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06 Sep 2012
Decent images of what the new bridge currently under construction at Marlborough Street will actually look like seem oddly hard to come by. This is the best I can find, showing the bridge with the Luas crossing it. The bridge will be open only to pedestrians and public transport, but it's main purpose is to facilitate the long overdue joining of the Luas Red and Green lines. It's not a terribly exciting design, but it has a clean simplicity, and seeing the Luas cross the liffey so many years after the old trams stopped crossing it, will be wonderful. Of course still no decision has been made on what the bridge will be called.
bridge notes
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dublin
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transport
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03 Aug 2012
I came back from my holiday to see the new bridge - only metres from O'Connell Bridge from which I took this snap - is reaching the "spanning" stage. It won't be carrying private traffic, only pedestrians, busses, and eventually the new LUAS "link" which finally got the go ahead from An Bórd Pleanála this morning.
I've mentioned before that I think it's abvout time that one of the Liffey bridges was named after a woman, and seeing as the last few bridges have all been named after writers, I think naming it after Maeve Binchy is a pretty good idea. I've heard it suggested a few times since her death on Monday evening. I have to admit that I've never read one of her books (though I have read articles and short stories in newspapers over the years) but she was hugely popular and always struck me as a lovely woman when she appeared on radio and TV. And it's clear from the outpouring of affection since Monday that she was enormously loved. And it certainly doesn't hurt that "the Binchy Bridge" has a nice ring to it!
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28 Jun 2012
Dubliner's will already know that we're getting another new bridge (It's been a great few years for bridge geeks in this town), this one only yards from O'Connell Bridge itself, and willl be carrying the LUAS and other public transport. I haven't posted much about it yet even though it's also only yards from my place because at this stage the construction is at the unexciting pile-driving stage and I don't want to bore you all with my bridge geekery. I'll wait till we get to a more picture-friendly phase of the construction.
Meanwhile, the Irish Times letters page has a running thread of people suggesting names for the new bridge - mostly naming it after the great and the good - and they have run the gamut from sportsmen to scientists to (as usual) writers. But so far, unless I missed it, no one has suggested a woman.
Currently there are seventeen bridges between the East Link and Heuston, and all seventeen are named after men. Not one of them is named after a woman.
If you go a little further out there's the Anna Livia Bridge in Chapelizod, but I don't count a poetic 'female' personification of the river Liffey as an actual woman. And the bridge at Island Bridge was previously called Sarah's Bridge after Sarah, Countess of Westmoreland, wife of the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who laid the first stone of the original bridge in 1791. However the brdge we have there now was renamed Island Bridge after independence.
Now I'm not one for advocating gender quotas for the naming of bridges, and of course in times gone by it was much more difficult for a woman to leave a historically significant mark on the city, but when you have seventeen bridges (twenty three, if you go out as far as Lucan) and every single one is named after a man (bar the couple named after landmarks), well, it begins to seem deliberately insulting.
So I say when it comes to naming the new bridge over the Liffey, let's name it after a great Irish woman.
"Artivist" Will St Leger feels similarly about the representation of women among the statues in the city centre, and yesterday morning he tried to restore a semblance of balance by adding a new female statue to the city's statuary. She didn't last too long unfortunately.
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19 Oct 2011
More HERE.
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21 Sep 2011
More of these fun posters encouraging polite behaviour on the Tokyo underground between 1976 and 1982 HERE.
(Thanks Lar)
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05 Jul 2011
China, already home to seven of the world's longest bridges (including the longest at 102 miles which runs over land and water near Shanghai) has just opened the world's longest sea bridge linking the city of Qingdao with the suburb of Huangdao, spanning the wide blue waters of Jiaozhou Bay.
The massive structure is properly awesome.
(via The Telegraph)
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08 Jun 2011
My New York gay Angelo is always complaining about how dangerous cycling in New York is, which I've never really understood, because you'd imagine that the simple, clear, grid system would make things simpler and safer when it come to traffic, in comparison to, say, Dublin's medieval street layout.
Well you'd be wrong. Judging by this overview of one NY intersection, the confluence of pedestrians. cyclists, and drivers is as dangerous and insane there as anywhere else. In fact, possibly worse!
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31 May 2011
Thankfully I live ten minutes walk away from Pantibar, and from most other places i ever need to be. Yeah sure I have to step over drug addicts and negotiate my way through streams of piss at the weekend, but I couldn't bare to have commute a long distance. I have done it in the past and it is soul destroying.
Well, now it turns out that a long commute isn't just be soul destroying - it's a lot worse than that.
Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia.
ideas
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31 May 2011
Thankfully I live ten minutes walk away from Pantibar, and from most other places i ever need to be. Yeah sure I have to step over drug addicts and negotiate my way through streams of piss at the weekend, but I couldn't bare to have commute a long distance. I have done it in the past and it is soul destroying.
Well, now it turns out that a long commute isn't just be soul destroying - it's a lot worse than that.
Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia.
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infrastructure
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07 Feb 2011
As regular readers will know I absolutely hate the way Dublin treats pedestrians. We are shoved on to tiny pavements littered with bollards and poorly thought out street furniture, forced to wait so long in all weather to cross narrow streets that it encourages people to run for it, herded on to traffic islands and made to wait again for a second "green man", clipped by bus and lorry wing-mirrors, made to jump out of the way of cars (including cop cars) that imagine they have the right of way when turning into our path.... Pedestrians are afforded no respect, the very bottom of the totem pole, when in fact they should be the top.
Dublin Observer has an interesting piece looking at some of the changes that New York has recently made to make the city more appealing to pedestrians - some simple and inexpensive changes as well as more major ones - and wonders if Dublin has the will or even the desire to to do likewise.
I won't hold my breath, but we can dream. A pedestrian friendly city is a better and more efficient city for everyone including drivers, and the changes needn't mean banning cars. It just means using common sense and affording pedestrians equal respect when it comes to traffic mangement.
(thanks Bob)
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