Bike to School Week is a sick joke…

bicycle, character, bike path

Today is the start of bike to school week. Or a more realistic name for it would be watch your child die under the wheels of a car week. I am a cyclist but the last thing I would ever do is bring my child out on the roads of Belfast. The cycle lane infrastructure in Belfast and throughout Northern Ireland is absolutely pathetic. In Belfast there are only 2 miles of protected cycle lanes in the whole city. The …

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Phoney Polish peeler gets himself into a pickle with the proper police…

A story in today’s Irish News provides a bit of a distraction from the unending doom: A 26-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of impersonating a police officer in Co Armagh. Police said an off-duty officer reported being pulled over on the M1 at Craigavon towards Portadown at around 1am by a vehicle he believed to be a police car. The driver of the unmarked grey Skoda Superb registration FT62 CEX which had been fitted with blue flashing lights, …

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Tall Ships 1991 – “great spectacularity” that could have turned M2 into a carpark #20YearRule

INTERVIEW WITH Sir Richard Needham about the Tall Ships which first visited Belfast back in July 1991. It was the first large-scale event expected to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. Recently released government papers show that extra car parking spaces were needed, and there was a suggestion that the M2 could be used for parking.

Poetry in motion. Just why is traffic so bad on a Friday?

Traffic

Ah, Friday.  POETS day.  Quieter rush hour than usual because of long weekends, and people getting the bus in so they can have drinks after work before getting a taxi home. So where does all the congestion come from on Friday afternoons? That was the question Brian asked me a wee while back, and it has a fairly straightforward answer, and I thought I might take a quick look at congestion patterns at two other peaks in the week. Monday …

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Transport options for Belfast. Who gets priority on our roads?

Andy Boal explores the transport options for Belfast It’s been interesting to read the responses to Brian’s post, but I’ve had a good look at the DRD’s proposed budget cuts and the consequences for public transport. It’s grim reading. Before we get into that, let’s start with a few principles. First of all, there is limited roadspace in Belfast, and a lot of people trying to use it.  It needs to be prioritised. Secondly, a lot of drivers have little or …

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How can we fix the Belfast traffic gridlock?

If you were one of the poor sods stuck in yesterday massive traffic jams  in Belfast you have my sympathies. It took the wife an hour to move 2 miles on the Westlink. A quick recap. A suspicious object was discovered about 3pm close to the M1 at Lisburn’s Saintfield Road junction. The country-bound section of the motorway was then shut from Blacks Road in west Belfast to Lisburn until 5.30pm when it declared a hoax. The interesting thing about …

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