Lack of town centre parking is causing traffic problems – Enright
WEXFORD’S traffic woes are a result of a lack of town centre parking. That’s according to the
Chief Executive of Wexford County Council, Tom Enright.
Mr Enright was speaking at the December monthly meeting, having given an update on the Trinity Wharf project, which looks set to create some further parking.
‘We’ve got to look at the town problem as a whole,’ Mr Enright said. ‘One of the problems is that there is a small number of parking spaces in the town centre. As a result we have people constantly driving around and looking for spaces that invariably they don’t find. This results in a lot of traffic movement generated in town unnecessarily. Since the economy picked up a bit and more business has opened up in the town, there is more traffic.’
‘What we need is large car parks at both ends of town,’ he continued. ‘We need to make them low cost to encourage people to use them and walk to the town centre. We’re currently looking at a couple of brown field sites for parking and there’s quite a bit of work going on on this behind the scenes.’
Meanwhile, responding to Cllr Leonard Kelly’s request for an update on the Trinity Wharf project, Mr Enright said that the application is still with An Bord Pleanála after they had requested an additional submission in October.
He said he was hopeful that a decision would be forthcoming either by the end of the month or in January.
Mr Enright then outlined that the first part of the project would be to open up the site and create some parking there to allow work to progress. He seemed confident that construction will get under way early next year and said that Irish Rail have also been approached as a result of the need to put a railway crossing into the site.
Cllr Kelly said that it was important that residents in the Trinity Street area were consulted, as the project would have massive implications for them. Director of Services Eamonn Hore said that a traffic impact assessment was to be carried out as part of the planning for Trinity Wharf.