Re: Free Parking
I was so warm on my walk into work this morning that I left my jacket in the office and walked home in the beautiful sun wearing just a sweatshirt.
Well done Rainday you use the one sunny day of the year to encapsulate your typical commute to work. If a financial institution was so selective in describing it's products you'd be on them like a ton of bricks.
Incidently when I mentioned Orlando and Tampa I was simply answering the question that you posted....
Have you ever seen any multi-story car-park anywhere in the world that was free of charge?
For the sake of comparison with Dublin Let me describe very
a Saturday in a country where annual road tax is $40.
Left Hotel at 8.30 drove about 25 miles to the first shop I needed to visit, was there at 9.00 parked outside the door (free)
Spent about an hour chatting to the guy in the shop, got in the car drove on to a huge shopping Mall parked (free) with no difficulty in finding parking,
Spend a couple of hours there, drove on to another shop about 20 miles away made it in about 25 mins.
Parked outside the door (free) spent about 30 mins chatting to the very friendly staff, went to another mall, parked (free) with no trouble finding space.
Had Dinner (very nice and very cheap).
Drove on to another shop, parked (free) outside the door.
You get the picture.
In total I visted 3 shopping Malls, and about 4 or 5 individual stores. At no time did I pay for parking. At no time did I get stuck in traffic.
They can provide that kind of road network and parking facilities charging $40 road tax per year, with low tax on fuel and $400 VRT.
A Crysler Crossfire costs about EUR65,000 in Ireland (As far as I know), you would be on the road in the states in the Same car for less than EUR18000
They also have a strange idea over there that the speed limit should have some relevance to the road.
In residential areas you have a 25mph limit, which people seem to obey. There were roadworks on some of the Freeway's etc, but they didn't slap on a ridiculous 37mph limit as we did in Naas. They simply double the penalty if you speed while work is being carried out.
By and large the speed limits seemed to be reasonably well observed, with those speeding standing out rather than being the norm.
Of course the difference is that most cities in the States were Planned and didn't evolve from medieval towns and villages with narrow streets etc.
But on the outskirts of Dublin there are cities that were basically built. Firhouse was essentially built in the last 10 years. And yet it's notoriously bad for traffic. The M50 was built in the last 20 years, Tallaght was built, the vast housing sprawl at Lucan was buillt. There doesn't appear to be any thought for design. We just accept that cities in Ireland can't be controlled or designed, even though the evidence from around the world is to the contrary.
Dublin's public transport, traffic congestion and bland housing sprawl are just the outword symptoms of the cancer of corruption that built Dublin.
-Rd
