According to the Global Mail when complete the development will resemble:

…a reproduction of the sort of historic, chic downtown neighbourhoods you find in the far more central parts of London or Paris, not in this distant expanse of former dockyards and bloodless public-housing project. At its core are straight, car-free streets lined with simple townhouses and ground-floor-access flats in five-storey rows. In the alleyways behind – an imitation of the classic London backstreet, the mews – will be little two- and three-storey homes, all with direct access to the street.

An interesting concept I think, lets hope they don’t approach the built environment with the same mad dash for the sameness of IKEA furniture and they create something awesome to behold! If you take a gander at the promotional website and image below, it looks pretty sweet. It would also appear that there will be very little car access to the site too which is pretty sweet. (Click the image to explore the masterplan for the development)

Visualize traffic impacts – thanks to the germans

The other article is this incredibly cool visualization tool for ArcGIS to allow planners like us to visually see the impacts the increasing in traffic a new development may have! Pop on over to Fast.co Design to marvel at it!

No more guessing about what the impact of improvements to cities might be. Now urban planners have software to fully visualize what will happen when projects become reality.

Keep in touch

That’s it for today! Don’t forget you can get your daily dose of me through my twitter @Rusty1052 and your daily Irish Planning News courtesy the paper.li aggregator.

Not down with any of these new things? Or maybe you would like to offer me a job or use my services? Well sure just drop me an email at colinb@dt106ers.com. Will be great to hear from you! (Whoever you maybe).

Peace out planners!

Related posts:

1. The great experiment by our planners to copy the European tradition of having middle income families live in apartments has largely failed
2. Council to ‘freeze’ zoned land in Ennis
3. Thousands of historic land files to be shredded

The real cost of rural living compared to urban living

Frank McDonald penned an interesting article on how he believes the recent attention surrounding the septic tank charge, is in fact hiding the bigger issue at stake, that urban dwellers are cross subsidizing rural-dwellers.

Development levies by local authorities reveal a different story. The average levy for a new house in the countryside amounts to €9,300, with no charge for sewerage, whereas the purchase price of a similar-sized house in an urban area would include a much higher levy of €28,650 – of which €5,350 is for sewerage

New Irish Addresses

I came across a very interesting tweet from Alice Charles of work done by James Nix on the spread of new rural addresses produced between 2005-2007. They’re really just everywhere! I’d love to see the new roads overlaid on the new addresses too, certainly presents a different picture to the Ireland you have in your minds eye.

Just look at the number & spread of new addresses between 2005-2007 in rural Ireland. #oneoffhousing #spatialplanning architecturalassociation.ie/blog/sge/addit…

— Alice Charles (@alicecharles) February 25, 2012

Geography of Business

Next up is an amazing set of slides from Duncan Smith’s blog Urban Geographics. They show a general bias of offices conglomeration slightly to the west of central london. Well worth a look as he draws on transport models as a way to draw conclusions as to why some of the clustering has occurred.

Thinking of doing Spatial Planning?

A deadly little brochure type thing Micheal from of @MentalPlanners did over the Christmas period, chapeau sir!

The New weekly section: Movie Thursday

This week saw the launch of my new weekly section to give you the inspirational kick I often find I need by the time thursday roles around. So sit back and enjoy the opening edition with  TedX talk from the Strong Towns Blog.

Keep in touch

That’s it for today! Don’t forget you can get your daily dose of me through my twitter @Rusty1052 and your daily Irish Planning News courtesy the paper.li aggregator.

Not down with any of these new things? Or maybe you would like to offer me a job or use my services? Well sure just drop me an email at colinb@dt106ers.com. Will be great to hear from you! (Whoever you maybe).

Peace out planners!

Related posts:

1. Links I liked 13/02/2012
2. What’s the story like? 1/2012
3. Links I liked 30/01/2012

City Parks

Following on from the Public Realm Strategy submission by the greens, a friend of mine sent me on a link to a wonderful artcile by National Geographic on the public parks that adorn the streets of Paris:

Urban Downtime
The City of Light is also a city of green, with a panoply of parks and gardens where Parisians rest and rejuvenate.

Wind Farms

The Guardian DATA Blog has again outdone itself by producing a map of all the windfarms located within the UK. I plan on taking their data and Irish Windfarms to the map, if anyone wants to help out that would be fantastic, just let me know via twitter or email.

Copenhagen

Copenhagenize this weeks carriers an interesting discussion on the new congestion ring being proposed to reduce the volumes of traffic in central copenhagen

Human Transit has arrived!

Finally, amazon got off there backside and shipped my copy of Jarrett Walker’s new book, Human Transit. Initial impressions are its fantastic, certainly a comprehensive pocket guide for those interested in transport planning and how anyone can get involved in the debate and brush away the technical mumbo jumbo. I shall be writing a review of it in the coming weeks with any luck so, stay tuned!

Some Charity – Love Dublin Festival

A friend of mine asked me to put on note up regarding St Vincent De Pauls upcoming event Love Dublin Festival – Checkout the Facebook event for more info by clicking the image below.

Keep in touch

Get your daily dose of me through my twitter @Rusty1052, your daily Irish Planning News courtesy the paper.li aggregator.

Not down with any of these new things? Or maybe you would like to offer me a job or use my services? Well sure just drop me an email at colinb@dt106ers.com. Will be great to hear from you! (Whoever you maybe).

Peace out planners!

Related posts:

1. What’s the story like? 1/2012
2. Links i liked 25/02/2012
3. Links I liked 30/01/2012

1. The Green Party released a video and the document they submitted as part of the public consultation on the new Dublin City Council’s – Public Realm Strategy [PDF]. The green’s I think should be commended for the numerous videos they’ve released lately! Check it out:

2. Dublin Bus allowed people to travel for free (on some buses) after the collection system broke down on some buses

3. I did a quick write up on my experiences with Dublins Leapcard so far at Leapcard has still got some living up to do!

4. Vincent Browne, love him or hate him, he stuck it to the man like only he can. Vinne was featured on the Strong Towns Blog (a fantastic resource) in a fairly honest outside commentary on what happened Ireland.

5. The Ulster Rugby fans have something to cheer about, Ravenhill has been given planning permission to renovate the stadium for the first time and increase the capacity.

6. Inevitably, Bord Pleanala announced they have delayed making a decision on the National Children’s Hospital on the Mater site, due in part to the complexity of the application.

Keep in touch

Get your daily dose of me through my twitter @Rusty1052, your daily Irish Planning News courtesy the paper.li aggregator.

Not down with any of these new things? Or maybe you would like to offer me a job or use my services? Well sure just drop me an email at colinb@dt106ers.com. Will be great to hear from you! (Whoever you maybe).

Peace out planners!

Related posts:

1. Links i liked 25/02/2012
2. Links I liked 13/02/2012

I would also advise you to check out all the other entries, some fantastic ideas providing food for thought in the ideas section and some great apps!

UrbanRural – Built on Heritage

Given that everyone seems to be mad into searching their family trees and establishing their personal histories, I figured why wouldn’t they be interested in their local area also. There’s a lot of built heritage out there that most people may never of known existed right in there back garden. UrbanRural aims to change that! I would be grateful if you could check out my entry and like it, spread the word, whatever!

The problem with Irish Planning is….

We don’t have enough documents like this one kindly retweeted by Dominic Byrne.

Very interesting paper on Participation in #SpatialPlanning (for both content & presentation) ow.ly/8sGDg via @rusty1052

— Dominic Byrne (@Dominic__Byrne) January 14, 2012

My Dissertation is now available online

For those of you interested in transport may want to have a read of my undergraduate dissertation which is now available online at issuu. Long story short, it looks at the barriers that one would come up against establishing orbital bus rapid transit routes in Dublin.

DT106ers is now on Google+

So plus one us!

Dublin Rail Transport – What it might be

Well the guys over at the Mental Planners have put together a nice map of what the complete NTA 2030 Vision transport strategy would look like if all the rail projects are all implemented. It’s an interesting idea. I have mashed up their map with the population growth maps of the NTA strategy and the result is below. Interesting to note that while the strategy fails in many respects it actually deals with the growth areas by proposing rail projects quite well.

Other Stuff

• My Dublin Rapid Transport map final version will be available for printing soon! So watch this space.
• The Irish Planning Institute is on twitter, Follow them @IrishPlanInst
• I’m planning on setting up some planning podcasts, if anyone is interested in being part of that, get in touch with me!
• Since their is bugger all planning work out there, we may aswell start our own businesses. That’s what the Dublin StartUp weekend is for! Build a business in 54 hours, more at – dublin.startupweekend.org

Keep in touch

Get your daily dose of me through my twitter @Rusty1052, your daily Irish Planning News courtesy the paper.li aggregator.

Not down with any of these new things? Or maybe you would like to offer me a job or use my services? Well sure just drop me an email at colinb@dt106ers.com. Will be great to hear from you! (Whoever you maybe).

Peace out planners!

Related posts:

1. Links I liked 13/02/2012
2. Links i liked 25/02/2012
3. Metro North – What’s the story like?

13, 194 Hits in 2011

That’s a 23% increase in traffic compared to the year before and I guess that reflected the at least 23% more effort I put in this year. Once again thanks a million to all of you who have read the blog, you’re great! Would be lovely if I could generate more debate in the comments though, that’s my new years resolution, to figure out how to do that!

So on we go to the top 10 posts of 2011.

Top 10 posts of 2011

The most popular post of 2011 were wide and varied in their depth of content and the downright failure of Ireland in 2011 in terms of withdrawing from many capital (bog boys) projects. For now enjoy and let us hope 2012 will bring much more cheer in that department.

#10 Westmeath CoCo gives the go ahead for Chinese Trade Centre

#9 CILT Transport 21 Mid-term Review

#8 [Guest Post] The need for transportation planning and urban development to be closely aligned

#7 Bikes on the DART, what about in Europe?

#6 ‘Ghost’ estates to get €5m to deal with safety issues

#5 Metro North – What’s the story like?

#4 [UPDATED] Sunday Rant: Dublin Bus putting up prices again!

Yet again we get a great Happy New Year from Dublin Bus with 15% increase in all prices, and to think they wanted 30% !!!

#3 Census 2011 by the county and Fusion Tables, mapping the data.

#2 Dublin Rapid Transit Map – Feedback please!

#1 Pictures Dublin Bus Realtime Information (RTPI)

RTPI sign and waiting Dublin Bus on Eden Key (Photo: Colin Broderick)

As always!

Comments are welcome, you can follow me on the tweet machine @Rusty1052. Only want the blog? Subscribe to the RSS Feed with your favorite reader!

Do you like what you have just read? Maybe you are interested in being a guest writer too. Email me at colinb@dt106ers.com

Related posts:

1. Bag’o Links “Independence Day”, Chinese ghost estates and more…
2. 6,649 Visitors to DT106ers last year! Cheers folks!
3. Things to look out for in 2011

According to the UN today, we symbolically reached the 7 Billion person mark. It just boggle the mind, that in just 11 short years since 2000 that another billion people have been added to the worlds population. So why not tell your story on 7 Billion Actions?

In 1900 some 10% of people lived in cities, by 2007 this was 50% and it is predicted by 2050 some 75% will be living in cities!

That will produce some profound impacts on land use planning for the future. How are we going to deal with this 25% increase in just 40 years? Our own population grew by 14.5% between 2002 – 2011, and we are only a small drop in the ocean.

Considering Ireland went with the spread it everywhere spatial approach and yet the majority of population growth continued in the City areas such as Dublin and Cork:

So why don’t we just abandon the politically motivated spread it everywhere and start to prioritize areas for investment and development? After all that’s what land use planners are meant to do right? Think Big, Think Strategic!

So anyone got any pragmatic solution to deal with this? Would love to hear from you if you do!

As always!

Comments are welcome, you can follow me on the tweet machine @Rusty1052. Only want the blog? Subscribe to the RSS Feed with your favorite reader!

Do you like what you have just read? Maybe you are interested in being a guest writer too. Email me at colinb@dt106ers.com

No related posts.

Incinerators

Indaver Ireland are pursuing a Judicial review of the Bord Pleanala decision to refuse permission for the planned Waster to Energy facility (Incinerator) at Ringaskiddy on the a number of grounds including strangely that the board made conclusive decision prior to the completion of an EIS

Merging

The talk of merging local authorities continues, this week minister Hogan announced that Tipperary North and South county councils are to be merged for the 2014 local elections. This along with the merging of Limerick county and city reduces the number of LA’s by 2.

 Transport

Fantastic piece by Jarret Walker over at HumanTransit.org on how a transport planner might approach the designing a transit network for high ridership in a dense city. His example Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Network Direct

Our own network reshuffle / redesign continues apace with Dublin Bus releasing revised proposals for the last areas of the Network Direct Phase II to be implemented in the Autumn (whenever that is!). The most important for me is the Santry area as thats where I live:

Just to recap the two areas realeased are:

• Swords / Santry / Rathfarnham / Firhouse / Ballycullen / Terenure - Route Diagram [HERE]
• Ballinteer / Dundrum / Milltown / Ranelagh / Beaumont - Route Diagram [HERE]

 DIT Grangegorman Planning Scheme

The long awaited restructuring of DIT and its spread out buildings has made some progress this week. It has been adopted through a variation into the Dublin City Development Plan 2011 – 2017 with one final hurdle to overcome being the probable appeal of the scheme to Bord Pleanala by some local interest groups. Details of the plan can be found at www.ggda.ie and www.dublincity.ie

As always!

Comments are welcome, you can follow me on the tweet machine @Rusty1052. Only want the blog? Subscribe to the RSS Feed with your favorite reader!

Related posts:

1. Things to look out for in 2011
2. [UPDATE] Dublin Transport Map v1.5
3. Grangegorman SDZ Oral Hearing – The last hurdle?

Chinese ghost estates (cough) CITIES!

Interesting piece by those plucky Aussies on dateline down under – Watch Chinas Ghost Cities.Watch as they tour cities designed for 12 million people which are 85% vacant. Boggles the mind!

News just in, An Taisce hates planners!

While they also hate the laws in which we operate in, councilors and county managers they label planners as “spineless” in the face of bad zonings. Read On.

Fingal talk to NIRSA summer school of urban walkability study

Fingal planners were on hand at the National Institute of Regional Spatial Research’s summer school to explain there study of walkability in the Blanchardstown area, a residential area i know only too well characterized by a huge shopping centre and loads of fences to stop you walking to the bus 50m’s away.  Read On.

Preliminary Census Results are out!

Results from the 2011 census of Ireland have been published, check out the published CSO Report [PDF] or check out the data. There have been a number good posts from various blogs who were pretty fast off the mark. One very good one by Rob Kitchin over on Ireland After NAMA with commentary on the vacancy rates. Most eye catching stat for me though is , there are way more women than men in the state, well except for the midlands.

Don’t forget!

As always folks comments are welcome, you can follow me on the tweet machine @Rusty1052. Only want the blog? Subscribe to the RSS Feed with your favorite reader!

Toodles!

Related posts:

1. Cuffe backs demolition of some ‘ghost’ estates
2. ‘Ghost’ estates to get €5m to deal with safety issues
3. Ghost estates mess is fault of council chiefs, insists Cuffe

After reading an article in the Irish Times entitled “Regional airport cuts ‘should be reconsidered’” by Lorna Siggens. Given that the article was about the the subsidization of PSO (public service obligation) air routes within Ireland and how a late decision by the former Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey to cut costs by only subsidizing Dublin – Donegal from July and how these routes are vital for tourism and business in the far flung parts of Ireland due to there sub 2 hour travel times. What other routes are served by the various regional airports? So 20 minutes of research later and a bit of google docs magic here are the results:

• 28 Regular service non Irish destinations served by various different Airlines on non PSO routes.
• The majority of non Irish routes are to the UK.
• Dublin is served by all of the airports except Waterford.

Regional Airport Routes in Ireland

Information was compiled from the respective websites of each airport.

From this brief overview it shows that Sligo will stand to loose the most out of the removal of the PSO’s since Dublin – Sligo is its only route. All the regional airports bar Donegal and Sligo link into worldwide Hubs in London with all main airports served aside from London Heathrow (LHR).

Assuming most of these routes are economical to be run by the various Airline Operators all the airports currently provide major links for there respective regions through the network effect thanks to their connections to the Dublin, London and the UK.

Maybe a better use of the funds allocated to the PSO routes would be to provide proper connecting transport service to and from each airport to their respective tourism and regional destinations, to make something similar to the airline hub system to improve the land transportation.

Related posts:

1. Regional development key to growth in all areas of economy, report states
2. €14m to be spent on bus transport
3. Gotthard Tunnel breakthrough. Could Ireland create a high speed rail link to the UK?