Dublin apartment residents could see parking spaces removed under transport plan

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Dublin apartment residents living in the city centre could see their parking spaces being removed to make way for the new transport plan.

It comes after a new draft strategy published on Tuesday by the National Transport Authority shows that work on the proposed underground train line linking the city to Dublin Airport – itself already scaled back massively from initial plans – will now not get going until 2031 at the earliest.

Also postponed for a decade is the proposed Luas line extension into North Dublin towards Finglas.

And mooted Luas extensions towards Poolbeg, Lucan and Bray have also been put on the backburner for at least 10 years.

Brian Caulfield is a member of the steering committee which drew up the plan with the NTA and is also an associate professor at the School of Engineering at Trinity College Dublin.

He said that the Metro being delayed by another 10 years is “not completely accurate” and that the NTAplan to go for planning permission for this for next year.

“I think the Minister came out a couple of months ago saying that it could be 2034 for the likely delivery time on it, so that project hasn’t been delayed,” he told RTE’s Today with Claire Byrne.

“I suppose the project that will get a lot of attention having been pushed down the line a little bit is the DART interconnector that goes underground in the city.

“That has been decided that it will be looked at in the next strategy phase mainly because the NTA through all the modelling that was conducted think the demand isn’t there for it in this phase, and that the Phoenix Park tunnel is able to alleviate some of the pressures that were there prior to it.”

According to Mr Caulfield, the NTA also plan to get up to 70% emissions, which he deemed good planning.

He said: “There’s lots of really good things in there about parking in the city centre, there’s great stuff about cycling and microbilitly.

Mr Caulfied said that there are also plans to change the regulation of parking in the city centre, which may affect apartment residents wanting to park their cars.

He said: “There’s plans to change the regulation of parking in Dublin city centre, the amount of parking that is given to apartments and there’s also a plan in there to reduce and remove any public sector parking in the city centre.

“We know that to have a parking space is an enabler to drive there’s a number of policies in there to take those types of things out of the city.”

Mr Caulfield acknowledged that these plans may prove controversial for apartment residents, meaning there will be less parking available for them.

He said: “To move to this more densely populated city and that’s kind of what we need to have, the more densely populated this city is the easier it is to provide good public transport. And that’s kind of the core behind this whole strategy, that the parking availability would decrease and then people living in the city centre would start to take alternative modes of transport.

“Not saying all cars would be taken out, they could use shared cars etc, but walking and cycling would become a lot easier, electric mobility would come in terms of e-bikes and e-scooters.”

Mr Caulfied said that measures would be put in place to make cycling safer for everyone in Dublin’s city centre, noting that this is what many European citities are moving toward.

He added: “When you look at the map for Dublin it looks very European, the type of city that we could have at the end of it all. And it’s a city that I think we would all want to live in.”

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