Park-and-ride a recipe for chaos

CORK city manager Joe Gavin is to be applauded for his ideas for park-and-ride facilities for our rapidly growing city.

But that applause turns to gasps of disbelief on the city’s northside when he proposes to put such a facility in a heavily populated residential area beside the North Ring Road, which is already catering for 10 times the traffic that was originally intended for it.

The park-and-ride is to be sited at the intersection of four roads - two of them mere laneways. This is already a traffic blackspot at rush hour and, to compound the problem, all four roads are within a half mile of five schools.

The international formula for a successful park-and-ride is to site it on the city’s perimeter allowing, say, 1,000 car lengths which might be added to the existing traffic on the main arteries to be converted into 10 buses which join the flow instead. This has proven to be a sensible formula all over the world.

For the northside of Cork, this would translate into a park-and-ride on the Dublin dual carriageway catering for the massive flows from east and north.

Instead, the city manager proposes to put it within a 20-minute walk of Patrick Street, wants to add 800 extra cars to an already impossible junction at rush hour, and has presented the plan as a choice between this daft idea or another site only metres away.

The plan would have been sensible 15 years ago, but today it’s just shortsighted and, in another five years, it will be seen as nothing short of insane.

We, the public, should be entitled to expect proper planning from our city fathers, not the shortsightedness that has them adding lanes to the Southern Ring, now putting a flyover on the ‘magic roundabout’ at Kinsale Road, and the stupidity that put only four lanes into the tunnel in first place.

That same school of thought now wants to put a park-and-ride at Tinkers Cross. Well, the facts are it is designated as a community resource (though it never developed into anything) in one of the few remaining greenfield sites in the area. It is totally unsuitable as a park-and-ride facility. Currently it is a bog and, as they have discovered, it is on an underground lake. How’s that for forward thinking and city planning!

John Mallon

5 Shamrock Grove

Mayfield

Cork