Found this presentation from a recent GIS conference analysing data from the DublinBikes stations. Probably nothing that surprising in the results, but I like the way they got the data by scraping it off the DB website.
I’ve lost touch with the ‘bikes for billboards’ story over the last year so it was good to be updated by the comments to this post over at Copenhagenize about the rather miffed anti-JCDecaux stickers that have been appearing about the place of late.
So it’s all going to start in July, and there’s a map of the (potential, it says) stations here - clearly the council has taken the wise decision not to build any in West Dublin until you lot prove you can be trusted not to do wheelies into canals and so forth.
It’s going to be a grand total of 450 bikes, just enough to make it look like DCC are making some token effort towards increasing cycling but not really enough to make much of a difference to the overall modal share and probably not to contribute towards ’safety in numbers’ (but probably enough for taxi drivers to complain about). All that said, Jay and I tried the same system out in Paris last weekend and found the bikes endearingly clunky, more or less forcing you to slow down, which might not be a bad thing in terms of changing the image of cycling from one of an activity of interest only to hyper aggressive blokes in lycra, though that may be more of an issue here in London.
Right, that’s enough rambling. Any thoughts from actual Dubliners? Oh and lastly, this thread on boards.ie reveals the very Nordic fact that “In Oslo if you’re taking the bike after midnight you had to first solve a simple maths equation on the swipe card machine before the bike is released” in order to forestall drink driving, as if anyone can actually afford to get drunk in Oslo.
Councillor Maurice Ahern was canvassing for the local elections in June and came around our road on Saturday. He and his team were all looking a bit sheepish, seemingly only knocking on the doors of houses that looked like nobody was in.
And they put this leaflet through the door:
But mainly at election time.
I’m really impressed with how the consultation for the Dublin strategic transport plan is being done. You can give detailed feedback on a huge list of potential measures to improve transport, including quite a few pretty radical ideas. Okay, some it’s pie in the sky (land value taxation?) but there’s also plenty of feasible, sensible measures that would really improve things along the general lines of making walking, cycling and public transport safer and more attractive. Some of these things are more likely than others but they could all benefit from some evidence of public support. So if you’re in favour of that kind of thing get on there and vote for it, not least because there’ll probably be any number of petrolheads doing the opposite.
In keeping with my habit of noting pointless errata, just as one should on a blog, I will recount today’s experience.
As I approached the local supermarket, not twenty yards distant, I was accosted by a ruddy-faced chap. I caught his eye, and he sidled up to ask “Can you get me a plastic bag from the Supervalu?” I declined, baffled as usual. He wasn’t a child looking for some kindly adult to buy booze. He may have been mad, or disabled, but surely if he had the capacity to ask me for this favour, he had the ability to buy a bag. We will never know, and civilization is the lesser for it.
Today, hired by a makeup company to shoot a video, I attended a wedding fair in deepest Citywest. An exposition of chintzy, tasteless tat. There is something about weddings that attract the worst of whatever service you want. I know of film, wedding videos are what you do when all else has failed (almost there). It seems to be the same for every industry.
As the pastey trudged around, grabbing samples from envelope manufacturers, meaty paws flipping the brochures of countryside hotels, the giant vinyl barn in which this all took place rattled and quivered frighteningly. Buffeted by gale-force winds, it seemed, several times, to be on the verge of collapse, its steel ribs waving like the carcass of a long-dead whale, just a whisp of skin, all undulating in the currents at the bottom. The threat of imminent death did nothing to dissuade the ravenous, though. They continued to consume, glazed-eyes, the gooey, gaudy innerds.
It was all a potent metaphor for something. I’m going to go with either the Celtic Tiger or the credit crunch. Probably.
Oh bravo, Dublin City Council:
Bikes-for-Billboards” scheme exposes major planning flaws
Archiseek / Ireland / News / 2008 / May 2It sounded like a fairytale, yet what was initially hailed as “free bikes” has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit the capital in years.
The so-called “metropole” plan – whereby advertising company JC Decaux is to swap city advertising space for 450 bicycles has exposed major flaws in the capital’s planning system – with elected representatives left out of a deal where they should have been instrumental.
Over the Christmas break of 2006/ 07, 70 applications were filed, followed by another 50 for billboards which are to be erected on public footpaths.
Remarkably, nobody seemed to tell the then Lord Mayor – or indeed the other councillors of this; this despite the requirement under section 183 of the Local Government Act which specifies that the release of public lands is a reserved function, necessitating a vote by councillors.
Yet councillors have not even been allowed to see the already-agreed contract, which officials describe as “commercially sensitive”.
What councillors were told was that the non-cash deal was worth €85m to the city, although subsequently it has been claimed that the revenue generated by the billboards is only worth €1M per annum over the 15 year terms.
This scheme has been hit by a number of criticisms – chiefly that by virtue of a single project being split into 120 applications it was project-split and applied to an authority that had a vested interest in approving the scheme. Critics claimed that this meant that to comprehensively appeal the scheme to the Bord would have cost €30,000.
Fortunately for JC Decaux, all applications left with Dublin City Council were approved – with city planners staunchly defending the scheme and denying that there was any conflict of interest for the council to adjudicate on applications arising out of a scheme in which it has a vested interest. However some 24 units were appealed to An Bord Pleanála, resulting in two dozen successive hearings over three days in October – which an inspector herself described as “unprecedented”.
Bizarrely the billboards all seem to have been earmarked for less well-healed areas; no application was lodged for Donnybrook, Ballsbridge, Sandymount, or Rathgar. Yet applications were made for Ringsend, Dorset Street, Coolock, and Fairview.
So how much are 120 billboards worth? Intriguingly it is claimed that the larger electronic billboards, displaying 3 different adverts, should each generate €8,000 per month – netting approximately €7M per annum, with the 50 smaller billboards making another €3M per annum. Hence over the 15 year terms the deal may have been worth €150 Million to JC Decaux.
So one estimate now puts each of the “free bikes” in the original deal at each costing the city over €300,000 in terms of foregone revenue. But that’s not the only problem. In recommending that the Bord reject all units under appeal, Inspector Jane Dennihey reasoned that the applications were “premature”.
One reason for her recommendation was the use by senior city planners of a map, entitled “Zones of Advertising Control”, as now exclusively reproduced by Plan.
The hitch here is that councilors claim to have not even seen this map previously – never minded voted on it.
This throws suggests that key planning documents are being decided without any consultation with either the public or elected councillors, resulting in what An Taisce often calls as “rezonings without due process”.
Notably the document is broken into areas that correspond with Dublin City Council Development Plan maps – yet equally notable is the absence of an official City Council stamp, or for that matter a date. So the question must be asked: who drew up the map? And by what authority? It is now being acted upon as if it were already adopted policy?
Now the Bord has rejected 18 of the 24 units, permitting some of the smaller bus-shelter size units in pedestrian areas – while refusing all of the larger “Metropole” units which were to be7 sq m and standing 2m off the ground – primarily on grounds of road safety.
The ratio of bikes yielded by billboards was less than 4 per unit, although in Paris JC Decaux provide 13 bikes per unit as well as an annual rental of €2,085 per billboard over 10 years – while Dublin gets no cash over 15 years.
Paris also rolled out a programme of putting in place an additional 300 kilometres of cycle-ways in advance of their scheme.
Intriguingly, the original deal required 75% of all applications to be passed for the scheme to go ahead. However, even though only 72 billboards are now permitted, the deal is still going ahead – and where JC Decaux was to remove 100 existing billboards, as stipulated in each planning permission, city planner Jim Keogan is now saying that only 50 are to be removed – a change which critics say is unlawful.
The units are already under construction although no rental bikes are expected until next spring – and the units are distinctly different from that which was illustrated in the applications, with brown metal mesh detailing replacing what appeared to be solid chrome stands.
Split applications, dubious rezoning maps, and the Bord rejecting all “Metropoles”: to add to this the Dublin City Business Association has written to Minister John Gormley asking him “to investigate”. The only question is what’s next? It’s over to you, Minister.
I’m not familiar with much of the background but on the face of it this seems a pretty stupid way to have gone about things. DCC appear to have assumed that bike hire schemes can only be carried out with the co-operation of JC Decaux, and that means economic logic can go out the window. For granting them the privilege of plonking big brown advertising hoardings all over town we’re going to get a measly 450 bikes maximum, and probably less given all those planning defeats. In comparison there are more than 2,000 bikes in the free bike scheme in Copenhagen, a city of about the same size. Critical mass is very important if this scheme is going to catch on, have a marked impact on driver behaviour and encourage more cyclists to take to the roads, and 450 bikes is unlikely to be enough. What scope is there for enlarging the scheme - will we have to put up more billboards? And why this connection with street advertising in the first place? Given the many positive external benefits of increased cycling such as better health, reduced congestion and less strain on public transport, there was surely a case for actually spending some money on it (y’know, like we do by the billion for other forms of road transport) and making some back with user fees and selling advertising on the bikes themselves.
A car near Christchurch, earlier.
It’s not a bumper sticker. It’s just common sense.
Buala bos to Mark and Associates for coming up with these proposals for transforming the stretch of coast from the East Pier to Sandycove. Having lots of fond memories of the place I’ve probably got an inbuilt wariness about any major changes, but after looking a bit more closely I think they’d both be big improvements, particularly in making the water actually accessible. I think I prefer the first one (with the lagoon rather than the big beach) at the moment, any thoughts?
The National Archives of Ireland are making available the full records of every household in the 1911 Census, starting with Dublin as is only right and proper. You can search it all here. Don’t think any of my family were in the big shmoke at the time but there are certainly fuckloads of Gibneys, Geogeghans and Gannons. Somebody at Crooked Timber found Dev’s record (back when he was Edward DeValera) but I didn’t have much luck finding anyone else famous - no Yeats, which would have been fun.
Rich people queuing outside Joe’s house in Dublin, today.
Over the course of three decades from the late 1930s on Charles W. Cushman of Indiana traveled the world and photographed what he saw on colour Kodak slides. On his death some 14,500 of these were bequeathed to Indiana University, who have made the collection available online.
By any standards this is an amazing body of work: for colour and quality they already stand out from most photography of that era, but throw in the range of locations and subjects, and Cushman’s eye for composition and interesting detail and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here.
Cushman went all over: there are thousands of photos from the US, and hundreds from the UK. Best of all, there are a few dozen from Ireland, including some fantastic shots from a June 1961 visit to Dublin.
[edit: Forgot to say, you can get a much bigger version of each photo by clicking the links provided]
Here is College Green, not much changed apart from the traffic:
O’Connell Bridge and the Liffey:
On O’Connell Bridge (complete with flags, green bus and Bolands delivery van):
On O’Connell St itself (they didn’t seem to go in for road markings much in those days):
Cyclists at the bottom of Great Georges St:
And further up Georges St (the Long Hall hasn’t changed much!):
And lastly for Ireland, here’s one from the Vico Road looking over Killiney Beach and up to the hill, so bright and clear it could have been taken yesterday:
Then there’s London, also in the early 1960s. There are great shots here of Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus at night, a ‘huckster’ in Aldgate market, a couple of authentic urchins, the Hippodrome when it wasn’t such a dive, and Covent Garden when it was still a working market (with old-school market men who could balance stacks of pallets on their heads). I love this shot of the South bank of the Thames east of London Bridge, when an area that is now a mix of offices (featuring insufferable yuppies like me) and various cultural activities was solid working docks.
Some of the best stuff comes from the Moorgate area. I’m including this one because I’ve actually been up in that tower (Pat works in the offices below):
And then there’s this one, probably the shot of the collection for me, looking north from London Wall over land still lying waste after the devastating bombs of WWII to the church of St Giles-Without-Cripplegate:
Five years later Cushman returned to find them building the Barbican around St Giles:
The earliest photos are American, and the effect of seeing things from such an early age in such vivid colour is pretty jarring. Here is a New York City street scene from 1941:
Here’s a hot-dog stand and here’s McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th St, which is still there today, more than can be said for many of the lower Manhattan neighbourhoods Cushman photographed.
Finally, proof that times really have changed: in 1941 even the bums were well-dressed:
This seems like a good idea:
Hey all,
I’m a daily user of Dublin Bus but I usually only take the same three bus routes into and out of town. So while I know those routes backwards, when it comes to going to any location I’m not sure what bus to take.
The Dublin Bus website isn’t great at giving the exact route of the bus. It might say the bus goes to A then B and then C but doesn’t say how exactly it gets from A to B. So I’m not sure what stop to get off in order to bring me closest to my destination.
But now that Google Maps have launched their My Map service, this could change. I think it’s possible to use this service to map out every Dublin Bus route and stops.
Shouldn’t really be necessary, but they’re right, the DB website gives information about routes but for some reason not in the form of lines on maps. And Google’s My Map is apparently very easy to use.
I thought this was pretty interesting. Dick Gleeson, who is the Dublin City Planner but no relation of mine that I know of, talks about all the whizzy things he’d like to do to the city. A lot of it’s around the west end of the city, and he wants to make Phoenix Park more connected and accessible to the rest of the city, which seems reasonable. I also like the way he’s happy to say that Ballsbridge is actually a bit rubbish. I can’t quite picture what he means by this though:
Gleeson said the city would open up to the west with a new public park, linking IMMA in Kilmainham, south of the river, to the National Museum at Collins Barracks, north of the river, via Heuston Station.
Left outside the Bridewell Garda station on Friday: a mysterious yet highly insulting sculpture of a pig.
Huh. I didn’t realise the College Tribune already has a website. Initial thoughts:
This is quite cool, though perhaps not for the reasons they think:
Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle routes.
It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city by bicycle, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a new destination.
But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way
I dunno, people’s routes tend to be very specific - they’ll need a lot of routes submitted before someone really logs on to find exactly the right route across Hamburg they needed, for example. I suppose if it takes off they might manage it, but in the meantime it’s fun just plotting out your own routes (here’s my commute to work, here’s someone else’s swing round Donnybrook and Killiney), plus you can view them in Google Earth (by saving as a .gpx file) and, which I found just as nifty as Tom, you can view a cross-section which shows you the change in elevation along the route. How long before someone plots the entire route of the next Tour de France?
I’m still tinkering with this idea of a weblog / mega-site for the College Tribune, and I’ve set up a very simple demo site here just to show what can easily and freely be done. The theme obviously needs a bit of work - that banner image doesn’t exactly scream Belfield, for example - but hopefully you get the idea. This page has a few ideas for what the site could eventually include.
Dublin crime map. I can see it becoming really useful, but it only shows past crimes for now, unfortunately.
Here’s two things I’ve noticed: there is no website to speak of for the UCD College Tribune, and there is no good general website to speak of serving the general interests of UCD students. I’m guessing the reason why there is no Tribune website is that it is felt the benefits to the newspaper from establishing one wouldn’t be worth the time, cost and hassle (and anyway editors are only around for a short time), and the reason why there is no good website for UCD students is that the two organisations who have established general UCD websites - the college itself and the Students Union - are both too official, too unpopular and too uninterested, for their own good reasons, in the wider interests of students outside learning and union politics (I know the SU site has forums and other areas ostensibly covering non-political subjects, but they seem relatively inactive and therefore not good, probably due to students’ identification of the SU with boring politics).
Well, I think if the College Tribune were to set up the right kind of website it would stand a good chance of being very worthwhile for both the newspaper and students in general.
What would the right kind of website involve? Two suggestions: the Tribune ‘brand’ / reputation (independent, for students by students, interested in what students are interested in) should be used to draw people in but shouldn’t dominate their experience of the site (like The Guardian does for Comment Is Free), and content should be as student-driven as possible. So, it should include content from the paper, at the very least all the comment pieces online, but it should make every effort to encourage readers to leave comments so that conversations have the best chance to develop. It should have a fairly chatty blog of college-centric news and views written by the paper’s contributors. It should have an easy to use section for classified ads. Going wider, it should have sections for the various student societies, run by the societies themselves. It should have discussion forums. It could go even further and host student blogs, homepages, photo galleries and maybe (maybe) even a wiki-style guide to all things UCD written by students themselves. There are a lot of possibilities, and with something like this you need to be able to walk before you can run, BUT critical mass is important to social networks taking off, and bundling together different services makes users of one more likely to use another, making that critical mass easier to achieve. If it took off, it would be self-sustaining.
What would be in it for the Tribune? Well, if it worked it would put the Tribune at the centre of online college life and enhance its reputation and maybe even its print readership. It shouldn’t hurt earnings from ads for the print paper (since it’s a freesheet) and might even increase them, and if the site takes off the Tribune could sell online advertising. And finally, if the Tribune doesn’t do it somebody else eventually will. Social networking has been very good until now at linking people who live far away from each other, and it’s only now starting to link people who live or work close together but don’t interact as they might want to. A lot of the time people who live or work close together don’t want to interact online in any way at all, but universities, I think, are an exception, so I think we will eventually start seeing more and better community websites for particular universities starting up. I’d like to see UCD be first, and I’d like to see the Tribune do it.
Wouldn’t this be a lot of work? I think if you started with a small but scaleable set-up (like a Tribune Wordpress blog at a dedicated URL, total cost 20 quid or something like that) it needn’t be, and if and when it starts to take off it shouldn’t be too hasslesome to bolt on extra features such as forums using the free, easy and powerful software available. And it wouldn’t be hard to get one or two Computer Science students to maintain and tinker with the site as necessary. It’s surely worth a try.
So , that’s the idea. Any thoughts?
The new lord mayor of Dublin, Vincent ‘Ballyfermot’ Jackson (yes, he’s one of those guys like Seán ‘Dublin Bay’ Loftus, although he’s dropped it recently) says it would only cost €2-4million to provide free, wireless broadband all over the city. It would involve the city council allowing its lampposts to be used as antennae.
I reckon it’s a Doctor Who episode in the making.
Note Eircom’s severe lack of enthusiasm compared to the other companies when asked if they would be interested in a public-private partnership.
Up with this sort of thing.
Dublin City Council is to remove a memorial plaque from O’Connell Bridge because it does not know the person commemorated or how the plaque got there.
The bronze plaque, set into the wall on the western side of the bridge, commemorating “Fr Pat Noise” was spotted recently by a Sunday newspaper journalist.
‘Pat Noise’… Sunday newspaper journalist… don’t even have to reach for that one.
The plaque claims to mark the spot where the priest died in 1919 when his carriage plunged into the River Liffey in “suspicious circumstances”.
The council’s heritage officer has reviewed historical records but can find no reference either to the priest or the accident, a council spokeswoman said.
Furthermore, the council did not erect the plaque, was not asked permission for its placement on the bridge and has “no idea” how it got there.
Fr Pat Noise - whose carriage, like that of Trachim B, either did or did not pin him to the bottom of the Liffey in 1919 - I for one will remember you.
Dublin today:
I suppose it’s nice to be the one asking this question for a change, but: is everyone alright over there?
Hopefully it looks much worse than it really was, everyone’s fine, and we can all get back to laughing at the idea of a “Love Ulster” parade.
Misleading headlines ahoy, I just want to point out how stupid Dublin City Council is and how much money it must be wasting on useless and duplicated signage and weak, crappy bollards.
These pics were all taken near Smithfield, where I live.
Grrrr. That really grinds my gears. Grrrr!
My friend Orla is starting up her regular short-film night again. She writes:
Starting on Sunday, 8th January 2006, Sunday Ghetto will be running on the second Sunday of every month in the Sugar Club, Lower Leeson Street, where I will be screening a programme of Irish and International shorts, followed by a DJ til late, all for only a fiver per person.
I used to go to the Sunday Ghetto during its first run a couple of years ago, and it was always fun. Orla managed to get all sorts of people to send her all sorts of short films from all sorts of places, and the wildy variable quality became part of its charm. And sometimes the film-makers would turn up and give a touching little speech before making way for their five minute opus about killer shoe-boxes or whatever. The duds were actually in the minority - there are a lot of good short films knocking around, you just tend not to come across them in the normal run of things.
So I heartily recommend you check the Sunday Ghetto out. Oh, and if you know anyone apart from Ruadhan who makes shorts, point them in Orla’s direction - she’s always looking for new stuff to show. Ask me for the address if you need it.
If two people knew they had to meet somewhere in Dublin at a particular time but hadn’t arranged a particular place to meet, where would they go?
I can think of three possible places:
(a) In front of Bewley’s on Grafton St
(b) In front of Trinity College on College Green
(c) In front of Cleary’s on O’Connell St
Is any one of these the most likely default meeting-spot? Is anywhere else more likely?
As for London, I’m not sure. Many of the most popular areas here have no one focal point - like around Parliament, or Oxford St, or Leicester Square. The statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus is something of a focal point, but I’ve never met anyone there and I don’t know anyone who does. Tate Modern has too many sides. My personal favourite is the Great Court at the British Museum. But I think the bottom of the London Eye might be today’s default London meeting-spot.
Diageo’s new advertising campaign is legion. Throughout the city, at Luas stops and on buses, Diageo is saying:
They’ve also taken to hijacking people’s mobile phones, but anyone I’ve spoken to hasn’t clue how Diageo ‘found’ their numbers.
Brilliant. Tell people to drink less while telling people to drink even more. I wouldn’t want to see a good night wasted because I didn’t get wasted enough either.
Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s overseas development minister, has a reputation for fucking things up. A few months ago, he called oriental persons of dusky skin “kebabs”. Before that, he caused embarrasment simply for existing. He’s probably a heavy breather.
I went along to a launch (a lunch/launch) in Mongo’s HQ of a book the organisation I’m working in has produced. Lenihan’s like a weird cross between a giant teddy-bear (you know, the ones you get in teddy-bear specialist shops) - well, no, he’s more like a man-boy. All man, still born. Uh… anywho, the thing was funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs so he had to make a little speech.
He said Ireland’s deadly at sending volunteers abroad, but now is the time to move away from fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants amateurism towards sort of commercial professionalism. The audience was a cabal of development representatives from Ireland like Concern and Oxfam. They found it hard enough to hear the teddy-bear suggesting the overseas volunteering in Ireland should become more commercialised - as if this isn’t part of the whole problem. At this stage, Lenihan was riffing, and riffing badly.
Then he actually said: “Maybe volunteering organisations should become more like McDonald’s than charities”. Or something like that.
There was no air left in the room for a few seconds. I couldn’t breathe. People’s gasps created such a vacuum, the walls bulged in. I was scared we were going to be crushed into a singularity until people started laughing under their breath. I could breathe again.
Could you think of a worse fucking example of the excesses of globalisation than McDonald’s? Is Lenihan insane, or just stupid? Ah, but he’s so adorable, can we not just keep him?
The same day, I heard an even better story about him. An early morning RTE radio show rang him up asking him to comment on some issue or other he obviously knew nothing about. He was in bed when RTE rang him and they asked him to stay on the line until they introduced him and brought him into the discussion. He probably wasn’t waiting long but when they went to him, live on air, all the presenter could hear was loud snoring, or gurgling, or burbling or something.
Presenter: “So, we now go Junior Minister of State Conor Lenihan, Mr. Lenihan, do you have anything to say about this?”
Conor: “NNNNNGGGGGHHHHKKKKKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.”
HAHA.
No, not that stupid website.
Genuinely heard someone on Dame Street say…
“Oh my god, I was totally a victim of pathetic fallacy!”
