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Ciarán Ferrie

I realise I've never properly explained this hashtag on here.

Over a four year period from 2016 to 2019, I carried out a daily count of illegally parked vehicles on my commute home on the outbound cycle lane on Lower Rathmines Road. The results consistently showed illegal parking on the cycle lane on four out of every five days.

On occasion there have been as many as twelve vehicles illegally parked on the cycle lane.

The instances of illegal parking over the four year period remained constant with no indication of any enforcement being carried out, despite the proximity to the local Garda Station.

I stopped the count when Covid intervened in March 2020 as I was no longer commuting and there was much less traffic on the road. Over the last three years there have been some changes to the cycle lane.

A 400m section from the canal to a point south of Richmond Hill is now designated a 24 hour cycle lane.

A further 400m section from there to Castlewood Avenue has been fitted with "stumpy" wands and orcas to deter people from parking though this has several gaps for access points and bus stops

The last section, between Castlewood Avenue and Upper Rathmines Road, remains unchanged but is a clearway between the hours of 7am and 10am and from 12 noon to 7pm, Monday to Saturday.

Despite the changes noted above there continues to be a problem with illegal parking and for that reason I decided to restart the count from the beginning of January this year to get a better picture of what impact the changes have had, if any.

In the previous years, I recorded the count on my Twitter account using the hashtag and @james very kindly assisted in extracting the data (time, date, number of vehicles) from my posts and putting it into a spreadsheet, which @neiloleary (I hope that's the right Neil!) then took and generated the graphs above.

I don't know if the same is possible on Mastodon but I'm hoping it is!

The Sunday Times published an article about my survey in 2019 (if you have a subscription you can read it here: thetimes.co.uk/article/cycle-l)

And the data was also used recently in an @IBIKEDublin submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice to support the case for increased enforcement of illegal parking. You can read that debate here: oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debat

The TimesCycle lanes still blocked by illegally parked carsBy Cian Ginty, Catherine Sanz

@ccferrie @neiloleary Definitely possible .. I’ll just have to update my dreadful Python script and find the best way to grab the data (Search or possibly parsing the RSS feed of the hashtag .. which I think is a thing)

@james @neiloleary I'll take your word for it - thank you!

@ccferrie @neiloleary I'm slowly working on this .. hopefully I'll have something to show by the weekend.
So far, it looks like I can
- Grab and store the Mastodon posts easily enough (so that gives me date & time and a "permanent" link to the post)
- Get the vehicle count and any commentary e.g. "Amazon prime van"
Next, I need to stick that in a new Google Sheet and schedule the scripts to run relatively regularly (e.g every hour)

@james @neiloleary that's great James, thanks a million for your efforts!