Letter to the Editor: Solving Waterford's traffic problems
Dear Editor,
In recent days and weeks, many in local media and on social media have been highlighting the horrible traffic congestion faced by those living in and around our city. Alongside these many complaints, some have highlighted supposed ‘solutions’ to the gridlock - conservative suggestions, which ultimately include even more lanes for traffic and additional parking spaces.
There is a better alternative, which is actually based on best-practice in urban planning across Europe; reducing the number of cars on the road by providing additional transport options and by planning for medium-density, mixed-use buildings, which can build thriving, walkable communities.
The traffic congestion in a city like Waterford is not normal. Nor is it normal in Galway, nor in Dublin. This is caused, simply, by too many people driving. And that is due, in part, to a lack of freedom to choose how we want to travel safely and efficiently. I am one such example; despite never once driving anywhere else I've lived, preferring to cycle or use public transport, my life in Waterford is dominated by driving, due to a lack of safe and segregated bike paths, severe urban sprawl, and abysmal public transport for a city the size of Waterford.
Our lack of public transport infrastructure in our cities makes Ireland the clear outlier among European countries. Many similarly-populated cities across our continent have at least one tram line, and a large number of bus routes - with some providing 24-hour coverage.
During my local and general election campaigns, I found 10 French and German cities the size of Waterford which have tramlines. In particular, I highlighted the example of Dessau-Rosslau in Germany, a city of similar size, which contains two tram lines, 14 bus routes, including six night routes, and a commuter rail system.
Maybe, instead of calling to make our city actively worse to exist in by undoing pedestrianisation and adding extra lanes of traffic - we can pressure those in power to build a Waterford Luas along the Cork Road onto the South Quays and out the Dunmore Road, and to implement additional bus routes with a frequency of 5-10 minutes!
That would allow us to actively increase pedestrianisation and actively reduce parking in our city centre - and study after study highlights how, contrary to the assumptions of conservative commentators, increased pedestrianisation and active travel infrastructure actually increases city centre activity and commercial revenues. Put plainly, make our city centre a nice place to exist in and more people will want to exist in it.
At a time when online shopping is hollowing out commercial activity across the world and Kilkenny town is outcompeting us simply by being a lovely place to visit and to exist in, making Waterford City beautiful is more important than ever.
Imagine if our waterfront was a lovely green space dotted with a playground, skate park, public rock-climbing wall, community space, and outdoor cafés, instead of a huge car-park owned by the National Government’s Port of Waterford company and operated on a for-profit basis by iPairc. A public space for all to thrive in, instead of an operation to extract profit from the local economy.
As has been highlighted repeatedly, a key aspect of improving our city centre is to look at how successful cities thrive across the world - it is by creating dynamic communities who live, work, and socialise in medium-density, mixed-use walkable spaces. Think of cities you might have visited, such as Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Amsterdam. Our conservative planners, meanwhile, have been learning all of the wrong lessons from US planners, creating soulless urban sprawls of remote housing estates, which require a car to get to work, to friends, and to shops. Not only does this cause traffic to worsen; it also makes us more lonely and stressed, and robs us of the freedom and flexibility we need to have a good quality of life.
The recent Waterford BusConnects plan, if not fixed, dooms us to years of inadequate public transport, with a frequency of 15 or 30 minutes at peak and no night buses. Our Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil government is depriving us of public transport funding and infrastructure; refusing to fund the re-opening of the Waterford-Wexford rail line, and not even contemplating a Waterford Luas, 24/7 frequent buses, or a new Waterford-Cork rail line with stations in Tramore, Dungarvan, Youghal, and Midleton.
To anyone who similarly dismisses these urgent and necessary improvements as ‘pie in the sky’, I urge you not to let decades of neglect by those in power force you to limit your ambitions, and to look at how countries across Europe with much less money than us manage to have way better public transport infrastructure and thriving communities and cities.
Our traffic problems are a consequence of political choices; how we solve them will also require political choices, and we must ensure that these choices are the right ones - not ones which will cause us to fall further into decades of failed urban design and public transport planning, but ones which will allow our city to truly reach its full potential.
Killian Mangan,
Ballynaneashagh,
Waterford
