Sir, – Well done to all involved in the proposed College Green transport plan ("Radical plan to remove cars from Dublin city centre unveiled", June 10th).
Anyone who has visited any of the hundreds of shopper-friendly, tourist-friendly and family-friendly cities of northern Europe will know it’s an obvious and long overdue good idea. – Yours, etc,
AIDAN O’SULLIVAN,
Brussels.
Sir, – I object to Dublin City Council’s harebrained scheme to ban cars from the city centre.
Not everyone is young or able-bodied enough to walk everywhere, and not everyone has the time or energy to walk everywhere.
Not everyone is young or able-bodied enough to cycle. You can’t expect people over 70 with arthritis to ride bikes.
Not everyone is young or able-bodied enough to stand waiting at bus stops until the buses deign to come.
There are areas totally without buses and there are areas badly served by buses. Even where there are buses they stop at 11.30pm, just as they did in the 1950s! Only a small portion of the population is served by the Dart, and the last Dart leaves Tara Street at 11.23pm. Only a small part of the population is served by the Luas, which stops at midnight. So even if people managed to get into town to enjoy entertainment and night life, they would have no way of getting home if they weren’t allowed to bring their cars.
Taxis are very expensive – and anyway the “plan” threatens to exclude taxis from certain areas too. As far as commuters are concerned, the three-hour limit on parking near public transport means that there is effectively no such thing as “park and ride”.
This daft scheme would kill the capital’s city centre stone dead. Shops and offices would increasingly move out to the suburbs. Theatres, concert halls and other entertainment venues would lose money and eventually close down. Southsiders could never go northside and vice versa. Tourists would stop coming to Dublin on city breaks because it would no longer be a city in any real sense of the word. Young people would be increasingly motivated to emigrate to real cities. Older people would be exhausted from walking long distances or standing at bus stops, would not feel safe going home at night without their cars, and would be tempted to stop going out altogether, thus increasing the danger of isolation and depression. So this project is ageist as well as everything else. – Yours, etc,
GRAINNE FARREN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.