Our Cork 2040: Short-term "quick wins" could be steps to Cork commuter heaven

Guest writer Ciarán Meers lays out his vision for transport for Cork city and county.

Welcome to part one of Our Cork 2040.

Cork city is set to double in size by 2040 under the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plans, with huge impacts not only on city-dwellers but on the whole county.

With these ambitious plans comes lots of talk of “stakeholders.” This often seems to mean private developers, multinational employers and politicians. But who really holds a stake in the future of Cork? We believe it’s the people who live, work, raise families and face all of life’s challenges here.

What kind of Cork do YOU want to live in?

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We launched our subscription model this week and the response has been outstanding. So we want those who signed up to know that the first thing we have done is offer a fee to all the Our Cork 2040 writers.

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Our Cork 2040: Ciarán Meers

Ciarán Meers is 20 years old and is studying Government and Political Science in UCC. He is the author of an 80-page proposal for a light rail system for Cork which now forms part of the Cork Metropolitan Area Transport Strategy. He’s a founding member of Cork Commuter Coalition, a group advocating for better public transport in Cork City, and has been a member of the European Youth Parliament since 2019. He lives in Ballincollig.

A 2040 Cork utopia…with perfect transport

The year is 2040, and Cork has been perfected. The ding of the Cork Luas has become as much a part of the soundscape as the Echo Boy. The Docklands has become the Canary Wharf of Munster, and dozens of new parks, plazas, and public spaces dot the city.

City streets are people-first, with outdoor dining common throughout the year, and apartment living has become a popular and affordable option for residents. Trains and buses are fast and reliable, connecting dozens of reimagined towns with the city centre.

A light rail proposal for an expanding Cork. Credit: Ciarán Meers.

The work of the past two decades hasn’t stopped, with new urban housing developments springing up every few months, and the new West Cork rail corridor just having broken ground. By 2040, Cork City has truly found itself.

The problem is, 2040 is a rather long time away. And when your bus is 30 minutes late, or you’re dashing around Patrick’s Street desperately hoping Dunnes Stores will take pity and let you use the staff bathroom, the promise of a permanent solution lying two decades into the future is no solace at all.

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Light rail going up Patrick’s Hill via SYSTRA

Where we actually are

Cork needs a dramatic change of pace to achieve this utopian future. While frequently ranked high on European travel destination lists, and being number one in the hearts of the nation, a conversation with any resident will shortly lay bare some of the problems that Cork has.

Many of these go right to the core of neglect in the city - the city centre seems to be hollowing out, city and county alike suffer from a housing crisis, and there remains a chronic lack of basic urban amenities such as toilets, seating, and good reliable transport.

None of these issues can be completely tackled in a short period of time (or an election cycle). Because of decades of development in the wrong direction, and a lost decade of investment induced by the 2008 recession, it's now clear that Cork needs decades of corrective action done in a few short years - with the population of Cork Metropolitan Area expected to hit 500,000 by 2040, there isn’t exactly much scope for delay or for misfiring. Enter ‘quick wins.’

Parnell Place Bus Station via Cork Commuter Coalition

When it comes to the urban policies of Irish towns and cities, ‘quick wins’ can mean a few different things. These are generally considered to be projects or schemes delivered in a short period of time, that are visible, and have a positive impact on the urban landscape - a kilometer of new bus lane is a quick win, as is making a few streets pedestrian only, or putting a few parklets around the city.

Quick wins are cheap, effective, and fast. Often they’re useful stopgaps - no one really sees the build-out pavement blocks on McCurtain Street as something that will be in place for decades, but certainly as a fairly effective solution for the mid-term at creating more space for pedestrians - at least until some proper concrete goes down.

Nonetheless, these lightning moves do have the potential to positively reshape aspects of a city. An unsatisfactory status quo can be shaken in a remarkably short period of time - we’ve seen how some cities have used the opportunity of crisis the past year to entirely remake themselves; Paris has gone from bike-hostile to bike-friendly, while many American cities are experimenting with their first dedicated busways.

We’ve seen Cork take first steps that it might not have done otherwise, from the much-publicised 17 pedestrianised city centre streets, to the slow trickle of bike lane related projects.

Despite this, this isn’t exactly the sight of a city acting within all its power to change the urban landscape - whereas other cities have been moving at the speed of a bullet train, Cork’s response has been more like the 220 on a rainy Monday evening. Even the Dublin Councils have been uncharacteristically rapid for Irish local authorities - Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s Coastal Mobility Route comprises 3.6km of completely segregated bike lane, and was constructed in only 25 days.

But the fact remains that even recently, the quick wins that have made Cork that bit brighter have been in the pipeline for a very, very long time. In the 1970s, the people of Cork were promised that the other half of Princes’ Street would be pedestrianised. Is it right to call it a quick win when it only happens half a century later?

A Park & Ride success via Cork Commuter Coalition

Quick Wins

There is a small bit of cynicism attached here - the term ‘quick win’ has been brandished excessively in Irish political discourse. Whereas a lot of substantive, impactful, and serious change occurs only over decades or generations, ‘quick wins’ allow politicians, or parties, to point at a concrete, visible change and say ‘I did that - vote for me so I can do it again’.

There is also the danger of treating ‘quick wins’ as a full accomplishment in and of themselves. For the unambitious, the temptation lies, when seeing bright umbrellas on Princes Street and a new cycle lane on the South Mall, to call Cork’s problems fixed. Not to mention the dramatic reduction of scope, as once again, we go from dreaming big visions of a city risen to haggling over minor basics.

Policy changes, too, are an underrated source of winning quickly - and are likely underutilised because they lack the visibility that back-of-the-net projects are able to attract. Enforcement of parking violations (through the long-awaited online reporting portal, for instance) would be a major step forward in scoring wins for comfort of use of cycling and walking facilities, as well as general accessibility on streets. Cork City Council’s recent creation of a Trees Officer role, which will presumably lead to increased greenery around the city, is one useful policy move with a variety of positive knock-on effects.

While any of these quick wins are valuable for what they achieve, another more important goal is changing the public and social perception of what can actually be changed. Three or four years ago, any movements at pedestrianising most or all of Cork city centre would’ve been dismissed, or condemned to the long finger of municipal planning.

The norm for local government in Cork and Ireland is drawn-out timeframes, consultation periods of dubious necessity, and general ‘down-with-this-sort-of-thing’-ism - not to mention that decades of unfulfilled promises have led people to generally expect quite little of the role of local government in their lives; hence national politicians turning to delivering parks and playgrounds as election winning pursuits.

So when all of a sudden, such-and-such street becomes safe for kids to cycle to school, or businesses get a lovely riverside plaza, something clicks that not only can the city change, but it can do so quite rapidly, and for the better. Without the ‘quick win’ of putting out some seats and awnings on Princes Street, we wouldn’t be in the position of having 17 streets in varying shades of pedestrianisation, and we probably wouldn’t be in the position where we could see a car-free, people-first city centre in a decade’s time.

The three-month challenge

But if we want to look at what properly utilising quick wins in Cork would look like, we can look at what Cork’s transportation systems could theoretically achieve as a series of quick win projects. Within about three months, there’s plenty of scope to shake up the established dynamic of transportation in Cork, at least a little.

It’s sufficient time to fulfil the promise of making Patrick’s St fully bus-only. Park and Ride facilities - at their core, a big parking lot with a fairly frequent bus service attached - aren’t incredibly difficult to make, and would be a quick win that enables greater reallocation of space across Cork, especially for those travelling to the city from further afield.

Any number of streets can become one-way to vehicular traffic, to make room for bus lanes, or to use bollards and planters to make suburban streets less of a rat-run and more kid-friendly. Three months is enough time to at least trial new methods of transportation - from a water taxi, using Cork’s rivers and harbours to move people, to paratransit, an on-demand transport service that provides increased options to those with mobility difficulties.

None of this would turn Cork into a public transport Mecca, or patch up the deep issues with transportation in Cork. But even three months is enough time to score a spate of quick wins that makes getting around Cork far easier, and far more liveable. It’s also a lot harder for governments to justify holding out on aspects of major panacea projects if they’ve just shown they can make buses arrive on time for the first time since independence. And this is just one area - moving with speed on first steps against dereliction, public space, or any other number of problem areas.

As we dream of the Cork of two decades' time, positively plush with facilities, toilets and playgrounds, it means little while we wait for national action. If many bites eat the elephant, it is time for those who can make change to at least start biting. And 2040 is quite a meal away.