The Belfast Inner Ring plan will see a continuous four lane (2+2) road right round the city centre. Most of this will be constructed using existing streets (for details and a map of this plan see link above), but the Bankmore Link will be new. It will join Cromac Street, close to Ormeau Avenue, directly to Dublin Road at Bruce Street (beside the cinema). Bruce Street and Hope Street will be upgraded to join it.

Anyone who knows Ormeau Avenue knows that the area on the south side of the road is essentially wasteland, given over to car parks and bare concrete. This is because this scheme has been in the pipeline since the 1970s and the land has been purposely left clear of developments. This is very obvious in the aerial view below.

An aerial view of the area of the planned Bankmore Link. Dublin Road is in the centre with Bruce Street and Hope Street to its left. The Bankmore Link will run from where the green garden is out towards the right, following the line of buildings to the south. Ormeau Avenue is visible just to the north of this. [Image from Google Earth].

Updates

9 Jan 2009: Roads Service issued a leaflet about this proposal in November 2008. The leaflet reaffirms sets out plans for the City Centre Ring Road in general, before commenting on this particular road link. It now seems that the new road link will be a dual-carriageway with two lanes in each direction. An artists impression was included (see below) which suggests that there will be no dedicated left-turn filter lanes on the main road. Although these help traffic flow, they have been criticised for making roads in the city centre unnecessarily wide and having poor facilities for pedestrian crossings. Roads Service also stress that "Completing the scheme is considered fundamental to achieving the public realm pedestrianisation project, traffic reduction and capacity objectives for the city centre". Implementation is currently anticipated "within ten years".

Artist's impression of the proposed Bankmore Link (looking east from the back of the Dublin Road cinema with the Gasworks on Ormeau Road visible in the distance). Taken from Roads Service leaflet issued in November 2008.