TRAFFIC IS RUINING Dublin city centre – and we now have a bold plan to fix it. Decades of poor planning and a lack of joined-up thinking have left the city centre a place of transport misery.
Drivers are frustrated in gridlock. Buses are trapped with them on the narrow quays. Cyclists aren’t safe. Pedestrians are hemmed in on small footpaths, forced to scurry across the road, picking their way through cars that barely seem to move.
It leads to a core city centre that looks grubby, congested and noisy. And for all the appearance of massive traffic, only around 270 private cars an hour go along Bachelor’s Walk in the morning rush hour – that’s less than five cars a minute.
I was born and raised in Dublin, but the Liffey has never been a destination. You would rarely aim to meet or walk along the quays – they are instead a place to move through as quickly as possible.
Dublin deserves more respect than we give it: it is a thriving, creative, prosperous capital – not just an extension of a dual carriageway.
Dublin City Council has launched a plan to end this congestion. They studied traffic patterns and found that three in five cars in the core city centre were “through” traffic. In other words, cars that weren’t coming from or going to the city centre – just using it as a through route.
With this in mind, the new plan aims to cut that off and make space for buses, cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers who actually have a destination in town.
The plan has two main elements that are new. They will turn parts of the north and south quays by O’Connell Bridge into bus lanes only and traffic going north on Westland Row will now be right-turn only, instead of the current left-turn only.
Relatively easy changes to make, but combined with some existing plans like a traffic-free College Green and Parliament Street, they should have big benefits for the city centre.
However, these fairly localised changes have caused some media and online uproar. Breathless headlines described two short bus lanes on the quays as “a ban on cars”. Joe Duffy spoke in exasperation about nobody being able to access the city, dismissing a man with a visual impairment who called up to say that the plan would improve his bus route.
Pat Kenny accused me on Newstalk of trying to make Dublin like Venice or Paris (heaven forbid!), while Miriam O’Callaghan put it to Eamon Ryan that people will only be able to access Dublin by bike or bus.
But this was all just bluster.
The clear principle of the plan is this: any street in Dublin you can currently drive to, you will still be able to. With all the fearmongering headlines or broadcasters, this simple fact is ignored.
Since yesterday’s media coverage, I have received 24 emails and social media messages from people concerned about how to make a regular journey.
In 22 of the cases, the plan won’t make any difference to their route. In one case, the alternative route took the same time according to Google Maps. In another case, the alternative route took two minutes less than their current one.
Even once this plan is fully implemented, there will be cars on virtually every street in Dublin. If this is a “war on cars”, then it’s one of the least successful wars in history.
Regardless, the plan is necessary. The current arrangements don’t work for anyone and leave Dublin worse off. In most cities, the river is an attractive space — the jewel of the city. In Dublin, we treat it as a rat run – a space that is held hostage by a small number of cars to save a few minutes off a journey.
And for the tens of thousands of people getting the bus, their daily journey will be much faster and more predictable.
There are always going to be cars in the city centre – they’re necessary for some people and many journeys. But we cannot allow that necessity to pretend that through traffic is doing our city centre any favours. We need access for all people and modes of travel coming to the city: alternative routes for those who going elsewhere.
Dublin City Council is often accused of being slow to act and lacking a clear vision for the city. Often, that’s an assessment I sadly agree with.
But in this plan, they are advancing a meaningful vision of how Dublin should be: a place to go to, not just to drive through. Let’s get on with it.
Michael Pidgeon is a Green Party councillor for Dublin’s South West Inner City.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say