THE CASTLETOWNBERE TRANSPORTATION STUDY

Our view on the Transportation Study and the concerns of some citizens

I understand the businessmen's concerns about the partial traffic calming in the center very well, as I have seen similar situations in my life as a planner.

In the end, concerns had proved to be unfounded in most of the cases, and the restructuring had generally brought growth to the businesses concerned.
As experience teaches us, even adjacent shops benefit from it because they will be able to present themselves better to the outside, and an attractive redesign (Bantry is an extremely bad example here) can help create, especially for visitors, a more beautiful, central area to keep staying.
The assumption that the situations of businesses would deteriorate due to the loss of parking spaces, has never materialized in my experience to date, as a partial traffic calming only is planned anyway. Having studied the draft, we don't see any significant loss of parking spaces, especially since additional parking spaces will be created in the peripheral area, only about 50 mtrs further on (see draft of plan: "In total off street parking will increase by 38% from 245 to 337 spaces").

I think that certainly all, just the businessmen in question, will deem an increase in residents (permanent) and also visitors desirable.
This of course means more traffic which would naturally make the traffic situation in the centre even worse and CTB even less attractive, thus complicating new settlements. To attract more people to the town, Castletownbere should not only be much more attractive, but also the potential of CTB should be made visible.

As I have observed it, there is a continuous deterioration in the fishing situation.
This means that CTB should open up new, attractive and promising areas and activities and establish new companies in the fields of IT and communications technology, sports, services, entertainment, culture, workshops, crafts, etc. Moreover, the present harbour situation could be used better (attracting yacht and sailing clubs talk about the mariner with margaret) as well as improve promoting qualitative tourism (e.g. annually recurring events). To this end, however, the infrastructure including traffic calming and more action and green space in the centre has to be improved visibly. More events could be organized here which make the town more attractive also for adjacent businessmen.
The inventory fotos in the study clearly show that Castletownbere is not seen as very attractive at the moment and that it rather hides its potential.
(see Castletownbere livestyle, accomodations and activities) and our Castletownbere - City comparison.

In the course of the redesign, a corresponding marketing campaign should also take place. Here, a few private attempts have been made. We, too, want to support this plan within the context of our new co-working hub studio b marketing. For this purpose, we have collected all the addresses of yacht and sailing clubs in Europe which we want to write to in the framework of our marketing campaign for the coworking hub "studio b ".

in our assessment/analysis of CTB in comparison to larger cities we did research on the advantages of CTB and where its future potential lies. We think Castletownbere can keep up with other locations and after having studied the present plan thoroughly, we believe that it enhances the existing as well as the future potential of CTB to a significant extent.

we would like to support the project with our possibilities