GIVE ME A BREAK:DÚN LAOGHAIRE Rathdown County Council has really gone and done it this time. It has interfered with my line of desire – and lots of other peoples' too. So now all I hear all day long on the weekends are people shouting at one another as they, too, cope with the frustration of having their lines of desire blocked.
This is not some small inconvenience that can be remedied by the erection of yet another piece of dubious large and rusting public art destined to be removed by public demand. We’ll draw a veil over that one.
Oh no. This is a major interference that makes me wonder if the council ever listens to our desires at all.
Let me explain. The “line of desire” is a term that urban planners use to describe the route that people will inevitably take when walking or driving. In a public park, for example, you can have all the footpaths you like to keep people off the grass, but if the footpaths don’t follow the route that people will naturally take from A to B, you will still end up with a worn dirt channel as people ignore the footpaths.
The road I live on is such a line of desire and has been for over a hundred years. The road leads from the Killiney-Glenageary roundabout (as distinguished from the Glenageary roundabout, which is another tale of woe) and proceeds in a straight line for a couple of kilometres nearly down to the sea.
The road was created by the British Army. Prince Albert’s lodge is at the top of the road, which is lined on each side by single-story dwellings built to house British Army officers and their staff. Their unusual layout of being one-story to the front and two-stories to the back derives from them being designed as bachelor residences.
That aside, the road was created as a ceremonial path to the bay for horses and carriages. It wasn’t built for cars – and that’s not DLRCC’s fault, obviously. But it was built as a single route meant to go in two directions, up the hill and down the hill.
Over a century later, this isn’t good enough for DLRCC. It took drastic action and made the very bottom of this straight road “one way”. So now people coming down the hill come to an intersection where one-way signs have been erected.
The problem is, these signs are so far apart that a lot of people don’t see them. Drivers are supposed to turn right or left at this point. However, the considerable proportion of people who don’t see these one-way signs drive on regardless in the “wrong direction”.
The drivers coming up the road from the very bottom, however, can proceed straight to the top. Result: two lines of upward going traffic nearly colliding with one row of downward traffic. This goes on all day. Uphill drivers shout “One way! One way!” and honk their horns at the downhill drivers, who then use my driveway to turn around. I’m thinking of charging them for the privilege.
It’s worse at weekends, when the area has a lot of visitors who get befuddled when they don’t see the one-way signs.
The other effect of this change is that the tiny local village is suffering. People don’t pass these shops anymore and business people are worried about missing passing trade. To make matters worse for the local businesses, DLRCC has extended the double yellow lines in front of their premises, so that even if you did want to stop by, there’s nowhere to park.
But that’s Dún Laoghaire for you. This town has grown increasingly down at heel, with lots of empty shops, partly because people find it so difficult to park there.
The traffic wardens consistently excel at their job, so that not having your pay and display ticket perfectly in order means getting a steep fine. So what do people do? Instead of using their local area, they drive to Cabinteely or Dundrum.
I can imagine town planners saying that keeping down traffic improves conditions for residents and pedestrians. I’d argue that while that may be so in theory, it’s a moot point if it kills off businesses in the town because then there’s no place left in which you want to be a pedestrian.
I can see the same thing happening with Dublin City Council’s plan to block vehicles from the city centre area around Trinity College. Who wants to do their shopping in a place where they can’t park so that they have to lug their bags home on public transportation?
The traffic police need to do ask themselves whether their own lines of desire for ideal traffic management could mean writing the death notice for many of our towns and cities.
