Reading the Phoenix Park bylaws requires a time-travelling dictionary. The traffic rules, still on the statute book, permit vehicles that transport people, “not including omnibuses or charabanes”.
Charabanc (n., from the French char à bancs, “carriage with benches”): a cart with rows of seats, horse-drawn then motorised, hired by the day by groups of factory workers for their outings.
So in 1926, the Irish State banned exactly two vehicles from its largest park: the two that carried people together, while private cars were waved through. How crass the charabanc must have seemed, arriving by the coachload with workers on their day off. Mass movement was thus restricted – all, presumably, to preserve the idyll of a people-free park.
Lo and behold, a century later, les chars à bancs have vanished from the world, while our obsession with individual transport has swallowed the park whole – up to 25,000 cars a day, per the Office of Public Works. But is it still idyllic?
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When I lived nearby, I ran more than 1,000km through it. On paper it is a runner’s paradise with 7sq km of greenery – more than five of London’s royal parks together, Hyde, Kensington, Regent’s, St James and Greenwich. In practice, the “greenery” is concrete; the only surfaced long route is the roadside footpath, where I often jogged past queues of idling cars, breathing their fumes – while sometimes running 20 minutes without passing another human being on foot.
In other words, the Phoenix Park is simultaneously both crowded and eerily empty.
Recent discussions around its reform in The Irish Times persuaded me to pull the data on the park, to estimate how much of the emptiness was in my head. Using volumes of open-source data from Open Street Maps, I measured the park against the two city escapes with which it is often compared: Hyde Park, and Richmond Park, another vast walled deer park in a capital city.
My findings made one thing clear: that Phoenix Park has an identity problem.
The best city parks come in two modes: they either amplify the city that is there, or they turn it off completely. London is lucky enough to have both. Hyde Park, like Central Park, undoubtedly does the former. It has roughly the same 40km of paved walkways as the Phoenix Park, but packs them into a fifth of the space alongside 14 coffee shops, a famous swimming lido and boats-for-hire, and world-famous galleries. And given that cities don’t sleep, two-thirds of its paths are lit for evenings and nights.
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In contrast, Richmond Park is where you go to escape the city. Commercial traffic has been banned for nearly 30 years, and there is no lighting. The gates shut at dusk and thereafter the park belongs to its resident deer. To support near-silence it has forgone amenities: with 13 public toilets, 11 water stations, and coffee at only the gates.
Which of these modes, then, describes Phoenix Park? Neither. It is a curious third type that I label a “pass-through” park, so-called given its main customer: the commuting car. Its 20km of road is higher than that of Hyde Park and Richmond Park combined, and the park was built around this road, instead of away from it – even down to the lighting, with 77 per cent of lit paths being beside the road. So from 4pm on a winter’s afternoon, the only place to walk safely is in traffic.
But why bother going there in the first place? Of the 1,750 acres, there are only three freely accessible cafes, no boats or drinking water fountains, and only one bench for every 21 acres; while the park’s only designated cluster of entertainment sits beyond the turnstile of Dublin Zoo’s ticketing counter.
It is a park that neither accentuates Dublin city nor switches it off; it is merely a way to commute through the middle, to the soundtrack of a traffic junction with the amenities of a non-landscaped field. So what is the solution to its identity problem? The same as it is to every identity problem – simply to become what you want to be.
In this case, the park is big enough to become a place that both enhances the city and one that switches it off, but it needs to be zoned for that. The eastern part, which already comes within touching distance of the Luas and Heuston Station, could amplify the city in a beautiful setting by becoming a busy cultural attraction with restaurants, art, landscaped gardens and, dare I say, a bus or two.
The western part can then be turned off – and this means one thing only: rewriting the park’s bylaws to keep through-traffic out altogether, so that the dark sky can be kept dark. Forty-six kilometres of unpaved trails have already been worn into the park’s grass by walkers, suggesting that Dubliners want more.
So perhaps it’s time to give the charabanc masses their path. And then write the new bylaws so that a reader in 2126 needs a time-travelling dictionary of her own to look up “through-traffic”, and wonder why a park ever needed the word in the first place.
