There’s been a lot of funding for new cycle lanes – but not so much for maintaining them

On the sunny May bank holiday on South Great George’s Street, cyclists ride by in t-shirts, and less urgency, maybe, than on a typical Monday. 

The northbound cycle lane is sometimes clearly defined on this stretch, and sometimes it’s painted as a shared lane with buses. 

There are busy stops along the street, forcing cyclists to dodge buses pulling in and out in front of them.

Between the George’s Street Arcade and the iconic gay club and bar, The George, there’s a problem: the road is cracked, creating a dip in the cycle track.

Cyclist after cyclist veers to avoid it, pushing further out into the road among the buses– to avoid the jolt.

Arjun Nemani, cycling on his way to see a friend, dodged this pothole – and says he’s used to dodging hazards in cycle lanes all over the place. 

“Potholes, I understand, like, you need to maintain them, you need to fix them,” says Nemani, who stopped to talk on Monday. 

“But, like, the manhole covers are so annoying because it seems like it's planned. Like the cyclists are going here, they're not important,” he says.

He said bumps, dips, potholes, cracks, manhole covers and other hazards in cycle lanes, means more maintenance for his bike. And dodging around them, further into the road with motor vehicle traffic, can be nerve-wracking, he says. 

“If I avoid them, I'm always kind of scared, at least on, like, the [big roads], you know, the E1-E2 buses, that come on that. So many manhole covers and fast cars.”

In recent years, the National Transport Authority (NTA) has invested heavily in expanding infrastructure and trying to make cycling more accessible, not just for the brave riders.

But, Nemani says, bike lanes across the city need not only to be built, but taken care of to keep cyclists safe, and to make cycling accessible to more people.

Yes, said Angela Donnelly, a Sinn Féín councillor in Fingal, by phone recently. A lack of maintenance of cycle lanes can make it more difficult for cyclists. 

But a spokesperson for the NTA, which says it has provided more than €1 billion for cycle lanes since 2020, says it is “not in a position to provide funding for general maintenance of infrastructure”. 

And Department of Transport spokesperson says there is €40 million in capital funding for protection and renewal of footpaths and cycle lanes – but “funding for maintenance of active travel infrastructure” “was not secured in Budget 2025 due to a high level of competing demands”. 

Problems in Dublin city

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, chair of Dublin City Council’s mobility committee, says road maintenance is even more important for cyclists than drivers. 

While a pothole might be a minor issue for a driver, it can be a big issue for a cyclist who is navigating in a narrow space without room to swerve, and with more risk – since they’re not inside a car with airbags.

On-street cycle lanes, which there are a lot of in the city, would often be resurfaced as part of road maintenance works, Horner said. “So I guess if we're looking at that aspect of the maintenance budget, that's where that would come in.”

However, she said, maintenance is not just paving, it’s also removing debris from the cycle lanes. Glass is more of a problem for bike tires than car tires, and objects on the road that a car would roll right over can crash a cyclist. 

“Debris, rocks, anything else like that can cause somebody to come off their bike so that can – it can be quite dangerous,” Horner said. Wet leaves in the autumn can also get slippy, she said. 

Sweeping painted-on cycle lanes is easy enough. But the regular street cleaning machines can’t get into some cycle lanes that are segregated off from the main roadway with bollards or dividers, Horner said. 

Both Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council have invested in cycle lane-sized street cleaners since in recent years. 

Problems in Dublin 15

While in the city, it’s not uncommon that cycle lanes are part of the roadway, according to Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor. In Fingal, that’s less common, she says. 

A lot of the area’s cycle lanes are completely segregated from traffic – over to the side of the roadway, maybe across a grass verge from the cars, running along next to the footpath. 

“There aren't very many cycle lanes that are part of the road or without any barrier,” Donnelly says. 

So, in those situations, when the roads get resurfaced that doesn’t help the cycle lanes.

Last autumn, Donnelly put in a motion to Fingal County Council to review the bike lanes around Dublin 15, and worked to secure funding for their repair. 

“We were getting a lot of funding for new cycling infrastructure, which is fantastic,” Donnelly said.

“The problem was that the funding only covered the introduction of new infrastructure,” she said. “It didn't cover the maintenance of that infrastructure and of the older infrastructure that we had.”

She called this a “glitch” – that the government programmes paid for the new cycle lanes but not so much for the upkeep. 

Instead, funding for cycle lane maintenance was coming out of the council’s general operations budget, which is used for “our paths or our parks, public realm, or everything”, Donnelly said. 

“So if the maintenance of the cycle lanes continues to come out of that, it would really erode that budget, and there wouldn't be much left for anything outside of those cycle lanes,” she said.

But still, there were cycle lanes that needed to be fixed up so councillors lobbied Fingal’s chief executive, AnneMarie Farrelly, for more council funding for that. 

The council allocated some funding for each of Fingal’s three administrative local areas, including €150,000 for the Blanchardstown/Castleknock/Ongar area this year, Donnelly said.  

Now council staff have inspected cycle lanes in Dublin 15, and graded them based on how urgent it is to repair them.  

At a meeting of the Blanchardstown operations committee on 24 April, Darragh Sheppard, an inspector at the council’s Coolmine depot, gave a presentation on what they found. 

He showed photos of cracked and lumpy off-street cycle lanes around the area. The council hopes to get many of the prioritised fixes done this year, he said.

Tree roots and manhole covers can both be issues, Sheppard said. “That's a lot of the issues we have.”

He said part of the issue is the age of these tracks, and the way they were installed.

“A lot of time, of time the cycle lines may be poorly constructed going back years ago”, and they need to just be replaced, Sheppard said. 

“You could see, like, at the very last slide is, is an area we did from Castlecurragh back to Warrenstown,” he said. “People are cycling the footpath. They won't – obviously, you're not going to cycle on that, because it's crazy.

Worse cycle lanes, fewer cyclists

Maintaining cycle lanes properly is crucial to getting more people to cycle more, says Donnelly, the Sinn Féin councillor in Fingal. 

“People aren't going to use cycle infrastructure and cycle unless they feel safe,” she says. “But secondly, you have to make it attractive. You have to make it so that people actually enjoy getting on a bike and bringing our bike out and cycling in an area.” 

Horner, the Green Party councillor in Dublin city, says she wants to see funding in place to make sure regular maintenance work takes place in bike lanes.

It shouldn’t take as much funding to keep cycle lanes in good order as it does to maintain roadways cars and HGVs use, Horner says. 

“Like, they don't wear and tear to the same extent as general carriageways, because the vehicles using them are generally significantly lighter and less impactful than general carriageways,” she says. 

Donnelly, in Fingal, says there needs to be a reliable source of funding for ongoing maintenance of cycle lanes. Because while they got that €150,000 for Dublin 15 this year, that will need to be renegotiated in 2026.

Nemani, who was cycling down South Great George’s Street Monday, says cycling in Dublin got easier for him once he got used to his routes, and he likes it – he cycles around to visit friends, and to get to work, and it saves him a lot of time. 

But some of his friends avoid it, he says. “They're scared of cycling in the city.”