Conor Faughnan’s stance on 30km/h leaves the AA lacking any credibility on speed limits

COMMENT & ANALYSIS | LONG READ: To some people, 30km/h speed limits are like dark magic set against the hardworking, tax paying motorist who are just trying to go about their business. So, clearly daft things are said by some objectors to the limit (like saying people can walk faster), but not Conor Faughnan of the AA. He’s smarter than that.

Faughnan, the AA’s head of communications, says 30km/h is proven to be effective… Dublin is just doing it wrong is the message. 

Mix reasonable words with silliness, and common sense with nonsense, and many people will get quickly lose track — most people won’t be giving their full attention to the radio and will only skim articles. If the audience is prone to siding against change, you’ll add to that.

In the words of one road safety campaigner, Faughnan is trying to engineer a backlash. We’ll go further and contend he has done a great job at this so-far. So, it is vital that the AA’s PR drive is seen for what it is.

IMAGE: Extra engineering can follow the roll out of 30km/h -- as it happened Dublin city centre (pictured above) and many of the streets covered already have traffic calming or some sort (shown below).
IMAGE: Extra engineering can follow the roll out of 30km/h — as it happened Dublin city centre (pictured above) and many of the streets covered already have traffic calming or some sort.
The AA is a lobby group for motorists, as well as an insurance company with a breakdown service. The Irish AA was recently sold off from the UK group, but the UK website gives a history of how the overall organisation was set up to “overcome the perceived police oppression of early motorists and their use of speed-traps”.

Faughnan is a very skilled media handler who is liked by broadcasters and journalists as he’s able and available to talk about a range of issues relating to motoring and road safety. He comes across as smart, widely-briefed (with a motoring bias as per his job), and willing to take on other’s views.

He’s also liked by the public for pointing out things like the fact that speed enforcement nationally is all too often focused on wide, straight sections of roads outside our urban areas. Meanwhile there’s little or no enforcement around schools or where most people live.

If you track his media appearances over time (helps when you’re a media junky), you’ll see that Faughnan is great at playing the long game and getting his message across repetitively. 

His message includes that on-street bicycle lockers — which aim to provide secure bicycle parking to residents of inner city Dublin who have little storage space — are “an excuse to sabotage car use” and he’s make similar claims about motives of those behind the Liffey Cycle Route. He also claimed that a plan for that route came out of nowhere, when he should have known it was planned for years.

IMAGE: With very few exceptions, residential street like this one will be the typical areas covered by 30km/h.
IMAGE: With very few exceptions, residential street like this one will be the typical areas covered by 30km/h in Dublin.
The AA’s attack on 30km/h speed limit on residential streets, and areas of high pedestrian and cyclist activity is more of the same of trying to muddy the waters in the debate about sustainable transport and liveable cities.

AA Ireland tweeted last week: “Dublin City Council are proposing to bring in a 30km/h speed limit across the whole of Dublin city”. But there’s no such plan.

It was not just a Tweet, it linked to a statement by Faughnan. In the statement — which was used by a number of local and national media outlets — he said that the council is “to bring in a 30km/h speed limit across the whole of Dublin city between the canals” and “extend this even further to include places like Ringsend, Sandymount, Crumlin, Drimnagh & Phibsboro.”

Faughnan claims: “This is clumsy and unnecessary and will do more harm than good for road safety. It is being sold as a road safety measure but it is not…. the Council have essentially coloured in the whole of the city centre.”

Dublin City Council has come out stronger than is typical of them and called Faughnan’s coloured comments a “total misrepresentation of the facts”.  Faughnan, it seems, found it hard to say that the plan mainly covers residential streets or that the vast bulk of main or arterial roads and streets will remain at 50km/h. We cover this in another article titled: Is Dublin really planning a blanket 30km/h speed limit?

There is a promise to review all roads and streets in phase 3, but this is unlikely to change many main roads from 50km/h to 30km/h and, indeed, it could do the reverse and include removing some 30km/h streets. There’s certainly no plan to do so in the short term and the the review will include the potential to change roads to other speed limits (ie 40km/h, 50km/h).

We have focused on the AA and Conor Faughnan more than any media outlet because the AA have far more reach than any one media outlet — AA spokespeople or their statements have featured in national broadcasts and on print and online article. RTE.ie, RTE TV news, on Morning Ireland, The Irish Times, dublinlive.ie, businesspost.ie, the Herald, UTV and radio news reports. The AA are the main opposition to the rollout of 30km/h on residential streets.

IMAGE: Dublin it's planning radical 30km/h zones as can be found in cities like Berlin (pictured).
IMAGE: Dublin is not planning “radical” 30km/h zones as can be found in cities like Berlin (pictured) and parts of London which have applied the limit to many main roads.
Many media outlets were also hardly blameless in their reporting last week. Standing out was The Irish Times running an online poll with the simplistic and misleading question: “Do you agree with cutting the speed limit to 30km/h in Dublin?” — no indication it did not include main routes. The poll was in an article which only manages to mention the exclusion of arterial roads in the 6th paragraph, after the poll.

The Irish Times also mentions areas which will be covered by 30km/h next year, but does it not fully qualify this. For example, the light blue shaded area below is the only planned area to be covered in Drumcondra. It’s so small and confined to estates, it’s hardly worth mentioning:

img_1418-1.jpg
IMAGE: In the short-term, the blue shaded area is the area to be covered by 30km/h in Drumcondra.
Faughnan also highlighted how “The AA lobbied strongly, and successfully, to get rid of ridiculous 80km/h signs on country boreens with grass growing up the middle. We did this not because anyone was trying to do 80km/h on them but because they brought the whole system into disrepute.” This is just more PR fluff.

His lobbying did not result in the removal of 80km/h limits from narrow country roads, it was purely a branding exercise which changed the design of the signs used but kept the exact same legal meaning of those signs and kept 80km/h as the limit on narrow country roads, ones with grass strips running down the middle.

It’s also amazing how the AA has an issue with 80km/h on grassy a rural roads but has not pushed the issue of 50km/h on narrow residential streets. Maybe if we could see signs on more of these streets, the AA would have a different view? Would it then be a PR problem worth solving?

IMAGE: 50km/h signs on a narrow residential street in Dun Laoghaire.
Faughnan also made a massive factual error on 30km/h in Dublin when he claimed: “This is why none of the bodies with any road safety expertise are asking for this measure – the RSA, Gardai, the Department of the Environment, the AA.” In an article in the Irish Independent about two months ago (ie well before the latest AA PR push), an RSA spokesman is quoted as stating: “We very much welcome this proposal. In fact, Ireland is lagging behind the rest of Europe when it comes to the issue. If you look at Edinburgh, they have 20mph across the city…”. It’s surprising that Faughnan missed this as he’s mentioned in the article and media tracking is a core tool of mainstream PR.

The RSA has also called for 30km/h ‘default’ speed limit on urban roads — on 30km/h the RSA has moved away from the position of motoring groups towards the stance taken by road safety groups and countries across Europe.

Both Faughnan and the RSA do agree on one thing: both said that there must be local community support for 30km/h — and there is! Dublin City Council have already said that requests from locals was a determining factor in which areas they chose for the first of the planned phases of 30km/h speed limit.

With its current approach, the AA should be seen as lacking any credibility on the issue of speed limits. Their attempt at muckraking should be seen for what it is and rejected.

To find out more and take part in the public consultation for Dublin’s 30km/h plans, visit http://www.dublincity.ie/speedreview

MORE: Is Dublin really planning a blanket 30km/h speed limit?
IMAGES:
All photographs by IrishCycle.com; map from Dublin City Council public consultation.


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10 comments

  1. Excellent article, Irish people who walk and cycle as park of their transport strategy are lucky to have such a quality journalist in their corner.

    Reply
  2. People need to bear in mind that the Irish Times is not the only problematic Irish media outlet when it comes to discussing urban management and transport planning. The state broadcaster RTE also has an enormous conflict of interest that is rarely declared. In addition to giving the AA a platform on their news broadcasts every hour the RTE news department has a long standing cosy arrangement with the AA.

    RTE news does not have a city centre broadcast studio. They have a studio in the Dail but not elsewhere in the city centre. When you hear an RTE news interview from “our city centre studio” the studio in question does not belong to RTE and is used by arrangement with the owners. The studio is actually located in the AA offices in Suffolk street and the owners are the AA.

    Arguably, if RTE were being honest with the Irish public, their journalists should declare a conflict of interest before any broadcast “report” on traffic management or road safety.

    Reply
  3. Its so good to have Conor Faughnan’s PR sleights of hand on 30kph speed limits exposed….and so important to campaign for cities that are geared towards the active movement of people rather than car domination! Lowering of speed limits offers up so many benefits for all citizens. It needs to be supported and embraced!

    Reply
  4. Has he been asked to retract the “blanket” statement? Interesting discussion on same topic on Seán O’ R today. Conor Faughnan muddied the waters by conflating local authorities powers to set speed limits on all except N roads and motorways( which does result in inconsistencies) with the effort by one local authority to set lower speed limits in residential areas in Dublin. Ciaran Cuffe challenged him on it though. I wonder if that man in Ennis who has been campaigning for 10 years for traffic calming measures in his estate has been in touch with Rosanna Brennan

    Reply
  5. By a coincidence last month William Campbell’s “HeresHow” Potltics and Current Affairs a podcast site has a piece on editorial practice in RTE. It covers a range of issues including the association between AA and RTE. The podcast itself consists of an interview with Donal Byrne a news editor at RTÉ who is responsible for news planning.

    http://blog.hereshow.ie/2016/06/heres-how-41-donal-byrne-of-rte/

    On the podcast the section dealing with RTE and the AA is between 20mins and 30mins. Mr. Byrne declines to accept that there is an imbalance in the level of coverage the AA get from RTE news.

    There is also an accompanying article that explores the issues. A section of the text bears repeating here:

    “Donal disputed my assertion that the AA gets vastly disproportionate coverage on RTÉ, compared to other transport lobbying groups. At the time of writing, there are 332 pages on the RTÉ website mentioning Conor Faughnan, almost all of them publicising his lobbying activities. By contrast the Irish Road Haulage Association gets a mention on 60 pages and the Dublin Cycling campaign gets 18. These numbers are likely to change as RTÉ updates its website.”

    Reply
  6. RTE needs to review its relationship with AA Ireland. All traffic reports are given by spokespersons for the AA and not by RTE’s own journalists or by the Garda or TII/NTA who do monitor traffic levels.
    AA Ireland is not a membership-managed club for motorists. It is no longer a club or mutual society. It has recently been taken over by a financial-service company.
    Why is RTE offering ‘free’ advertising to a private company on our national airwaves?
    http://www.independent.ie/business/aa-ireland-sold-to-carlyle-cardinal-ireland-in-multimillion-euro-cash-deal-34845088.html

    Reply

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