A Crumlin and Kimmage area councillor has criticised Dublin City Council for disproportionately prioritising walking and cycling projects in the east of the city in coastal areas such as Clontarf and Sandymount, as well as the city centre.
Cllr Pat Dunne (Independents4Change) made the comments at the recent monthly meeting of Dublin City Council when reports outlining the progress on walking and cycling projects and plans was presented to councillors.
The meeting was the same one where other councillors said that it was “absolutely insane” and that they were shocked at the expected decrease in active travel funding for the city council. Confirmation of the national funding to councils around Ireland is expected next week.
Cllr Dunne said: “Looking at the report, it is disproportionate to the east along the coast from Clontatf to Sandymount the city centre, it should really be active travel for those who live in those areas because there’s very little mention of any of the areas to the west of the city no mention whatsoever of Kimmage, Crumlin, Drimnagh, Ballyfermot or any of those areas.”
“So, I think this needs to be relooked at from the point of view of ensuring that transport for people living in what are effectively the inner suburbs is made easy and is made safe. But we haven’t addressed that here,” he said.
Cllr Dunne added: “And as one thing to refer to is neighbourhood schemes but neighbourhood schemes in themselves are minor — we need to look at those major routes into the city from the areas that I have described and some other parts of the north-west of the city as well.”
Andy Walsh, director of the active travel office in the council, said the council try to balance areas covered.
Walsh said: “This is a network after all 300km — we’re doing 200km and BusConnects is doing 100km. It’s all connecting, it’s just that we have to kind of establish a priority list sometimes.”
“And how we get to that from an engineering perspective and the ease of engineering sometimes encourages us to go to one area to get the project done faster, there are constraints in certain areas that we have to work through before we actually appoint contractors so we are doing our best to distribute the programme as much as possible but it will all connect in the end,” he said.
Same when dart was done a lot said why no improvements to the rest of the city metro west would have helped the issue is more that areas with the best public transport and less car use seem to be getting better cycle lanes etc why not concentrate excellent cycle lanes where car use is higher
I think Pat Dunne is Local Election mode.
In fairness to Pat he’s consistently very supportive of active travel, in my experience.