Conor’s Bandon Blog

Michael Newham just left a comment on my post about car-sharing. It looks like this is going to happen next year. It’s a great idea.

Our company ‘Mendes – GoCar’ will be providing the car-sharing service in Cork City Centre. We hope to have it operational by May the 1st 2008.

Please see the Wikipedia article for a good overview of what Car-Sharing is about.

All our ‘GoCars’ will have dedicated parking spaces ‘GoBases’ near high residential and business nodes of population.

Research has shown that in a successful car-sharing business each car added to a car sharing fleet replaces 8 to 12 private vehicles; thus reducing Co2 emmissions and congestion.

Another benefit to joining a car-sharing service is the increased use of public transport as well as walking and cycling.

We hope to have our website www.gocar.ie live by mid January. It will just be a brochure based site to begin with where ye can leave contact details to find out about membership and so forth.

Got an email from Cork GreenMap telling me about a new feasibility study that Cork City Council are doing in the area of Car Sharing.

Cork City Council is considering the feasibility of the setting up of a car-sharing service – also called “car club” in the UK – in Cork City:

http://www.corkcorp.ie/ourservices/roads/carsharing.shtml

What is car-sharing?
Car-sharing in urban areas is a cost-effective alternative to owning your own car. It allows people access to a car when they need it, from a place near their home or workplace. The car can be used for short trips lasting as little as an hour or booked for a few days. You only pay for the hours you keep the car and the distance you drive. NB: the term “car-sharing” is also used to designate the sharing of a ride.

Who can be members of a car-sharing club?
Members of a car club can be both individuals who don’t need a car on a daily basis and companies/organisations looking for mobility solutions to tackle parking, traffic or car-pooling issues on their site in Cork City.

What are the advantages of car-sharing?
The advantages of car-sharing are numerous:

• Affordable: just pay for the time the car is in use and the distance driven
• Reserved parking: cars are conveniently located in reserved places close to where you live or work
• Flexible: book a car for as little as an hour, on-line or calling a booking centre
• Easy to use: after registration you just book it, jump in the car and drive away
• Planet-friendly: car-sharing globally reduces parking pressure and car use, helping to combat pollution and climate change

Tell us what you think!

A feasibility study is being carried out on behalf of Cork City Council and a public consultation stage is now on track to assess the potential market of such a service as well as to define the best locations of a car club in the city centre.

If a car-sharing scheme is of any interest for you please take part in our on-line survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB2267Q9ECZ6E

Click on the following link for leaflets about the car-sharing project as well as a tool to calculate your car costs:

http://www.corkcorp.ie/ourservices/roads/carsharing.shtml

Also don’t hesitate to get in touch with Traffic Division to get more information or to give your opinion:

Noel Tummon, Traffic Division, Cork City Council
VHI Buildings, 70 South Mall, Cork
Tel: 021 492 4452
E-mail: traffic@corkcity.ie

Looks like Cork is turning into the San Fran of Ireland in more ways than one! I hope this idea takes off.

I don’t know whether this is good or bad news, and either way it has no impact on my life, but Lous Vuitton is buying Aston Martin. Sure they are both luxury brands but mixing handbags and camshafts – I’m just not sure. It smacks of one of those “synergy” horrors which used to be so common.  Maybe Daniel Craig will sport a man-purse in the next Bond movie.

Hopefully they’ll do something about the rear-end of all recent Astons which to my eye are identical to a mid-1990′s Mazda.

Technorati Tags: Aston+Martin, Ford, Louis+Vuitton

Cork->Rosslare, Rosslare->Cork on a Bank Holiday Weekend. Number of cops encountered? Big fat zero. Number of hard-of-thinking suicidal cretins encountered? 4.

Oh but they did arrest over 100 drunk drivers today. Keep that up for 365 days a year and maybe it’ll be something other than a reflection of their day-to-day incompetence as they waste taxpayers money snaring people doing 45 in 40 zones on bypasses across the country.

Technorati Tags: roadsafetyblog, efficiency, resources, resource+managment, competence, quotas, lip+service

Two of my favourite automotive blogs used to be Autoblog and Jalopnik. I had to unsubscribe from both due to the huge number of posts they were doing daily which I just could not keep up with (same reason I only lasted a few weeks with Blogorrah).

Alex Algard mailed me last week to tell me about a new car blog that he has launched called CarDomain Blog. I have to say it is the dogs for over-aged car nuts like me. Yeah yeah, I know I drive a Mondeo, but just wait until I have a mid-life crisis and then it’s Mustang all the way baby.

Check it out – great pictures (not just car pr0n) and huge enthusiasm. He has a winner on his hands.

Technorati Tags: Autoblog, Jalopnik, CarDomain, Blogorrah

You can say what you like about Top Gear but I can’t stop myself loving it. It is silly, childish and predictable but it is one of the few programmes I look forward to in the week.

Sadly, I just heard that Richard Hammond was critically injured in a crash in a jet car doing upwards of 280 MPH! Fingers crossed that he recovers.

 tags: Top+Gear, Richard+Hammond

Budget Car Rentals gave us Noddy’s own vehicle from the live action movie.

The Chevy HHR, the answer to a question no-one was asking.

All we need is a few tommy guns and fedoras and we’ll be sorted the next time we want to smuggle hooch.

[tags]Chevy HHR[/tags]

It had to happen – they are making a new Knight Rider movie. I’m gutted to read  that neither Hasselhoff nor the TransAm will feature. There are some fantastic suggestions over at Jalopnik for their replacements. My two faves are:

[1 ] Jeremy Clarkson and a Ford GT40

[2] Brokeback Knightrider with Jake Gyllenhaal as Michael Knight and Heath Ledger as the voice of the car.

[tags]Knight Rider, Jalopnik[/tags] 

One of the best TV ads I have ever seen for a motor car. Must be a couple of minutes long and surely costs a fortune to broadcast. But worth it for them if they are ever to change the UK demographic from 55-85 to 25-35. They rightly have much younger buyers in Ireland. Just checked and they have some of the sound effects from the ad on their UK site too.

I had a look at the car in Kevin O’Leary’s the other day (whilst on my bike, strangely). Fabulous looking and much bigger than it appears in pictures. Not that I’ll ever get one (some day I want to test drive a Type-R), our next car is a VW Caravelle.

Finbarr Galvin up the road is selling a 1979 Roller. No price tag. Now that’s what you need for sitting in traffic jams. Could you imagine arriving into work driving one? Would I have to wear a suit and smoke a pipe before they’ll give me a drive in it? Or would the Civic be more comfortable?

[tags] Honda Civic, Rolls Royce, VW Caravelle[/tags]

Jalopnik is one of the two best sites on the web for petrol heads (the other being Autoblog).

Earlier this week they had a link to a wonderful video of Ayrton Senna taking a Honda NSX for a blast around a race track. Just watch his right foot blipping the throttle. Is that what you call toe-tip control? The world really is a more boring place with him gone.

But Jalopnik went one better yesterday. They link over to a story and actual footage of an Audi TT being flattened by an out-of-control articulated lorry. Somehow (and no-one really knows how), the driver escaped with scratches and bruises. You have to check this out.

[tags]Audi, TT, Crash, Jalopnik[/tags]