There are certain locations in Dublin that, whenever I encounter them, make me question the nature of the relationship between the people who live in this city and the people who, at least notionally, run it. Probably anyone who lives in Dublin, and indeed in any city, has certain places that evoke these questions. One of these places, for me, isn’t even particularly bad – in the scheme of things, in fact, it’s arguably frivolous; it just happens to be a place I encounter several times per week, in the course of my ordinary business.
I’m talking here about a particular pedestrian crossing, on the corner of Lower Baggot St and Upper Merrion St. And whenever I have to use this crossing I find myself questioning not just the administration of the city itself, but my own life choices. Why do I continue to live in a place where I have to wait 45 minutes to cross a busy city-centre intersection on foot? (Perhaps it’s not quite 45 minutes, but it often feels like that; and if you have so much time on your hands while waiting to cross the street that you wind up thinking about your own life choices, then I would argue that it is simply taking too long to cross the street.)
This, as I say, is on the surface at least a fairly minor issue in a city with no shortage of major ones, but to me it’s like a small loose thread which, if you pull at it hard enough, threatens to unravel the whole ragged fabric of the capital. Dublin is a place that seems to have very little respect for pedestrians, is the thing. This is despite having a reputation as not just a “walkable city”, but in fact one of the world’s great cultural sites of perambulation. This reputation is, it seems to me, based less on any actual contemporary experience of the place than on its load-bearing association with a particular modernist novel, set before the advent of the motorcar, about a couple of guys who spend an entire day walking around it, occasionally stopping to furtively masturbate, or to air arcane theories about Hamlet.
Every time I stand at that crossing, and wait an absurdly long time with a gathering cluster of fellow pedestrians, I am forced to think about Dublin’s dully insistent prioritising of cars. Anyone who has been to basically any other European city will recognise the extent to which Dublin has forced those negotiating it on foot into radically reduced circumstances. The fact that the city had until recently a total of three – three! – zebra crossings seems like one of the most dire indications of its total lack of regard for anyone trying to walk around the place. And let’s not even start with cyclists, whom it seems to want to actively kill. Again, not literally.
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I’m not particularly interested in a drivers-vs-pedestrians framing here, and even less so in a cyclists-vs-drivers one. I get about the place by all three means, and also by public transport, at different times for different reasons, and I don’t especially identify with any one category. But it just seems obvious to me that cities with fewer cars, and with more restrictions on where those cars can go and how quickly they can go there, are, on aggregate, easier and more efficient and more pleasant places to spend time in.
I, like probably a lot of Dubliners, have been thinking about this stuff more than usual as a result of the recent controversy over the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan. The plan, which is due to be put into action next month, was designed to reduce the number of cars in the city by preventing traffic that goes through it but does not have the centre as its final destination. But this plan, as mild and inoffensive as its various measures were, has been diluted and potentially delayed, thanks to Emer Higgins of Fine Gael – who has recently become Minister of State with responsibility for Business, Employment and Retail – and to Ibec, whose claim, if I understand it correctly, seems to be that preventing motorists from driving through the city centre without stopping in the city centre will hurt trade in the city centre. (Possibly there are motorists so highly skilled in both driving and buying things in shops that they’re able to practice both at once – dashing into Louis Copeland and buying a summer suit off the rack while the Range Rover idles at a red light, making tap payments for flat whites out the driver-side window – but this is surely so rare as to have a negligible impact on the city’s economy.)
This last-minute derailing of a plan to make Dublin a marginally more liveable and pleasant place seems to me to further underline an aspect of the city that has long been painfully obvious: it does not, by and large, feel like a place that is run primarily in the interest of its citizens. It feels like a place that is run primarily in the interest of its businesses. I’m not so much of a hardline leftist that I can’t be convinced of the potential for those interests to be here and there aligned – I like to buy things in shops as much as the next subject of capitalism – but the city’s loyalties feel increasingly, hopelessly invested in one side of the equation. In fact, even invoking the concept of citizenship in relation to Dublin feels a little odd – as though I’d somehow forgotten the word “consumer”, and had to momentarily make do with some older and more politically unwieldy term. But it might be time to start using that term a little more, and getting more comfortable with its implications. And the first steps may have to be taken as pedestrians.
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