Sir, - On Easter Sunday afternoon, I drove from Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral along Dame Street and Westmoreland Street to O'Connell Bridge. The sequence of traffic signals on this route was an unsynchronised red, amber and green chaos which resulted in a quite unnecessary quiet-Sunday-afternoon traffic jam. Example: the Westmoreland Street-O'Connell Bridge green light lasted exactly seven seconds before reverting to red for more than a full minute.
It has become customary for Dublin Corporation and other authorities to blame the city's traffic problems on increasing numbers of vehicles, motorist indiscipline, long-term parking and so on. Private city motoring, we are told, is a "sunset industry" and will be so restricted as to be all but stamped out. How much easier it is for our Corporation to victimise and restrict the tax-paying road-user than it is to rectify the problems caused by its own witless incompetence.
It's the infrastructure, stupid. It doesn't work. Unsynchronised signals are but one example of it not working. We have many fewer vehicles than comparable European cities where the infrastructure does work. No amount of motorist-targeting can obscure our Corporation's negligence, incompetence and culpability in this regard.
I pay tax of all kinds, including road tax. I, along with my fellow tax-payers, am entitled to use the roads. I am entitled to a road infrastructure that works. I am entitled to expect such an infrastructure from the city officials whom I help to pay. I want to see the Corporation get its act together and provide a working infrastructure. I want official restriction and victimisation of the tax-paying motorist - the easy, cop-out, thought-free recourse of public officials incompetent in conceiving or building this infrastructure - to stop. - Yours, etc.,
Conor Sexton
Castleside Drive, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.