Quality Buggy Corridors

My suggestion last week that Trinity College be relocated to Meath as part of the effort to improve traffic flow in Dublin was, technically speaking (and many readers spotted this), a joke.

Such is the frustration with traffic in the city centre, however, that the proposal also provoked serious feedback of a kind which, frankly, this column is not used to receiving. True, one correspondent suggested my idea belonged in the "Murphy's Laughter Lounge" and advised me to "cop on". But more typical of the response was this e-mail from a reader called Mark Tottenham.

"I hope it won't seem too conservative to suggest an alternative to the razing or relocation of Trinity ," he writes, with the sort of formal politeness that, if I'm the shrewd judge I think I am, is the mark of a TCD education. "You can put it down to my being a graduate of that institution," he continues, adding that his argument was first proposed in a speech to the Hist (Trinity's debating society) in 1992.

His idea, simply, is to reverse the traffic flow around the university, because: "In a country where people drive on the left, it makes most sense for one-way systems to go clockwise rather than anti-clockwise. This stops the traffic having to cross over itself (I hope I'm not getting too technical)."

Getting even more technical, he goes on: "The anti-clockwise system is the cause of the perpetual tailback on Pearse Street, because everything ends up at the junction on College Street. If it went clockwise, traffic coming in via Merrion Square could go straight up Nassau Street and onto Dame Street. And traffic coming down O'Connell Street [bound for] Merrion Square could go to the left of Trinity without having to be swept round College Green."

It's crazy, maybe, but it just might work. Anyway, Mark says that if he doesn't convince someone of the wisdom of his idea soon, he will take to standing outside Leinster House with placards attacking the Minister for the Environment (he means the slogans on the placards would be attacking the minister, not the actual placards): "But as you appear to be looking for constructive solutions to our many problems, I thought I should mention it. There might be a campaign there, somewhere."

My suggestion for Trinity was more of a deconstructive solution, to be exact. But he could be right about the campaign, to judge by another, equally thoughtful, e-mail from Helsinki, where Petri Mirala (who has a Ph D from Trinity, but adds treacherously that he enjoyed last week's proposal) now lives, after five "happy and eventful" years here.

He writes that he and his family are "terribly homesick for Dublin and the Dubliners" (I think he means the people, not the band), continuing: "There is only one thing we do not miss at all: the traffic. In Dublin, the bus timetables show purely fictional times of departure from a faraway terminus (in reality many buses never show up, presumably having been hijacked to Cuba) [whereas] in Helsinki, the timetables show the time when the bus actually arrives at that very stop."

This was disconcerting at first, he admits, but last week the Mirala family realised they were "finally about to go native" when they got off the seat at their stop and stood up before they even saw the bus, "simply because the timetable said it was due to arrive at 19.39 hours. It did."

Petri adds that he still thinks Dublin is a "fantastic" city and he "would like to help in the struggle to make it habitable again". So if Mark is considering a run in the next general election (when independents of all kinds will be a shoo-in), he can count on support from me and Petri, anyway. We should at least try the traffic-reversal idea. If it doesn't solve the Trinity problem, we can always knock it later.

I've been making a practical contribution to easing traffic lately, ever since the sad demise (a moment's silence, please) of my car. It happened the day of the women's mini-marathon, which I was covering for the newspaper; and I was just about to park in an alley-way near Stephen's Green, when the car parked all by itself.

I only had to push it a few feet to the intended space. We'd had our disagreements over the years, me and the car, but I have to say it was very dignified at the end. In fact, I was still hopeful of a recovery (mechanics can do wonderful things these days) when it was towed to the garage; until the man took me aside quietly and said the news was bad.

So for the past few weeks I've been walking, or waiting for buses - some of which, unbeknownst to me, are en route to Cuba). But the biggest challenge of pedestrianism, so far, is having to transport children in a double buggy.

Some Dublin streets are not wide enough for a double buggy. And even if it weren't for the fact that many car drivers park so far in on the footpath that they must be trying to halve the number of wheels available for clamping, manoeuvring one of these things in a built-up area is like driving an articulated truck. Without the power steering.

Which is why, as this week's radical proposal on traffic, I'm calling on the city fathers (the city mothers are already on board) to examine the provision of Quality Buggy Corridors (QBCs) on all major routes. I know it sounds like something you might hear in the Murphy's Laughter Lounge. But I bet they already have them in Helsinki.

e-mail: fmcnally@irish-times.ie