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PUBLIC CONSULTATION ON six proposed bus corridors in and out of Dublin city centre commenced today as the National Transport Authority presses ahead with its ambitious BusConnects project.
In November, the NTA announced consultation on the first four of these bus corridors in its plan to transform Dublin’s bus network which proposes 230 kilometres of bus lanes and 200 kilometres of cycle lanes on 16 corridors in and out of the city centre.
Across the 16 proposed corridors that would provide continuous bus lanes, the NTA has said that around 1,300 properties would be affected.
Alongside continuous bus lanes will be dedicated cycle routes. To make way for these, however, it will necessitate the cutting down of trees, a loss of parking spaces and some property owners will lose a bit of their front garden.
The public is now being asked for its say on the emerging preferred routes for a further six bus corridors. They are as follows:
Under the NTA’s BusConnects plan, most property owners will only lose around 1-2 metres of land. “But it’s fair to say that others are affected slightly more,” NTA deputy chief executive Hugh Creegan said back in November.
On average, property owners will receive €25,000 in compensation but they may be entitled to more and the NTA has pledged that where lands are acquired, it will ensure new landscaping and replanting of gardens and reinstatement of driveways.
In cases where private and public walls or fencing is removed, this will be rebuilt and/or replaced.
The cost of providing all of this will be separate to the compensation provided.
In terms of the trees that will be cut down, a “comprehensive replanting programme” will be initiated with the aim of planting more trees than were removed.
Consultation on the network redesign – which proposes 16 high-speed radial corridors throughout the city with 11 orbital routes – concluded in August, following a series of public meetings held by the NTA throughout the summer with a revised plan due to be published in 2019.
Along the corridors announced for public consultation today, annual passenger growth in Dublin Bus services has increased by up to 19% in the period 2015 to 2018, according to the NTA.
“However, the millions of passenger journeys taking place on each of these corridors are facing increasing congestion with delays being frequently experienced by commuters,” a statement said.
In total, 665 property owners potentially affected by today’s announcement have been notified by post, according to the NTA, and one-to-one meetings will be offered in the coming weeks with those potentially impacted.
The public have until 29 March to give their view on the six proposed bus corridors announced today.
Public consultation on the final six corridors will begin in mid-February and will run until the end of April.
With reporting from Sean Murray.
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If 1600 homes lose a few feet of garden for rapid corridors that will benefit almost a million people each day then I’m perfectly okay with that. I do wish they’d speed up though.
@Darren Bates:
1,598 will probably think “cha-ching” but two will object fight it all the way through the courts maybe even European courts and the only people that will actually go cha-ching will the the solicitors.
@Patrick Nolan: Perhaps if your driveway is only the length of your car and you lose 1 or 2 meters off the driveway and on street parking is done away with then this will affect you big time. Something as simple as arriving home with your grocery shop, no pulling in to the driveway and where to find parking convenient before you haul all your shopping back to your house. Many of the homes affected are home to elderly people who enjoy gardening but now they will have walls close to their windows with pedestrians/cyclists/bus corridors up close and personal, very many would sooner hold on to what they have.
@Honeybee:
Use the money to move.
Houses right on these major routes will jump in value.
The fact is if we were to avoid even the possibility of inconveniencing anyone nothing would ever get built.
That’s is what compensation is for.
@Honeybee: But those elderly people will all be dead before they move a brick, so no issue! :)
@Patrick Nolan: Seriously Patrick, do you think a maximum payment of 25,000 euro would help you to move, many of the proposed routes are in old expensive and close to city limits areas. People living there are likely to have spent a lifetime in the same house and they would lose their friends/neighbours/access to hospitals/shopping centers etc, their lives would be turned over and not because it was their choice but because they are forced in to moving. As to house values increasing,I would imagine it would be the reverse, who wants a house in a traffic rat run, your children could not play outside and car ownership could be restricted because of parking issues,granted it might suit those using the traffic corridors but these old residential areas will see change , As an example some cottages on Lr Kimmage rd had gardens taken years ago, you can actually open the front window of the houses and touch the front walls constructed after cpo’s,sometimes compensation is not all it seems.
@Honeybee: everything wrong with this city in one comment. If you live within the city limits you really really don’t need a car.
@Honeybee:
First, €25k is an opening bid, a ways to go on that still.
I have personal experience of a CPO during the motorway building phase about 15 years ago. I have seen peoples livelihood destroyed at that time and in a handful of cases, homes demolished. Every effort should be made to minimize it but the fact remains every piece of public building ON THIS PLANET has inconvenienced or disrupted peoples lives, at some point the greater good has to come to the fore.
Your suggestion that house prices would go down is frankly, ridiculous. Time and time again surveys have shown property on commuter runs go up in price
There has been a number of articles on this website about the premium you would pay for a place near the luas.
@Darren Bates: It’s always the ordinary citizens who suffer for ‘the greater good of society’. Why don’t we raise taxes for people earning €150k pa for the ‘greater good of society’ to help pay for this compensation? Don’t give me nonsense like these super people will leave the country. Let them! And I can’t believe we’re letting the TFI cut down hundreds of long standing historic trees! We’re more worried about plastic than trees in city centre to give us oxygen?
@Patrick Nolan: @patrick Nolan. What use €25k to move? Why should anyone move? It’s the TFI that should move back to the UK. Not only are they increasing prices and reducing frequency of trains but now their destroying the homes of the elderly. People who built the country. People of Ireland should be out protesting about this!
@Darren Bates: I bet if it was your garden you would say different.i love people like you who champion the greater good of everyone……as long as it does not affect you.
@Darren Bates: Have you read it or just the headlines? Or is all you think about is yourself.
@Patrick Nolan: Do you knowestly think that those 1600 people are the only problems. There are issues with this on every route they have published and not the peoples gardens at all.
Just because you think in money terms does not mean everybody else does
@Patrick Nolan: Its not compensation , its to pay you for the land. So people must move after living all their life in a home and you have no problem with that.
@Darren Bates: Why is that Darren pray tell. How can an older person or a Person With Disabilities make the way from door to door. Especially with this transport service the bus stops are further away as well. We cant all cycle or some people dont want to either, much as that may shock people
Traffic jams all over dublin and still every bus tram train bursting at seams. Clearly arent enough public transport options or infrastructure for population.
Check google maps traffic 6am-9am / 4pm- 7pm weekdays and all the traffic red lines on the busiest routes.
Traffic reports on radio. Same junctions, motorways, interchanges every day.
We cant cope with the small percentage of the population using public transport now.
We probably need about an extra 100 buses, 100 trains and 100 trams etc for peak
Buses, trams and trains never run on time either.
Most are geared towards city centre. No public transport infrastructure to transport around city centre. Everything, even under new plan is a journey to the city centre to go back out again.
System is a mess!
If they could fix all the traffic lights that are out of sequence all over the city , that would be a start.
No point in having super duper bus lanes with faulty traffic lights causing traffic jams .
I know of at least 40 sets of lights that are banjoed. Not including pedestrian lights that go red when there’s nobody crossing.
@gerard carey:
Traffic lights are out of sync to create hold up, as with extending footpaths out into the road to reduce road the amount of road creating traffic jams, They have been doing this for years and getting away with it.
High speed rail please.
Nah, we’re gonna put more 5hite on medieval roads
All this talk about improving things for Dublin city centre, what about those that have to commute into Dublin from Wicklow etc? N11 is an absolute joke most mornings. If I don’t leave the house by 6:15am then I’m stuck in traffic to North Dublin for 2 hours, most of that on the N11.
With house prices in Dublin forcing more and more people out of the capital, it’s time more money was spent improving the roads in the commuter belt. Don’t get me started on the (lack of) public transport either.
@Mark Railton: M50 v2.0 is badly needed. It’s 4.30pm – take a look a the traffic on google maps. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dublin/@53.3244431,-6.3857864,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x48670e80ea27ac2f:0xa00c7a9973171a0!8m2!3d53.3498053!4d-6.2603097!5m1!1e1
@Eugene Tyson: M50 is just one part of it, but regardless of how much they upgrade the M50, there will always be the usual choke points on the N11 (and other arterial routes) unless work is done there too.
Bear in mind, I can only speak from my own experiences of daily driving from M11 J16 to M50 J5 and back. My general point is that as per usual, those outside of Dublin aren’t given a second thought by our backwards government and representative bodies.
@Mark Railton: M50v2 is not the answer. M50v1 was supposed to be the answer but the simple fact is, more roads = more cars = bigger traffic jams. The answer is better,cheaper,efficient public transport, combined with giving people reasons not to drive single occupancy cars in urban areas. People living outside Dublin who have to commute by car every day into Dublin have my sympathies.
@Alan Kelly:
Agreed but give us competition within that public transport
@Patrick Nolan: what kind of competition would you like?
@Patrick Nolan: Why? As you hate public servants and like exporting money outside Ireland. It iis called a public service as that its first duty to serve the public, no private company will run services without profits. All using privateers against the CIE companies is drive staff wages and conditions down and export the profit
Why not just remove 50% to 75% of bus stops. Hey like magic you have sped things up. Especially if you focus on removing the ones where buses can’t pull in and get in each other’s way at the stops.
@thephantomshit:
But but but how would anyone get elected to a council seat then???
This will be of huge benefit to Dublin City and to commuters when it is opened sometime in the mid 22nd century.
Compulsory purchase orders are unconstitutional. Property rights are the foundation of our society.
Who decides what’s in the national interest is?
@Redpill.ie: agreed,everyone in here saying ‘do it,and do it now’ …..but if you asked them to move an inch they would be all over you.everyone complains about nimbyism when it’s someone else but they are the first to become nimbyist when it involves them.
@Redpill.ie:
The four courts is on Inns Quay, off you go, let us know how you get on.
@Patrick Nolan: Has to go through a whole load of time consuming courts before then and then of course the EU and the European courts. Dont be so smug
Dublin dublin something something dublin dublin something dublin.
@Seriously stunned: Aw, is the capital, financial hub and business centre of the country dragging you down?
@Seriously stunned: moan moan moan something moan moan moan.
Great article it reads like what Dublin will be like in the not too distant future
@Starburst: Dont hold your breath, at least 3 to 5 years without any issues, which there will be loads, Their are access issues and a whole load of others
Consultation on the network redesign did not finish in August, that was phase one and NTA know it. They have also changed road designs from then so the routes will not match the original plan. They also have the issues of the record amount of submissions to the original failed plan.
All of the road works have to go through planning permission. One council refused the NTA access to their area if they changed the routes, So it is far from finished
have your say