Madam, – We welcome the initiative by Dublin’s Transport Management Authority in restricting coach parking on Dublin’s streets and would beg it to consider introducing such restrictions on Mountjoy Square in Dublin 1.
This beautiful residential Georgian Square on which we all live and work is destroyed day in day out by a huge mass of end-to-end private coach parking adjacent to the park. This blocks views of the park, it causes noise and air pollution and it makes access to the park difficult by creating a corridor of coaches that have to be negotiated by people with dogs, buggies, etc. On Croke Park match days, our lives are made a misery by multiple layers of private coach parking.
On July 3rd, the City Council kindly supported the Dublin Open Squares day and suspended coach parking on the south side of the square for one day only. As Brian Boyd reported (Summer Living, July 5th), “There was a day-at-the beach atmosphere in the normally traffic-choked Mountjoy Square”.
Gerry Mullen Chief Executive, Coach Tourism Transport Council (July 9th) says that each coach “takes around 30 cars off our streets”. In Mountjoy Square we would far prefer to have cars parked where coaches currently park (free of charge). Cars bring people to the square, unlike empty buses which use it as a parking lot. You can see over cars and parked cars do not generally keep their engines running for hours at a time to keep warm (or cool) depending on the weather.
Allowing coaches to clog the northern Georgian core primary square does nothing to build the “smart or sustainable capital city” that Mr Mullins wants – perhaps Mr Mullins and his Coach Tourism and Transport Council might learn that the operating preferences of his members are but one factor to be taken into consideration in how traffic is managed in the city and they might start to take better account of their impact on people living and working in the city, before censuring others. – Yours, etc,