On Saturday, a contractor started upgrading a cycle lanes at a junction along the route. The whole scheme is due to be delivered by 2029.
Dublin City Council has started initial construction work on 3km of segregated cycle lanes to run from the Clonskeagh Bridge to Charlemont Street, council officials said on Monday.
On Saturday, contractor Cairn Construction started to carry out upgrades to cycle lanes at the junction of Eglinton Road and Milltown Road, south of Ranelagh village, according to a report to the council’s South East Area Committee.
These works are to include signalised pedestrian crossings, "landscaping and public realm" improvements like tactile surfaces, and segregated cycle lanes, as well as removing slip lanes, it says.
The upgrades form part of the council’s Sandyford Clonskeagh to Charlemont Active Travel Scheme, Christopher Manzira, the acting director of the Active Travel Programme, told the committee.
This scheme will run from Clonskeagh Bridge at the River Dodder through Ranelagh and down across the Grand Canal onto Charlemont Street, and is expected to be delivered between 2026 and 2029, according to the council website.
The work at the junction south of Ranelagh village is to be done by the contractor ahead of the first main phase of the three-stage scheme, which covers the area between Woodstock Gardens and Clonskeagh Bridge, he said. “The remainder of [phase one] is going through detailed design at the moment.”
Councillors at the area committee were first told by officials that the project was in the pipeline back in July 2022.
In 2025, the council built an interim walking and cycling scheme through Ranelagh, said Conor Lynch, an active travel engineer, at the committee meeting.
“For 2026, the priority was the delivery of the Milltown Road-Eglinton Road junction,” he said.
Right now, the junction is poor for cyclists, he said. “At that junction, there is no controlled pedestrian crossing on Eglinton Road.”
Segregation will help to reduce cyclist collisions, he said, “and minimise conflict points at the junction”.
The council intends to finish the detailed design on phase one and go out to tender in 2027, he said. “Then works will continue on phases two and three after phase one has gone to tender.”
Contractor Cairn Construction started work on the junction over the weekend, Niall Geraghty, a senior engineer from consultancy Aecom also told the committee.
Initially, these centred on getting the ducting installed for road crossings at the four arms of the junction, he said. “That was successful.”
Subject to licences, the contractor intends to set up pedestrian crossings in December, with the full schedule of works set to run over an eight-month period, he said.
Fine Gael Councillor David Coffey said he is seeing videos of construction workers in the Netherlands installing a pre-fabricated tunnel below a highway over a single weekend. “Eight months just seems far too long. Why can’t we do this in a quicker timeframe?”
Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne asked why the council needed to wait for the junction upgrades to be finished before starting to work on the designs for all the way down to Charlemont Street.
“Like, particularly, Charlemont Street, there’s huge issues there, particularly with flooding,” she said, “and we keep being told that they can’t do anything about it because of the active travel scheme.”
Can’t these be done in parallel? she asked. “Because obviously it’s one whole cycle route.”
The initial upgrades at the junction and the rest of phase one between Woodstock Gardens and Clonskeagh Bridge were originally intended to be delivered together, Manzira said.
But when they went through the final design reviews, the overall budget of the scheme made it unaffordable, he said.
“We had to go back and see how we could reduce the cost to deliver the scheme, because we want to deliver the overall scheme and we have an objective to bring down the cost per kilometre for the schemes that we are delivering," he said.
The council has ambition, he said. "But we also have to be realistic in terms of what we anticipate to be future funding provision over the next few years."
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