Proper planning and the public good...

Touchy subject, planning.

Just watched the new Prime Time Investigates -'The Pressure Zone'. Bad planning, dodgy councillors, conflicts of interest, no records of meetings.

Well, as I said to Kathy Sheridan last month: - "the skulduggery that went on in Dublin in the past is now happening around the country", in the form of "councillors who are also auctioneers, who one day are rezoning land in one part of the town and the next are selling land".


Cllr. Lorcan Allan (FF) and Cllr. Hughie McElvany's (FG) contributions made for good television, and our own Cllr. Vincent P. Martin (GP) gave a clear overview of his own county.

To be honest, the reason I did a masters in planning in UCD in the mid 90s was because I felt awful planning decisions were being made for all the wrong reasons, and that was only Dublin. Plus ca change! Car based long-distance commuting from haphazardly rezoned land in the wrong locations is simply unsustainable. The alternative is far from easy. The challenge is to provide decent and affordable homes with amenities within walking distances of the school, shops, pubs and work. If we can make a start on that within the next five years, I think we'll have done well.

The Programme put it up to Minister John Gormley to rectify the planning process, and suggested that we aren't as keen to make radical changes now that we're in Government. Well, it's early days, and we didn't want John, or Vincent for that matter to be lynched before we were a wet week in Government.

Watch this space...

Back to the future

I'm in the Ulster Room of the Burlington Hotel at the Environment Ireland® 2007 Conference. 'Towards 2020: The Environment in Ireland's Future'. Let’s not mention the lack of bicycle parking… Dave Fadden, a civil servant at the Department of Transport is speaking at the 'Towards a Sustainable Transport Future Workshop'. He tells a story. His brother-in-law has a garage. Last week a fellah came back with a 4.5 litre Range rover to the workshop; too embarrassed to drive it any more. Well that's some progress, but for the most part, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The Transport 21 white paper didn't mention cycling & walking in detail. He said the trend is not sustainable and that political leadership is required. Traffic congestion is going to get worse. Some kind of a champion at a political level is required, with the Green Party in government there’s quite a momentum. It's early days, but he's confident Noel Dempsey will rise to the challenge. .. He said it galls him that cycling is at 2% in Dublin, but in Copenhagen it's 33%.

Henk van der Kamp, head of the school of spatial planning at DIT made a pertinent comment about by-passes: why don't they institute traffic calming and car-free areas at the same time as building by-passes? As he pointed out, if you don't integrate transport and land-use you can forget about it. He lists the studies over the last forty years - Myles Wright 1967; Dublin Transportation Study 1971; Eastern Region Development Guidelines 1988; Dublin Transportation Initiative 1994; Strategic Planning Guidelines 1997; Platform for Change 2001;Regional Planning Guidelines 2004; Transport 21 -2005. Some looked at transport, some at land-use but never the two together. I sat on a DTI panel back in the early 90’s and I do remember Peter Ryan from Consultants Steer Davies Gleeve talking about this, but it just didn’t happen. One thing is certain, there has to be a meeting of minds between the Department of Transport and the Department of the Environment to put us on a sustainable course.

Henk emphasised that spatial planning policies need to be in place prior to the provision of infrastructure. Land use and transport planning policies have to be integrated. Henk ended on a poignant note. Its twenty years since An Foras Fórbatha was abolished. Maybe it’s time for a new environmental research agency to guide us through the twenty-first century.

High Rise in Suburbia

Ahh, lads. You can't be serious. This is the latest high-rise proposal for Booterstown. I was just getting used to the madness of knocking down the Tara Towers Hotel and replacing it with a twenty five story building when along comes this proposal for the old Shell Garage on the Rock Road. It's 'town cramming' as far as I'm concerned, these attempts to shoe-horn massive developments onto suburban sites where the context is two storey semi-detached housing.

I'm all in favour of increasing densities but these recent Planning Applications are over the top. Even the ducks on Booterstown Birdmarsh should be nervous at this stage. Here's my release on the issue.

Hopefully the High Buildings Study being undertaken by Urban Initiatives will shed some light on the issue of suitable heights and densities. We'll see what Kelvin and his team come up with. I'd be happy to increase densities around fixed-line public transport stops, but I'm worried that it's a bit of a free-for-all on every suburban corner site at the moment. Design, as always is crucial on these sites, but no amount of good design can dissipate the anger that many feel at watching proposals for ten or fifteen storey buidings popping up in the next door neighbour's garden!