WE LIKE NOTHING more than a lovely car park in this country. Lots of gorgeous tarmacadam, freshly painted white lines and beautiful, shiny new ticket machines.
We get goosebumps at the mere announcement of a new car parking facility. And there are many, many opportunities to get excited. You can’t flick the pages of a regional newspaper without discovering a local Cathaoirleach has cut the ribbon of yet another brand, spanking new automobile crèche.
I jest, of course. Car parks are perhaps the dullest, most miserable non-places that blot our urban landscape. They are dead zones, black holes in the middle of our vibrant city ecosystems. And yet, we quietly worship them. In fact, my own non-scientific research below shows that many new car parks have either been granted planning or have opened over the past year.
While the costs involved in the new Leinster House bike shed undoubtedly seem over the top, the national hysteria that greeted the release of the figure that was paid belies a harder truth: we have no problem spending exorbitant sums on car parking infrastructure, but we baulk at the costs involved in green transport alternatives.
What is striking about the newly released documents relating to the bike shed is the role of car parking in the costs. The project was beset with delays because the hoarding around the construction was taking up 10 car parking spaces. It was requested that the hoarding be removed during construction to make way for cars to be parked when the Dáil resumed last September. Shock horror! How dare our politicians’ access to free parking be jeopardised for the sake of cleaner transport solutions!
This gets to the heart of the issue. The real scandal is the fact that most of the grounds of our national parliament are taken up with car parking spaces in the first place. Why is there not more consternation over the fact that retired TDs, for example, continue to also avail of free car parking on the grounds of Leinster House? Surely this is the most anachronistic retirement gift imaginable. Thanks for your service! Now, feel free to drive into the city for the rest of your life instead of using the public transport options you were supposed to get over the line while in office!
The cost, both to the climate and our national psyche, of continually prioritising car parking over other forms of transport is far more egregious than money being spent on the provision of bicycle shelters.
We dismiss and ridicule the OPW’s installation at Leinster House, not necessarily because of the amount of money involved, but because we don’t respect green infrastructure in the same way that we fetishise car parks. This is the difficult truth that we are embarrassed to accept. I can guarantee there would be barely a whisper if this money had been spent on 32 new car parking spaces in the same location.
We think it is ridiculous that large sums of money could possibly be spent on something to do with silly old bicycles. Yet, how critical are we when Dublin Airport Authority seeks planning for an extra 2,500 car parking spaces, as it requested in its Infrastructure Application, submitted to Fingal County Council in 2023?
We expect our green infrastructure to be cheap. Consider how little thought has been given in this national debate to the value of building durable, beautiful bicycle infrastructure that compliments its historical context. From what we know so far, part of the reason for the high cost of the Leinster House bicycle shelter was the materials that were chosen to ensure that the structure fitted into the architectural context of this 18th-century building.
We should pay handsomely for green infrastructure, because this is the infrastructure that needs to last and bring us through the climate crisis. Not the roads, or car parking spaces.
Despite the clear and present dangers of global warming, we seem hell-bent on adding car parking spaces to our already-clogged town centres. While our politicians virtue signal about the importance of green alternatives on the one hand, the other is busy jamming as many car parks into our transport network as possible.
In February of this year, Carrick-on-Suir Municipal District’s councillors unanimously agreed on a new car park in the centre of the town, to accommodate roughly the same number of cars as Leinster House’s new shelter does for bikes. This is likely to cost around half a million euros, considerably more than the bike shelter. Yet, we don’t seem to care about towns like this splurging on new car infrastructure. Because it’s money being spent on what we know, on what is convenient.
Clare County Council has partnered with the GAA to build a brand new 200-space car park in Ennis, next to Cusack Park. Sport and cars… a match made in heaven. When will we get away from the notion that sports venues must have a car park? Let’s take a leaf out of London’s more progressive approach to this issue. The Olympic Stadium in Stratford, now the home of West Ham United, doesn’t have any public parking at all. Instead, the focus is on providing excellent public transport services to allow punters access.
A lot of this comes down to how committed we are to the idea of reducing the amount of car parking in our urban areas. Just last week, council leaders in Cork rowed back on the city’s development plan, which had sought to reduce the amount of car parking spaces in a bid to become a “15 Minute City”. Now, the rules will be relaxed on the amount of space allocated to cars, just nine months into the plan.
Simply adding more and more parking spaces is like filling potholes with sand: a temporary solution to our national transport woes, but not one that is ultimately sustainable or progressive.
The collective mockery and national outrage directed at the now-infamous bicycle shelter at Leinster House is deceptive. It hides a troubling reluctance to prioritise the transport infrastructure we need, but rarely want.
Simon Tierney is a journalist and writer.
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