omg Google Street View now covers the rivers in Limerick https://goo.gl/maps/3FKMejDzi2P2vYnX6
Limerick’s streets could be better. We need both an active travel officer to improve cycle and walking facilities, but also an urban designer to reimagine streets as places for friendship, romance, play and commerce.
It’s really important to reduce emiss-
ROADS
What about the health benefits of cycling and walk-
ROADS
Wouldn’t it be nice to have less air poll-
ROADS
A worrying number of children these days are obes-
ROADS
Compact cities and villages are bett-
ROADS
The deadline for feedback on Limerick Council’s corporate plan for the next 5 years is this evening. Here’s my submission.
Round 1: unanimous cross party support for 10% cycling funding at Limerick council transport strategic policy committee. Now to full council meeting for final vote.
Councillor Brian Leddin is proposing a motion today to allocate 10% of Limerick’s transport funding to cycling. I hope it gets cross-party support.
Excellent trolling by Limerick Council in their draft corporate plan 
Three SUVs parked in a cycle lane. 
It hasn’t been publicised much but there’s a new bus service from Limerick and UL to Newport, Rear Cross, and Thurles. 3 services a day, 7 days a week. Good to see new services for people commuting from rural areas.
Some people were asking me how I did my graph with commute times – I used the Apple Numbers app on my iPhone (free download). Here’s a video showing how I did it. I tapped the + button to add a graph, and the paintbrush button to edit the x axis. https://t.bibby.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/numbers.mov
My commuting options, city centre to university, to start work at 9. Would love to hear what other people’s choices are. 
For people interested in the plans for O’Connell St in Limerick, the planners report with responses to the 60+ submissions is now online (PDF)
I (respectfully) disagree with my friends in Sinn Féin and Social Democrats who wanted to reduce local property tax in Limerick. 80% of wealth in Ireland is property. It’s right that we have a small increase in tax to pay for better local services.
Decision on O’Connell St upgrade was deferred yesterday for two weeks. A few of us are meeting tonight to discuss possible co-operation and next steps. Drop me a line if you’d like to come along!
Happy 80th birthday Dr. Walsh, but your vision of urban sprawl for Limerick is a vision for last century, not this one. The whole concept of a new university town in Clare is performative nonsense and should be stopped.
From 1982: RTÉ archive footage showing the “experimental” closing of Grafton St. to traffic. Dubliners at the time were reassured that if it didn’t work, it’d be reversed after a year. Nearly 40 years later, could we follow suit in Limerick? https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/1123/922278-grafton-street-traffic-free/
The saddest thing about Limerick city centre is that it has no proper toy shop.
What happens when you concentrate development on the outskirts of a city and treat your city centre as a thoroughfare for private cars? Bad planning doesn’t just harm social inclusion, it harms economic activity too. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/limerick-has-3-5-times-more-vacant-office-space-than-galway-1.4007594?mode=amp
Sextons on Henry St has Cards Against Humanity and Franciscan Well beers on tap. Pizza’s pretty good too. 
Enough. Too many pedestrians and cyclists are getting injured and killed in Limerick. Let’s say no to the roads engineers who want ring roads and car throughput: the more we build, the more (and the faster) the cars will come. Prioritise people over cars.
Workers from Limerick Civic Trust maintain the canal path I use to get to work. They do a fantastic job and it makes my commute safer and more enjoyable. 
Had a close encounter tonight in the car park beside my flat. 
Good news for those of us crying out for better public transport and cycling facilities in Limerick. And some bad news. 
And Eoin in Limerick has been writing some brilliant articles about cycling, urbanism, and how to design people-centred cities and neighbourhoods. I’m always grateful when there’s another post of his to read.
Reading long-form articles that people have posted on their own websites makes me so happy. Paul from Kerry has been posting some fantastic and thought provoking pieces about masculinity recently – they’re worth a read.
A fascinating look at how people use public spaces. Lots of really useful lessons on how to design our cities for humans.
Hear, hear: ‘But Fianna Fail councillor Abul Kalam Azad Talukder said: “Students are not outsiders. They are our family. Limerick has a good name as a student city and we need to make them feel welcome.”’
From a post I wrote last year: it is possible to close Limerick’s O’Connell St to through traffic *and* speed up our bus services by providing bus lanes for all services through the city centre. 
Two letters to the editor of the Limerick Leader, November 1964.
This is not perfect but still to be welcomed – the road rises to meet the footpath, not the other way round, and the pedestrian priority is reinforced by the different material. So much better for pedestrians. More of this please!
In last year’s Limerick Council budget there was €1m for a cycle route to Mary I and €400m for a (unneeded) bridge at Park road. This year there’s no budget for the cycle route and €1.4m for the bridge. What’s going on? 
Depressing thought of the day: Limerick city and county emits roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases as Liberia, population 4.5 million (source: Wikipedia, assuming per capita emissions in Limerick are the same as rest of country)
I’m hoping someone can help me…I’m trying to look at obnoxious interest rates charged by insurance companies on monthly instalments. 15% deposit and 9 equal instalments at an interest rate of 6.715%. APR is quoted at 17.04%. How is the APR calculated from those numbers?
Limerick’s traffic problem is a school traffic problem. Many parents want their kids to cycle or walk to school if they can be safe. We need to ditch plans for expensive ring roads and connect all schools with high quality bike lanes that your seven year-old would feel safe on.
Allowing Clare County Council and the University of Limerick to build a new town at the edge of the city would be damaging for the city, damaging for the region and damaging for the country.
Important questions: “To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database?”
I love this: “Our town exists in a fog of mystery and enigmatic strangeness, and nothing that happens outside city boundaries should have any bearing on how we govern or exist.“
Though you have left me, I’m not yet alone:
For what you were befriends the firelit room;
And what you said remains & is my own
To make a living gladness of my gloom
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/09/student-discovers-new-siegfried-sassoon-love-poem
Your Green team. For a stronger Limerick and a stronger Europe.
You could line a room with reports written over the years saying what a bad thing sprawl has been for Limerick. We know the solution: concentrate development in the city centre. Instead we are planning even more sprawl, and it makes me sad.
This is the loveliest of things: a podcast about the story of repealing the 8th amendment in Limerick: produced by, narrated by and featuring the loveliest of people. Subscribe now and get episodes as they come in.
Ask your work colleagues if they are registered! If they weren’t born in Ireland they might think they’re not eligible. Five of my colleagues aren’t registered, so we’re heading into town tomorrow for a team lunch after getting forms signed in the Garda station.
If you live in Ireland since last Sept you can vote in local elections. Search for RFA2 form, print and get signed at Garda station. Limerick are accepting email scans of the form, you just have to email it yourself to registerofelectors@limerick.ie. Deadline Tuesday 5pm.
Hey Limerick friends, I’m looking for a place to live on my own in Limerick City Centre. If anyone knows of anywhere to rent I’d be very grateful! thomas@bibby.ie or Twitter DMs are open.
With this week’s Brexit chaos I was reminded of the Mary Poppins-inspired solution to Brexit that I came up with after the referendum. I also think our combined flag would be awesome.
Facebook are a deeply creepy company, which is why I deleted my account last year. Yet I still use WhatsApp, and I wonder if it’s ethical to keep using a Facebook-owned app in the face of all the creepiness that the company still engages in.
The young people who marched yesterday demanding climate action deserve more than platitudes in response. Here are some of my thoughts on what we can do in Limerick.
Politicians supporting the climate strike while also supporting motorway construction, building houses and schools designed around the car, and a climate-damaging agriculture policy are hypocritical. Our children are striking for action, not platitudes, and we’re failing them.
Heading to this tonight. Really looking forward to it.
The rear light on my black Brompton is faulty, so I’ve borrowed my wife’s Turkish green mode for the daily commute. It’s a very pretty colour, shows the dirt a bit more though.
I’m taking a twitter break for a while, and I’m going to turn off auto-posting my micro blog to twitter. You can still find me at https://t.bibby.ie or on micro.blog: http://micro.blog/thomasbibby
The Greens and Labour have organised a meeting next Monday in Limerick to listen to the experiences of people in the Direct Provision system. We’re grateful to the people who have agreed to speak and I hope lots of people will come to Ormston House to listen and show solidarity.
Straw poll of two people taking the bus to work on UL campus this morning, both journeys of ~7km: 1 hour 20 mins (1 bus); 1 hour 50 mins (2 buses). Slower than walking pace.
Consequences of designing a university campus around the private car: a bus stuck in a 1.5km tailback to the gates of the University of Limerick.
Rant: walking, cycling and taking public transport in Limerick is universally terrible but easily fixable if politicians/officials/we cared. Instead we’re stuck in the 70’s, trying to put cars everywhere. This makes our city so much more crappy than it needs to be.
I should add better public transport is also important for social inclusion as well as attracting overpaid nerds.
On the bus to Castletroy this morning. I’ve spotted two other software developers on the bus. We’re crawling along due to traffic. Limerick needs to sort out public transport and stop fetishising the private car if we want to attract professionals in high demand to the city.
My father-in-law, Joe Cahill, passed away this morning. He was a lovely kind and generous man and he will be missed. Wake in Ovens Co. Cork (Eircode P12 Y239) tomorrow at 6pm and funeral mass at noon Weds in Macroom church.
Had a lovely few days camping on Cape Clear off the coast of Cork.
And in case you think that sexism in tech is a few isolated incidents and doesn’t affect the actual tech, consider this: YouTube’s speech detection is 13% more accurate with male voices
Some accounts I’ve read over the past few years from engineers and other professionals in the tech industry who have experienced sexism and harassment.
This is pretty terrible: FitBit doesn’t allow you to enter a period length of over 10 days.
This is a wonderful account by a lovely Limerick repealer of the referendum campaign. And if you’re a repealer I’d love to read your story too.
This was so much fun. Can’t wait for the last Friday in August when we get to do it again.
Critical mass in Limerick!
Effective because they put a password you’ve used in the subject line. Ransom is $1000!
Looking forward to hearing Karin Dubsky speak in Askeaton tonight about the Shannon Estuary, should be a great event.
“Inspired” by Jordan Peterson, I tried to come up with a list of 12 better rules for men.
Being a man on Twitter vs. being a woman on Twitter
I wrote a small thing about Jordan Peterson coming to Dublin and a possible crisis for Irish masculinity and what we might do about it.
Happy Pride from the Limerick Greens.
So many beautiful things in Made in Limerick on Thomas St. Worth a visit!
My new internet addiction: so simple yet so clever. Let’s write a mini story together!
Any software developers in Limerick looking for a junior role? Feel free to drop me a line. Email address on my website.
Dear Autocorrect: I’m not sure this algal bloom is what you meant by ducking hell but I’d say it’s pretty ducking annoying. Also: no ducks in photo as they ducked off.
This is a lovely account of the referendum campaign in Kerry. Captures perfectly the loneliness at the start, the struggling through when we thought we were going to lose, the late euphoria when we thought we might win, and the sense of loss thereafter.
Feeling utter shame that Ireland is ranked 27th out of 28 European countries in tackling climate change. Our inaction is an act of sabotage against the world’s poorest people.
Ambitious cities plan for great public transport. It’s great that Dublin is getting serious about buses but we desperately need a similar plan for Limerick. Planning now for a high quality bus system will ensure inward investment and social inclusion in the future.
Great session last night at the Limerick iOS dev meetup, with a really accessible talk on Augmented Reality and its applications in industry.
This Sunday Catherine St. will be closed to traffic and open to families. Come along and get a glimpse of a safer, happier and healthier future for Limerick.
Streets are better with people, not cars
The University of Limerick actually employs people to stop pedestrians from using pedestrian crossings at rush hour.
Men of Limerick, we need your help this Wednesday.
Our 51st podcast episode, and our first with a guest. Stephen Coyle joined us to talk about all his apps, the challenges of being an indie developer, and lots of other things. Really enjoyed recording this one.
The next Limerick iOS developer meetup is on Friday. Looking forward to hearing Brian Halpin give an overview on developing for the Apple Watch. Newcomers welcome!
The graffiti around here is on point
An eloquent and powerful piece by Anne Enright in The Guardian today about pregnancy and consent.
First pilot canvass in Limerick tonight. Positive response. We’ll be out in numbers from next week.
Episode 50 of our podcast is out. Of course we forgot to mark the milestone. Looking forward to the next 50.
With rights and privilege come a responsibility to fight for those without: some thoughts about why I’ll be campaigning to repeal the 8th amendment.
I’ve put together some thoughts on how we could achieve an integrated bus network in Limerick and still keep our city centre free from through traffic.