The only subject on the tip of people’s tongues this week is our new one-way system.
If, like me, you work on the High Street or in the centre of the city you know the score. There hasn’t been a moment since Tuesday morning that there hasn’t been a stationary car outside the office door.
Frustrated drivers are now the order of the day. Say good -bye to goodwill and even good manners - ‘cos everyone is really cross out there! It’s all hand gestures and sullen faces - not a pretty sight.
But it is all for the greater good - or so we are being told and in honesty I do see the longer term point of having a traffic-free inner city where everyone cycles or walks and businesses are busy with pedestrian traffic rather than nasty, pungent, fumey traffic! However, there needs to be certain factors in place in order to implement the perfect traffic system and unfortunately Kilkenny doesn’t have that integral infrastructure in place as of yet - which is why we are seeing daily gridlock and even more fumes than ever before, instead of lovely fresh air.
Firstly as Malcolm suggests a park’n ride facility would have gone a long way towards alleviating the traffic congestion - people will always need to come into town whether we like it or not and for those businesses who rely on people coming into town, any measure used to prevent it is a retrograde step.
So what we need to devise is a strategy that will keep traffic that wants to come into town flowing and traffic that doesn’t need to be in the city, on the outskirts. The only answer that I can see to this problem is the completion of the ring road. Maybe this system is not a runner until the ring road is completed - and we all know that the funds for that are not forthcoming and won’t be for the foreseeable future.
Are we being a little too idealistic thinking that we can turn Kilkenny into a greener, more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly place when the structures to support this plan are simply not in place - we need the infrastructure to deal with the huge volumes of cars that visit our city everyday - and importantly enough we also need these cars to keep on coming to Kilkenny in order to support our local economy.
I think it is obvious at this stage that the efforts are futile if we are not trying out the whole system at the one time. Even turning off the traffic lights might help with logistical problems next week as the schools re-open. Everyone is fearing the worst and nobody wants to come near the centre of the city. Businesses are really suffering and this is unsustainable.
So let’s see some alternative transport in place and a fully rounded ring road before we plan for one-ways please - it’s simply clogging up our city and making normally sane, intelligent people go crazy!
