antoin@eire.com

Read this plan for an intercity coach system based on Motorways, conceived for the UK, but very applicable to Ireland.

This article on the UK Design Museum site tells the story of the British motorway and general road signage system, designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. It begins:

Determined to illustrate the haphazard state of British road signage at the turn of the 1960s, the graphic designer Herbert Spencer drove from central London to the recently opened Heathrow London Airport and photographed each of the road signs that he came across along the way.

Perhaps it is time for someone to do something similar for the drive from Naas via the M50 ring-road to the Airport. It would certainly be an interesting project to do over a few Sunday mornings.

Come for a spin with me on the Swords Express on Saturday 24 November at 11.30 from Eden Quay. It would be great to see a few people from the blog there. You can come back to town at 1pm or 2pm, as you wish. I will pay for the tickets. Intention here is to show non Swords people what the route is all about although if anybody wants to meet us in Swords they are welcome to as well. Let me know if you are coming so that I have an idea of numbers.

My company has launched Swords Express. We have a blog, in fact, our whole website is a big blog, and our customers can (and do) leave comments. Most of them are positive, but some of them are a bit less so. But we post them all up there nonetheless. I will be on the radio over the weekend talking about some of this.

Berkeley Bike Boulevards from Streetfilms shows some ideas about encouraging bicycle use in Berkeley, California.

Mountbrook: A Vision For Ballsbridge is the video about the urban development planned for Ballsbridge, which is about 10 minutes walk from where I live. There are also some nice pictures of the proposed development.
It’s interesting to look at the way the project is presented and the way that people are reacting to it.

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I went and bought myself a bike to get around Dublin on. I have to say, it’s definitely the best way to get around the city centre during the traffic.

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Boeing has this handy guide to starting your own budget airline.

Second Life, the big and overhyped virtual reality community has released the source code for its client under the GPL open source licence. (See reports - Boing Boing, developer’s blog, official release, official blog) This is something really big, it means that it is now viable to build a fully-fledged, free-standing, world-class virtual reality world without having to own or licence a bunch of proprietary code. (more…)

Back in April, I warned you all that the Integrated Ticketing System for Irish transport was in trouble. This has indeed happened. There was a report in the Sunday Business Post and in the Sunday Times that the project is being reviewed.

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