Dublin City Council: Still living in fear of disrupting the car?
Dublin City Council’s plan for the Grafton Street Quarter, released last week, is yet another example of how the city can’t take walking, cycling or civic spaces seriously. They don’t want to change traffic flows to the area — they seem to fear changing traffic.
But as the council should know, their own City Centre cycling traffic counts show that cyclists already account for 18.4% of traffic at the Dame Street / George’s Street junction, which is at the north-west corner of the Grafton Street Quarter. Cycling accounting for 25% of traffic in this area isn’t a far off target — it’s in reach.
Overall across the city centre traffic counting points, cycling is steady growing as a percentage of all traffic. But if we’re talking about a cycle modal share of 25% for Dublin City, the city centre will likely have a modal share 35% plus. This plan does not seem to account for such numbers of cyclists.
This is mainly a shopping and leisure district and research from DIT shows that car shoppers only make up 10% of all shoppers in the area. Retailers overestimated car users, while nearly as many shoppers cycled (9%) and twice as many just walked (20%). Most shoppers in the area don’t travel by car — 90% use a different mode.
The largest group after pedestrians were bus users (35%). Luas users were massively overestimated but, with the Luas still not connected, users already outnumbered car users.
Nearly everybody including car users — most of whom are walking from large car parks — are pedestrians. Yet there’s no plan (beyond what is tied into the Luas Cross City project and already announced) to give streets over to pedestrians, and for people who want to sit down to eat, drink, socialise or just rest.
The business-led group Dublin2Walk Pedestrian Zone Extension Campaign claims that the majority of businesses in the area support trialling extra pedestrian streets. This they say could include most of South William Street, Dame Court and Dame Lane — while still maintaining access to car parks.
There’s no plans to restrict traffic so this artist’s impression of people standing in the roadway is unlikely to happen much, regardless of the nice new surface.
Around the time Copenhagen pushed ahead with a massive network of pedestrian streets, in Dublin, the council allowed the pedestrianisation of Grafton Street to be stalled for years because of fear. Fear again is playing its part in rejecting the trialling of pedestrianisation on South William Street and Dame Court.
The main changes for the area included in the plan are changes which are forced by the Luas Cross City project. It was even left up to the planning authority An Bord Pleanala to stipulate improvements to the footpaths along the route. Sadly, as we covered before: An Bord Pleanala did not take the same approach with cycling.
Dame Lane — on a weekend night it’s filled with people enjoying Dublin’s night life, and you get the odd idiot in a car pushing their way past the crowds.
Keeping with fear but back to cycling: While the Dublin City Council plan for the area says that “traffic volumes and speeds within the Grafton Street Quarter are low”, there’s little mention of the lack of permeability for cyclists, and not a single mention of contra-flow.
Contra-flow had been planned for the South William Street area and a number of locations around the city, but Dublin City Council stalled and the only work on contra-flow since has fixing older contra-flow projects which were not implemented right from day one.
There are other problematic access issues which results in detours. The single-lane one-way system in the quarter filters out to wider two-lane one-way streets.
A prime example is heading south from St Andrew’s Street and later return to Dame Street. Any cyclist who want to say within the law, stay on their bicycles, and access the area from St Andrew’s Street (below the red dot below), are required to take a substantial detour to get back to Dame Street.
The image below shows the routes cyclists have to travel without dismounting once they past the south section of St Andrew’s Street — dismounting often means walking along often busy, cluttered and narrow footpaths.
Main green route: The most straight forward, but long and includes cycling unfriendly and busy two-lane one-way streets.
Narrow green route: Also long and also includes some of the two-lane one-way streets and the route is convoluted.
Orange route: This would be possible if South King Street was made accessible, but it’s even longer and includes where the Luas will be on narrow streets (not exactly a route you want to be pushing more cyclists down when there’s shorter routes).
MORE: What does Luas Broombridge mean for cyclists?