Royal Canal Greenway between Docklands and North Strand Road to open in May

— Dublin City Council expects cycling budget increase to €27 million this year.

A cycling and walking link along the Royal Canal Greenway between the Docklands and North Strand Road is set to open in May, a senor Dublin City Council official said last week.

Brendan O’Brien, the executive manager for Dublin City Council’s transport section, said that funding for cycling is increasing. He said that the level of money the council gets from the NTA-managed sustainable transport funding stream is set to jump from €7 million three years ago to “an anticipated €27 million this year”.

O’Brien said that a section of the Royal Canal Greenway between the Docklands behind the convention centre and North Strand Road is set to open in May.

The section due to be opened is known as Phase 2. It includes around 500 metres of a two-way cycle path and around 150 metre shared bridge over a railway and up to North Strand Road. The work includes making the stretch of the canal along the route into a canal-side park.

Phase 1 was a shorter section from the Liffey and along the conference centre, which was built as part of the Canals Route project which included the Grand Canal Cycleway.

MAPS SHOWING CONTEXT OF PHASE 2:

As readers will know, future sections of the greenway up to the border with the Fingal County Council area have suffered from delays first due to permissions and more recently due to tendering issues. Fingal County Council are also examining the options around the route in Dublin 15.

Drawings and other graphics for phase 2 as published in 2016:

O’Brien made the comments at the monthly council meeting during a debate on the Liffey Cycle Route, which we will be covering in another article.

5 comments

  1. Don’t get why they have to build it in sections: Kilcock-Maynooth, Athlone-Mullingar, etc. all are open. Why can’t they just build it from end to end?

    Reply
  2. @Cyclist
    After a decade of waiting for things to improve, the section that I use from Leixlip to Porterstown is still pretty much untouched by any works and is currently a swamp with sections closed for some spurious reason. No sign of any actual greenway work though I hear the Mullingar section is lovely.

    I get why there would be phases to allow for a focus of resources on different sections individually, but the sequence of doing the rural sections first is illogical. As usual there were too many agencies involved and it wasn’t until the NTA took over that this ceased being a series of almost entirely separate county projects that were entirely dependent on the whims of whatever minor officials had been lumbered with their section. Fingal in particular did absolutely nothing to progress this project before NTA intervention.

    While the rural sections are great local leisure resources with some commuter utility, the initial focus should have been on completing the urban and commuter areas first as the bike commuter need was clearly significant and it would have established the greenway as a practical commuter transport option as well as a gateway to the country sections which prospective cycle tourists can’t actually cycle to at the moment. But that would have taken joined up thinking and a single agency being tasked with the entire project from the start and that is just not how we do things unfortunately.

    Reply

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