A Stormont official’s suggestion that workers spend an extra week day working from home to help ease gridlock in Belfast city centre is “deeply disheartening”, an NI business leader has said.
Department for Infrastructure (DfI) deputy secretary Colin Woods made the suggestion on Monday morning during a lengthy interview with BBC NI’s The Nolan Show.“If people would use public transport or work from home one day a week even, you would start to see significant reductions in congestion,” he said.
“We hear the frustration people are expressing.
“There is not enough space for vehicles trying to use (the roads) and we can see the impact on people’s journey times.
“The network of streets in Belfast were laid out when horses and pedestrians were the only people using them and there isn’t the space to put as many vehicles as possible.”
That is an eminently sensible suggestion from Colin, one that I am sure would go down well with staff who are extremely reluctant to leave their warm, cosy homes to sit on the dark and gloomy Westlink for 2 hours a day, slowly watching their lifeforce leave their bodies.
There is just one problem. The Department for Infrastructure is one of the civil service departments trying to force people back into the office. I know staff there who have been told they must return to the office whether they like it or not.
These people have zero desire to lose two hours of their day commuting into Belfast. Going slowly mad with the gridlock traffic (courtesy of The Department for Infrastructure), paying £4 for a coffee, £7 for a sandwich, and a tenner for parking.
But, but, but, they should be taking public transport, I hear you cry. That’s a great idea, except the buses are also caught in the traffic, and trains are at capacity.
I suggest Colin Woods urgently requests a meeting with Colin Woods. I hear he is the kind of blue sky thinking problem-solving chap we need at a time like this.
My money is on jetpacks to solve our problems – like your man at the 84 LA Olympics. Strap us all to 30 litres of highly combustible jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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