This is a subscriber-only article
The National Economic and Social Council issued a report last week on the important question of transport-oriented development (TOD). The idea is simplicity itself: why not provide housing and even new city suburbs within walking or cycling distance of good public transport connections, existing or planned. TOD has been fashionable in urban planning circles for decades, and the earliest report urging the compact city model for Dublin (with higher reliance on public transport) dates from 1981. There has been substantial investment in rail-based public transport in the period since (DART and Luas), but the city has continued to spread across mid- and north Leinster. There is spirited opposition to new housing development from residents and councillors. Housing supply in Dublin and other cities is not responding to the acknowledged shortage, and there has recently been resistance to an enhanced busway project for the capital.
The outer suburbs of Dublin consist mainly of residential developments at densities of 10 dwellings per acre or less. Large areas close to the city perimeter are zoned for agriculture, so there has been no development at all – there are still pieces of land zoned for agriculture inside the M50.
Over the last few decades the situation has gotten worse and population has grown fastest outside the areas offering decent public transport service
This makes for a market hostile to public transport, since potential corridor volumes fall short of viability, even with public subsidy. Over the last few decades the situation has gotten worse and population has grown fastest outside the areas offering decent public transport service. Thousands face long daily commutes and the overall density of the extended urban area is too low. If the city of Dublin was being designed from scratch by people committed to public transport, it would look very different from what has been allowed to emerge. The same comment applies in less extreme fashion to Cork.
Therefore, the challenge for urban planners is to retrofit a more compact and less car-dependent pattern on cities, which have developed in a manner that their predecessors warned against three to four decades ago. Even where new public transport routes have been created at high expense, as with the Midleton rail line in Cork, patronage has been disappointing and the rail-based new suburb of Adamstown southwest of Dublin is well behind schedule.
Car dependence has been baked in and will not easily be undone, even with costly infrastructure investment
A key problem for Dublin’s planners is that the mistakes of previous decades cannot readily be reversed: it is not possible to gather up the homes mistakenly scattered across the province of Leinster and re-locate them in a more coherent pattern. Car dependence has been baked in and will not easily be undone, even with costly infrastructure investment. Some of the rail stations in outer Dublin still have vacant land immediately alongside, but not available for housing development.
There is a further and less visible problem. The proportion of Dublin-area jobs concentrated in the central areas has been declining and a public transport network built around the radial routes no longer suits large numbers of home-to-work commuters.
People are not all commuting into the city centre, they are headed for a dispersed set of destinations for which public transport alternatives cannot readily be provided
Urban sprawl brings forth extensive suburb-to-suburb commuting since jobs, as well as homes, are dispersed throughout the low-density sprawl. It is noticeable in the morning rush up the M7 for example, how many cars turn off for work destinations well short of the M50 ring road. People are not all commuting into the city centre, they are headed for a dispersed set of destinations for which public transport alternatives cannot readily be provided.
Jobs growth seems to be returning to a few central areas of Dublin without extra traffic, since the expanding tech sector has attracted workers happy to walk or cycle from the inner suburbs. On-street parking spaces in some parts of the inner south city have lower occupancy now than they had at the height of the bubble. But for suburb-to-suburb commuters living further out, car dependence is hard to avoid and policy changes are coming far too late.
Ireland has a low-density rural, as well as urban, population distribution and there are hidden costs in addition to the incentive to car ownership and use
In rural Ireland there has long been criticism of the easy availability of planning permission outside towns and villages, particularly for one-off housing. Ireland has a low-density rural, as well as urban, population distribution and there are hidden costs in addition to the incentive to car ownership and use. These include extra capital costs and operating subsidies for the provision of utilities and public services, of which the broadband plan is the most recent example.
Both in cities and in the country the public has sought, through the planning system, to inhibit a more rational policy on the location of new housing supply, creating low densities in both urban and rural Ireland. The fact that the costs are largely hidden, particularly the costs of traffic congestion and high car dependence, does not mean that they are minor. The inherited pattern of residential development is dysfunctional, and will not easily be altered without changes in public policy and in public attitudes.
SHARING OPTIONS: