UPDATE: New Cycle Design Manual brings Ireland a step closer to international best practices
– Councils given new manual but NTA says it will be revealed to all in September.
Councils around Ireland have been provided with copies of the new Cycle Design Manual which replaces the National Cycle Manual, but the National Transport Authority has not replied directly to questions asking why there is a delay in publishing the manual.
This has resulted in some confusion and speculation in both campaigning and council circles regarding what the delay might be.
Around the same time as councils were provided with a copy of the new manual, the interactive version of the former manual was removed from CycleManual.ie and replaced with a PDF of the now apparently outdated document.
The new document shared with councils is listed as version 1.0 — ie not a draft — and is called the “First publication of Cycle Design Manual replacing previous National Cycle Manual (2011)” and dated “July 2023”. Councils received it sometime around the end of July or early August.
Page 2 of the manual states: “The Cycle Design Manual has been prepared by the National Transport Authority (NTA) and overseen by the Department of Transport. This manual replaces the previous National Cycle Manual, published by the NTA in 2011, which is now withdrawn.”
Just over a week ago, a spokesperson of the NTA’s Active Travel section told IrishCycle.com that there is no date yet for putting the new manual online but that they are “expecting it to be sometime in September”.
IrishCycle.com then asked if any planning section of councillors or An Bord Pleanala had been informed of the updated manual and if a copy had been provided to them to avoid any confusion between planners, the public, road authorities, or the likes of developers.
And we asked why the document was not being published now when was already sent to local authorities.
The spokesperson for the NTA said: “We shared it with Active Travel teams in Local Authorities and informed them that we were sharing it with them so they could get familiar with it, but we did tell them that the document is not being published for another few weeks.”
They added: “We anticipate it to be published sometime in September.”