Parking Enforcement and Parking Provisions Issues
I’ll preface this by saying that I do think our town centres need more parking. There has been a tendency in planning lately to deliberately be anti-car. It’s been stick without carrot. Simply putting 20 spaces into a 40 unit building doesn’t mean people can magically teleport or that there are good enough transport links to get people to where they need to go (there aren’t).
But that’s a rant for another time.
There is a problem with parking enforcement in certain areas. Seatown regularly has parking on double yellow lines (improving), Pearse Park residents have noted parking on paths, there is regularly cars parked on the roundabout at the Garda Station (of all places) and of course there is Earl Street. It’s both a matter of consistency but also a well enforced parking policy improves accessibility to paths and disabled bays etc in the town.
Earl Street is Dundalk’s only pedestrian street, and it is currently being used a car park.
Clearly we need more enforcement in areas like this. The ongoing issue with Earl Street is that there used to be retractable bollards there, and they have been out of action for over a year.
When I pointed out the parking and the damage being caused to pavers and drains from regular vehicular traffic, I was told that it would be looked at.
After addressing any localised bad public liability issues with the path, there was no budget to improve the surface and shifting from the cars and it was noted it might require a public realm project for improvements.
It is a little disappointing that damage caused by a lack of enforcement, may now be lead to massive expense. In my view this has happened in several areas, putting things on the long finger has cost us dearly. With drains; when a specialist is needed to clear the build up in the pipes under the untended drains, trees; when regular pruning and pollarding is ignored until the trees are so big that specialists have to be contracted.
It is also frustrating when ad hoc improvements are shot down because of some hypothetical, and improbably, investment (this has reminded me to do a piece on my qualms with Active Travel plans sometime soon).
If we are not proactive, the council will have a job convincing people close to developments of scale they will be maintained. The Cooley Greenway springs to mind. The people out there are going to need serious assurances that any greenway (if it goes ahead) will always be maintained and not become a burden.
In a meeting last year, Cllr Meenan suggested that a legacy fund should be set aside to ensure that older, more historic parts of town have a chance of being kept up to spec and improvements made. I supported this idea and still do. Sometimes residents feel like those loyal customers of phone companies, who see those frustrating ads with deals that state ‘only applies to new customers’.
A middle ground needed between hifalutin hypotheticals and the here and now.
One definite step that could be taken, is to ensure that we make sure rogue parking is enforced and to correct the broken pavers.
A more medium term job to be done to address this that rests with the councillors, is to push back against the infuriating planning approach that does not provide adequate parking.
