Some of you may have seen that Richmond Hill in Cork North City was the subject of an article and documentary piece on RTE News last night.
The gist of the discussion centers around how the two-way, single-lane road which serves residential homes in its top-half, later narrows along a steep hill terminating in a tight T-junction with Hardwick Street.
Google and Apple maps allow routing of truck traffic in both directions along Richmond Hill, culminating in a scenario where trucks traveling South get pretty well wedged at the T-junction and in need of significant resources to free-up the roads. Locals have tried with vain to have Google and Apple maps corrected to suggest alternate routing for trucks, but I suppose that the problem lies in the road being two-way and residential.
Looking at how the road is treated in OSM, I see that the road is permissive for all traffic, but “hgv=no“ is set.
At the end of the day the issues with this road are in the hands of the local Council and better signage would appear to be needed, but my question is whether the road is configured in the most appropriate way on OSM, or can the configuration be optimised further from our side?
A width tag might also be useful. I don’t know to what extent it is taken into account by routers, and like most tags it probably wouldn’t help if trucks drivers don’t use a specific profile in the first place. But it seems a good idea generally on such a narrow road used by two way traffic. It wouldn’t harm to tag it on some of the surrounding streets also.
Is the speed limit really 50kph?
It wasn’t clear to me from the article if there is actually signage prohibiting trucks or large vehicles, or anything to warn drivers that they are approaching a bottleneck they may not be able to get out of.
I also wonder in which situations routers send traffic via this road in preference to the parallel higher classification roads on either side. I guess it doesn’t help that all three apparently have the same 50kph speed limit. The one way section of St Patrick’s Hill may also be a factor. In fact, it’s not clear to me what the “official” route is for any driver on the Old Youghal Road needing to go south of the river.
Overall, while not being a fan of Apple or Google, it wouldn’t surprise me if they are being used as scapegoats here for incompetence in other areas. But I agree of course that we should try to map the reality as well as we can in OSM.
Thinking about the road objectively, it’s not the width of the road that’s the problem, it’s the tight T-junction at the end which won’t allow a sufficient turning circle to clear the junction, so I don’t think that stating the factual width of the road will help. It’s a medieval hangover, really.
Yeah, I’m not sure about the signage either.
Where are you seeing a one-way? From what I can tell it’s two-way for the whole length of the road, and I see no signage to indicate that either end of the road is one-way, unless I’m mistaken.
I haven’t followed the links you provided, but it’s not clear from the posts here why the local council (or who is responsible for road signage) doesn’t change it. Wouldn’t one start with that? Any map would then just reflect that.
I think the report mentions there used to be a warning sign (not a prohibition) but it’s not there any more. While the issue was framed as a “big tech problem”, it’s not clear from the report if local authorities/politicians have actually done anything at all to try to solve the problem locally.
I take your point about the turning circle, but tagging the actual width of that narrowest section might at least give a hint that it’s not really a through road and perhaps nudge the weighting towards an alternative route.
Well that is discussed somewhat in the media attached and that should be where we take our leads from, but there appears to be a reluctance to deal with the issues on the ground, possibly due to the fact that there are residential homes (requiring occasional truck deliveries) on the same stretch of road.
What I’m trying to do is just identify and tie-up any loose-ends, …of which there appear to be none of on our side.
Given the news report, wouldn’t there be a “RUS 051” sign somewhere? (“Maximum Vehicle Length” on Road signs in Ireland - Wikipedia ).
Occasionally, I notice a truck that missed a local one .. Likely, they don’t need to get fined, they just spend a disproportionate time getting out again.
I’d hypothesise that the CCC prefer not to legislate by applying a “RUS 051” (Maximum Vehicle Length) sign as they wish to retain truck access to the residential units along the very narrow single-lane road, therefore by applying such as sign even at the Southern end of the road it would create a dead-end for trucks coming from the North end, with no prospect of an about-turn.
Honestly, what I’d do is make the road one-way going North, meaning that long trucks can’t take that sharp turn at Hardwick Street in the first instance, thereby dealing with the matter of the tight junction in one go. Lengthy trucked deliveries can be arranged through the use of a flag-man / traffic-management system, reversed down from the North end. Somewhat onerous on the locals, but would encourage deliveries on suitable vehicles. But hey - there’s a reason I’m not a town-planner!
