Public transport is awful due partly toomany car drivers
Cycling is awful due to too many drivers.
Walking is awful due to drivers soaking me at curbs and not slowing down when I’m crossing a road that the human has the most right to be on
Is anything going to be done about York St interchange? Madness that the busiest roads/motorways in the country all arrive at a set of traffic lights
Thank god DFI have spent the last few years implementing the belfast cycle network so it’s easy to cycle all over the city
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