A train of events
I never cease to be amazed and amused at their efforts at “traffic management” in Dublin.
Dublin has always been a little problematic when it came to getting around. Strangely though things weren’t too bad [as I remember] until they decided to “improve” things.
They introduced a mess of one-way streets, traffic lights at every junction [and quite a few where there wasn’t a junction] and shed load of “no left turn” and “no right turn” signs. Navigating the city centre became a nightmare.
They built a motorway around the city which was so inadequate that they had to replace it a couple of times.
They built a tunnel out from the city centre to the motorway and discovered it wasn’t big enough to take the bigger lorries.
They then laid tracks all over the place to run a light railway system. That was one of the more successful ventures until they decided to link all the various lines through the heart of the city. That’s when the fun really began.
They spent €380 million on that last venture and all it succeeded in doing was to bring the entire city to a standstill.
Having fucked things up royally they decided to make things worse by introducing more problems in the form of bigger trains.
So now we have such chaos that nothing is running properly.
It has reached a point where they are now calling for more buses to relieve the strain on the rail system. A little retrograde perhaps? They build a rail system to relieve the strain on buses and then need more buses to relieve the strain on trains?
Or maybe they’ll go with some new alternative? The streets are overflowing with buses, cars, lorries, horses and carriages [gotta keep the tourists happy?], cyclists, motorbikes, rickshaws and trains. What the hell can they add to that mess? Hovercraft? Skateboards? Why not fuck the city completely and build a monorail system overhead? Why not dig up the entire city and build an underground system?
I have a little personal rule – I never travel inside the ringroad unless it’s a matter of life and death. It must be about fifteen years since I was last in Dublin and I intend to extend that period indefinitely. So I sit at a distance and watch the farce unfold.
It never ceases to amuse.
Bring back the canals I say. I have never, in all my many years on this earth, heard of a canal causing a traffic jam 🙂
Bonus being they can sober up the drunks in an instant by ducking them in the cold murky water 😉
An excellent suggestion. Seeing as the city is circled by two canals [The Grand and The Royal] it would make sense. Issue jet-skis to commuters?
Good grief No. Kayaks will do. The Public Health charlatans would love everyone kayaking into work as part of the communal keep-fit pogram 🙂
How did K8te’s OP go ? Is she all ‘Animal Farm’ (2 legs good, no legs bad) ?
The surgeon is very happy apparently. But that may be down to drug abuse, an over inflated ego or something else?
She can’t put any weight on the leg for six months. I’ll buy her a load of Helium balloons and tie them to her head.
I understand that Michael O’Leary, he of Ryanair, has registered his Rolls Royce as a private hire taxi so he can use the bus lanes and avoid the traffic jams caused by the common people.