Please don’t laugh at my ice cream cones. They’re meant to be traffic cones, but they’re the only cone images I have.

Much has been written about parking in bus stops in Limerick, resulting in bus delays and making it harder for passengers to get in and out of the bus.

An easy answer may be that parking should be enforced by Gardaí and traffic wardens.

However I would start with some experimental “tactical urbanism”. My hypothesis is that if the start and end of the bus stop is physically separated from other parking, then people are much less likely to “bleed” into the bus stop to park there.

My suggested experiment is to start and end bus stops with traffic cones at 45 degree angles. This will show whether physically enforcing the start and end of bus stops will make it less likely for car drivers to pull in that we’ll defined area.

There are already examples of this in taxi ranks (which are also enforced because taxi drivers call the Gardaí to get illegal parking there towed, and the taxi drivers have skin in the game). Bus stops on William Street are also separated from private parking and seem to be relatively free of illegal parking.