Councillors wonder what’s become of those transport schemes to make neighbourhoods safer

Is there any update on the neighbourhood transport schemes for Finglas Park and Ballygall Crescent? asked Fianna Fáil Councillor Keith Connolly at a council meeting late last month.

Well, no, said Will Mangan, an area engineer with Dublin City Council. “As you’re aware, there’s no neighbourhood scheme engineer anymore.”

Councillors can send issues through to the traffic advisory group (TAG) as before, Mangan said. 

Neighbourhood transport schemes had been rolled out by the council in 2019, as a way of looking more holistically at safety challenges in areas, such as rat-running or heavy vehicles passing through.

The update that gave the impression they were over, at the North West Area Committee meeting on 20 May, was actually news to councillors, said Connolly more recently on the phone.  

“That was new information to us, there was never any formal announcement,” he said.

Councillors had been told last year that funding was put aside for a neighbourhood scheme in his area, he says. Now, without any explanation, it’s gone.

On Thursday, a council spokesperson said the schemes are kind of gone in the sense that they aren’t running them like that anymore, or with that name.

Now, an area engineer assesses all the traffic service requests that come in, and if there are multiple ones for one area, they are assessed as a single traffic management solution, they said. “Which in effect is a neighbourhood scheme.”

Still, though, councillors say that many of the schemes piloted in the early years of the project seem to have fallen by the wayside.

A wider lens

Before the changes, the council had introduced four neighbourhood schemes, a spokesperson said.

When they came in, the idea of neighbourhood transport schemes was to get away from the piecemeal approach that there had been in dealing with issues in neighbourhoods, said Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam.

Engineers prioritised areas based on traffic requests, data from the Road Safety Authority, and councillor feedback.

In early briefings, council officials honed in on 21 different spots they thought could do with that kind of approach.

The schemes had buy-in across all parties and stakeholders, says Donna Cooney, the deputy lord mayor and Green Party councillor.

“Everybody was in favour. Nobody was against it,” Cooney said by phone on Tuesday. It should have been an easy thing to implement, but they just seemed to fade away, she says. 

A neighbourhood scheme for East Wall, years in the planning, seems to have disappeared from the council’s agenda.

The area experiences “a huge volume of traffic”, says McAdam, the Fine Gael councillor.

In April and October 2019, the council hosted workshops on transport issues in East Wall. A report was presented to councillors in February 2020, highlighting the speeding, rat-running, and illegal and commuter parking.

Parking-demand management and rerouting were the favoured solutions, the report said.

McAdam says there have been cases where ambulances couldn't get up a road to reach people needing to get to hospital.

Then, after an initial buzz over this holistic plan for the area, the pandemic struck. McAdam said that it was around then that the plans started to disappear. 

There was some movement during the pandemic. In April 2021, independent councillor Nial Ring put forward a motion – which his colleagues on the council’s Central Area Committee backed – calling for a door-to-door survey to see what residents wanted.

Stoneybatter was also earmarked early on for a scheme, says Janet Horner, a Green Party councillor. 

The council put in some traffic-calming measures at the busiest spots, like chicanes on Oxmantown Road, she says. “But the idea of looking at all streets in the area as they work together, has just been put to one side.”

Cooney says Marino too was flagged for a scheme. 

The council ran a six-month trial with filtered permeability – blocking through-traffic by cars with bollards, to open up the streets to more, safer use by pedestrians and cyclists – on Haverty Road from August 2022, said a council report in early 2023 in response to a query from former independent Councillor Damian O’Farrell.

It would assess that and send the findings to councillors in “Jan/Feb 2023”, the report said. 

That never happened though, said Cooney. “Nothing more happened.”

Fine Gael then-Councillor Naoise Ó Muirí asked again in July 2024 for the scheme to be pursued. 

The Clontarf to City Centre transport project had happened since the trial, he said at an area meeting. 

But that was almost done, said Ó Muirí. “We finally need to deal with this rat-running and traffic issue in Marino and get a scheme in place.” 

The response from the council’s executive had been to let the changes settle and see where they get to, he said. But he disagreed and it needs to be done faster, said Ó Muirí.

Today, filtered-permeability bollards on Haverty Road remain.

On Thursday, a council spokesperson listed Haverty Road among the places where the council had introduced neighbourhood schemes.

No engineers, no scheme

Cooney, the Green Party councillor, had asked in March 2023 about funding and resources to progress schemes in Marino and Killester.

There was just one executive engineer working on North City Neighbourhood Schemes with a 2023 budget allocation of €100,000, the response said. 

North Central Area councillors also set aside €30,000 in discretionary funding for the Marino scheme in November 2023.

The reply to Cooney also said that all sections of the council’s traffic department are “severely lacking in engineering staff so it is not possible to transfer any additional engineers to work on the Neighbourhood Transport Schemes”.

Without more staff, the council can’t design and implement any extra traffic projects, including neighbourhood schemes, the reply said.

Horner says Andrew Geoghegan – who had been running the projects as the North City Neighbourhood Transport Engineer – left in the past year or so and the role hasn’t been refilled.

That was “another excuse” as to why the schemes were stalled, she said. But the whole of the north side should not be dependent on one person for advancing such projects, she said.

A spokesperson for the council said, “There was a redistribution of engineers in the traffic department and it was felt that it would be more efficient to have the area engineer assess all service requests in their area.”

The funding that had been allocated to the neighbourhood schemes has been put  back into the TAG budget, they said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme