Matter of inches

Last weekend I came within inches and milliseconds of killing someone. I was driving to Sligo and somewhere around Boyle, on the last good stretch of road, I saw a person stopped with a bicycle in the hard shoulder at a junction. Having already passed several groups out cycling in the good weather along the route I guessed that he was part of another set of fundraisers or keep fit enthusiasts. He was well in to the side and the road was wide so I determined that we were no threat to each other.

However, as we got close to the junction (maybe 30m) a young teenager on a bicycle came flying out of a side road heading straight across the N4. I slammed on the brakes leaving a long skid mark along the main road. Luckily the ABS worked fine and I was able to turn towards the hard shoulder. As we passed each other, I was probably still travelling at 80km/h. At that speed, had he traveled 1m less across the road we would have collided and he would be dead. Luckily for him we missed and there was nothing coming the other direction so he lived to tell the tale. I pulled in and stopped, spent five minutes shaking with a huge adrenaline rush and then drove very cautiously for the remaining 20 minutes of the journey.

From my point of view it reinforced several rules of driving

• Always keep an eye on side roads - if I had just been watching the main carriageway he'd have been flung over my bonnet.
  
• Always keep a good distance between you and other vehicles - there was about 40m between me and the car behind so she had plenty of time to react to my immediate braking.
  
• Don't drive when tired or after drinking - with slower reaction times I would have spent today at a funeral in Co Roscommon and possibly be facing a court appearance
  
• Don't drive a banger - good brakes and functioning ABS were key to the kid's survival
  

This hasn't put me off driving or made me a more timid driver. I enjoy being on the open road too much. But it does make me wonder a little bit more about road design, especially where minor roads enter a major through route at right angles. Depending on access requirements, a slight curve in the minor road to align it with the major route would avoid direct access to the main carriageway and the runaway bicycle would have ended up either on an embankment or else belting up the hard shoulder. Of course, were cost not an issue, all inter-urban routes should only have grade separated junctions but that's in the realms of fantasy for the foreseeable future.

Dublin Bikes usage

A few days ago (last year!) I picked up a snippet in the Irish Times about the success of the Dublin Bikes scheme. In it, figures from the council are quoted showing that almost 16k people have signed up for the annual pass with another almost 7k short term tickets were sold.

So far, so good. But then the really odd number is quoted - over 200k journeys have been taken since September. If we assume that the short term ticket users only used them once each, that gives us about 12 or 13 trips per annual subscriber over the three month period. If the short termers are bigger users, that average falls even further.

Now I personally use the bikes about 5 times per week, depending on which buses I get to and from work and whether I want to do some lunchtime shopping up town. Unfortunately, the online system only allows me to see my last 3 weeks of use which includes Christmas when I wasn't in town at all so I don't have lots of data to back it up but between 15th and 23rd Dec I took 7 trips. So that means I'm probably using the bikes about 4 to 5 times the average.

The other interesting figure given is the number of bikes (450) which means the average bike has been out on over 400 spins around the city centre. I'm sure that there are lots of other bits of information you could extract if you had access to the entire trip database - profiles of users, locations of hotspots, tidal shifts of bikes over the day. Damn you, data protection act, for keeping this information from a data mining nerd like me.

Bus gate changes

Last night Dublin City Council voted 35-11 in favour of removing the bus gate on College Green in the evenings from mid-November to mid-January. The proposal was brought before the Council after the Dublin City Business Association said they had lost over 30% of trade since the measure was introduced. Of course no evidence was provided showing that this loss was due to the bus gate as opposed to say the economic climate and the high prices being charged by city centre businesses for goods and services.

On the other hand, independant research from Deloitte has shown that bus journey times have been greatly reduced in the city centre and that the numbers of cyclists in the area has been increased, in part from the bus gate and also from the Dublin Bikes scheme.

Hard facts like these matter not a whit to the City Manager and the Councillors as DCBA represent the people who pay rates. With DCC almost completely reliant on rates and commercial water for income it is no surprise that when the piper starts playing the Council gets up to dance. Since the next local elections are over 4 years away the Councillors only have to keep business onside and can stick two fingers up at the voters.

The biggest worry about this development is that DCBA will use the upsurge in business brought about by the usual Christmas trade to argue that bus gate should not be re-introduced in January and that it should be phased out altogether. The Council should have stuck firm on the issue and kept the bus gate in place to make the city more accessible and safer for pedistrians, cyclists and users of public transport and left the gouging shopkeepers to wallow in their own misery.

As a Labour supporter it is especially galling to see that only four councillors (Gallagher, Kenny, Quinn and Upton) who voted to keep the bus gate as is. After all Cllr Montegue's efforts with the Dublin Bikes scheme you'd have thought at least he would have voted to keep it as well. Shame on the rest of them for caving into DCBA at the expense of the citizen.

Dublin Bikes

It was a long time coming, I remember discussing the scheme with Mary Freehill in 2007, but the Dublin Bikes scheme was finally launched on 13th September. For 10 euro a year I now have the freedom to scoot around town at lunchtime and get a small amount of exercise in the process. Sounds almost too good to be true.

Well unfortunately it is. In getting the scheme operational, Dublin City Council have sold their soul to the devil in the form of JC Decaux. DCC granted almost twice as much advertising per bike to JCD as was awarded in Paris. Also it appears as though the scheme was not tendered for publicly. Now, with only slightly more than a week gone, JCD have got a court order against a free iPhone app that would let you find in real-time the location of the nearest station and show the number of bikes and free stands at it.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the scheme is a wonderful idea. I've already clocked up over an hour of biking which is probably more than the total I've done in the last few years. I look forward to the scheme being extended to places like Fairview, Rathmines and out to Heuston and the Phoenix Park but it seems as though DCC will have to do that at their own cost as the JCD sweetheart deal won't cover it.