Sir, - Having just returned home to Dublin after a year away in England I find the traffic situation, bad when I left, a hundred times worse.
While I was away I often went into Cambridge, leaving my car in one of the huge, landscaped, supervised park-and-ride facilities on the outskirts of the city. For only £1 return we sped into the city along bus lanes, stopping only twice, once at a large shopping complex and once in the city centre. The buses ran every 10 minutes. The journey was quick and easy and appointments in the city could be made confidently in the knowledge that they would be kept on time.
Getting into Dublin is a complete nightmare; no park-and-ride and no continuity of uncluttered bus lanes. The occasional car park on the DART route, Booterstown for instance, is usually full, and the unfortunate residents in the vicinity of most of the other stations have to live with all the roads in their area clogged up with commuters' cars.
The worst part of all this is that it may well be too late to remedy the situation. Very large park and ride facilities on the outskirts of the city, connected to the city centre by bus lanes kept permanently clear, and parking areas beside many more of the DART stations, would have gone a long way to solve the problem, but it seems there was no forward planning and now the opportunity has gone. Meanwhile, large shopping complexes continue to go up in the city, with multi-storey parks, encouraging motorists to undergo the aggravation and tedium of getting themselves there.
We read that there is to be a permanent park and ride facility at Santry, and another planned for Finglas, and three cheers for that; but there is also to be a temporary one, for Christmas, at the RDS. It certainly will not take car drivers any less time to use the temporary RDS park; in fact, it will probablytake more, by the time they've got themselves parked and onto the bus - but perhaps crawling into the city while someone else does the driving is in a small degree less stressful than doing it oneself?
I am sure I am not alone in feeling that, as far as planning and thinking ahead are concerned, the left hands of those responsible for our traffic problems have not known what their right hands were doing. - Yours, etc.
Jane A. Meredith,
Glen Lawn Drive,
The Park,
Cabinteely,
Dublin 18.