As the August date for the introduction of radical new traffic regulations for Dublin city centre approaches, it is perhaps timely to look once more at what it will mean and the origins of the proposal.
The plan was approved by the City Council in November 2022 and then signed off on by the Minister for Transport Eamonn Ryan.
The aim of the plan is to reduce traffic in the city centre by 60%. Central to the plan is BusConnects which from its description and related graphics would appear to rely heavily on shifting bus traffic towards the Pearse Street, Samuel Beckett Bridge direction. Private motorists will be “encouraged,” as in forced, to drive around the city centre on their transits from one side of the Liffey to the other.
Quite how this will work in practice is unclear. The targets in the plan appear on their surface to be quite modest. The targets for the Canal Cordon area is based on an ongoing survey of those who travel into the city centre during the three-hour morning rush hour. They envisage a reduction by 2028 of 40% in private cars, delivery vehicles and taxis, to 17% of the overall transit.
Walking will then account for 13% of traffic; cycling 13% and public transport 57% the plan states. The thinking behind it is explained as requiring “a reorientation of the City Centre’s streets towards sustainable modes of transport.”
That sounds fine but how will it impact on people who need to get either into the city centre or to transit across the city centre?
In February this year, Dublin City Council stated that it had received 3,592 submissions from the public on the proposals. Which is curiously close to the number of submissions – 3,900 – which were received up to the beginning of 2021 on the related proposal to pedestrianise Dame Street.
As Gript reported at the time, more than half of the submissions on that, 96% of which were reported to approve of the proposal, were made on the very last day following a push by activist green groups including Irishcycle.com. Green Councillor Janet Horner claimed that the plan had been given a “huge mandate from Dubliners.”
One wonders how many Dubs were even aware of the proposal. The same applies to the traffic plan due to come into effect in August. Local businesses and, as widely reported today, the employer’s organisation IBEC, have voiced strong objections to the plan as it currently stands. They believe that it will impact negatively on businesses situated in the city centre both through reduction in customers and deliveries, but also on people working in the city centre being able to get to work.
The consultation with the public – or those who knew about it – was “non-statutory” meaning that no matter what the mood of the public appeared to be nor what proposals any members of that public might make that they might as well have been making submissions about the traffic plan for Ulan Bator.
The report on the consultation makes much of the efforts of the City Council to let people know about the process through media advertising. However, a presentation by the Council that was hosted on Youtub amassed the grand total of “800+ plus views.” Right up there with Communion videos or someone’s dog balancing a stick on their nose.
The meaninglessness of the consultation, which apparently was grasped even by anyone who knew of it, was underlined by the rather absurd situation that the consultation was only launched late in 2023, almost a year after the City Council and Minister Eamonn Ryan had approved it.
Only the written submissions are available to be read. There were 64 of these, with just four from public representatives; Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney, Labour TD Ivana Bacik, Green TD Neasa Hourigan and Senator Michael McDowell.
Cooney expressed herself as being “very supportive” of the plan and wanted it to be extended to include the pedestrianisation of Parnell Square north. Bacik “as an active cyclist” supported the proposals and wanted more cycle lanes. Hourigan made a joint submission with Green Councillor Horner and couched their support in the context of Dublin becoming a “feminist city” (new one on me that) and several references to a “rights based approach” which always gets the spidey senses tingling. No good will become of that I say.
Senator McDowell dissented and said that he was opposing the plan because it is “too radical and will seriously harm the vibrancy and social and commercial life of Dublin as the capital city of Ireland.” Of particular concern to him was the virtual ending of private and commercial traffic from north to south across the city.
While the Green NGOs and pressure groups like the Dublin Commuters Coalition are all for the plan, and indeed more radical versions, one of the most practical comments on the plan came from an inner city NGO, Jobcare, which has been involved for 30 years in providing local employment and education courses and other resources including food donations in the Pearse Street area.
This district will be the focus of the coming together of many bus routes which on the face of it would seem to be dragged considerably off course. So perhaps Pearse Street and its surrounding community and the unfortunates brought on a pre-work bustop tour of the docklands are like the proletarian collateral damage for keeping the scobes and the planet murdering “cors” away from Trinners and the nice people on bicycles on their way to help people and what not.
The disruption to the food deliveries was one of the issues referred to by Jobcare but others are shared by local businesses. They point to the confusion caused to vehicles and pedestrians by contra flow cycle lanes – no joke that! – difficulty of access due to car free zones, the shutting off of traffic turns that they claim will add to rather than ease congestion in the Pearse Street area, and that public transport is already over capacity and “fickle at best.”
I’d be inclined anyway to take more the word of people who have a practical interest and commitment to Dublin city in preference to ideologically motivated persons for whom this has more to do with their own pet projects than improving life for the citizens. August should be fun.