Capital congestion requires its radical solution

The report in this newspaper that Councillors in Ballina have been asking about the possibility of finding extra car spaces at the back of Tesco put me in mind of the differences on this between Dublin and the west. In the west, it’s a priority to accommodate cars in town centres; getting them out of the city centre is the priority in the east.

The situation in the two places is different for many reasons, not least the availability of public transport.

For people in Dublin, traffic is a love/hate. Everyone complains about it. Everyone gets into their car to contribute to it. Everyone is therefore stuck in it. The traffic is a topic of conversation up here the way that the rain is in the west. That’s why the radio stations in Dublin talk about it all the time. Traffic reports on the half hour. Any accident on the M50 is a disaster for those in it and much less importantly, headline news if your plan is to get home by anything close to 7pm after work. This is why people in the west and in Dublin have such a different conception of time and distance. To go five miles in Mayo is the journey of a moment: in Dublin it can be the journey of a morning.

James Joyce famously said that it would be a good puzzle to cross Dublin without passing a pub. Nowadays, the puzzle would be to find a time when you can cross Dublin without getting stuck in traffic. For the city centre is clogged, choked, congested. Getting across the river – even on a bus – is a slow slog. You’d think therefore that any initiative to try and do something about traffic levels in the city centre of Dublin would be welcome.

Well, it turns out that this is not so. There is an old line about a prisoner loving their chains, and there is a touch of that to be seen when any effort is made to reform car usage in Dublin. As soon as anyone tries to do anything to set people free, you can hear those chains clanking as they are hugged close.

Why the noise lately? Dublin City Council is putting in place a new plan to stop traffic driving through the city centre when it is en-route to other places. The engineers behind the plan reckon that up to 60% of traffic in the core city centre area is travelling through the city centre to somewhere else, so the plan involves drivers having to take other routes – diverting them from the city centre – to get where they are going. Now in the west of Ireland, such a plan would often involve a by-pass. But Dublin being clogged as it is, by-passes are cardiac only.

You would need to know the city centre pretty well to be able to grasp the gist of the plan.

As well as restrictions on cars, there will be a lot more cycle lanes and infrastructure and many more improvements for buses and pedestrians to move around in the city. As a specific example of the effect on cars, no private cars will be permitted along Bachelors Walk and Aston Quay, two quays either side of the river at O’Connell Bridge. Another is that traffic going north on Westland Row (at the back of Trinity) will now be right-turn only, instead of the left-turn which is in place now – taking traffic away and not into the city centre.

The idea is not to prevent people driving to a destination in the city, but to make them choose different routes when they are not stopping, and using the city centre purely as a carriageway. It will be done in a phased manner allowing for people to get used to the changes over time.

The plan is due to take effect from August, but when it was announced in the last few weeks, the temperature took an early rise. The objections, as well as being loud, were many. Generally, the view was that this was an attempt to stop people driving into the city centre at all. It appears that driving through a city is considered by many to be a fundamental liberty. Using that as the theme, every category of individual in every possible circumstance of life who might be inconvenienced by such a move got a good hearing – and there is more of that to come before the summer.

There were points made – and these arguments the west well knows – that commercial life in the city would be badly affected by the plans. There was some talk about Diageo being concerned that the Guinness lorries would not be able to drive down the quays. Presumably they would have to float the barrels down the Liffey and onto the canals. Oh hang on, isn’t that what they used to do?

Many of the wider arguments are as well used as they are tired. No one is trying to stop anybody from driving to places they need to go to. What the plan is trying to do is stop people driving through areas in the centre of the city which have become overwhelmed by traffic levels. And yes, it is of course a goal to try and reduce traffic levels everywhere in the city, even if the promoters of the plan might not want to say it openly just now, but to do that by enhancing all the other ways of getting into the centre. And you can’t do that while the city centre is as congested as it is.

Some of the debate around cars and cities has a certain snobbery to it as well. Some people who like to think they have ‘made it’ don’t want to take the bus, or any public transport. It’s like some failure to have to do so, when in fact it is a sign of what should be normal and necessary if you live in a built up urban area. The new plan is designed to speed up bus journeys, bringing large volumes of people to places they want to go to at the right time. That is a bigger fundamental liberty than your right to get into your own metal container on your own and go wherever you like.

There is also a need to make the city centre more appealing to visit and anyone who has been around it recently will know how high a priority that should be. The commercial future of any location – in an online commercial world – is not whether you can park there, but whether you would like to spend any time there.

Changes like this are being carried out in cities all over Europe, cities which we then praise lavishly for how much better they do so many things than us. And the other thing is this – change has to come. If we rattle our chains – on housing, on metros, on roads – when we need to do new and necessary things to live better, we are going to continue to be stuck in a wider gridlock than faces a driver on the quays in Dublin today.

I’m not a traffic engineer so I don’t know for definite that the new plan will work. But it is obvious to anyone that the current arrangements aren’t working. Anyone sitting in traffic in Dublin city centre should have plenty of time to think about it.