— Current junction is wide with sweeping turns and no formal crossing at five locations.
Public consultation on the Suir Road/Davitt Road junction project has been extended until August 9th after opposition from local motorists, mainly against a bus priority measure which was included as part of the project.
A presentation was given to councillors at the first South East Area Committee since the local elections recently. Councillors said that the junction is a “notoriously a bad intersection for everybody” but that members of the public have “real genuine concerns” and that they are raising “reasonable” issues.
The majority of issues raised related to the impact of the project on motorists. A Fine Gael councillor said that Senator Mary Seery-Kearney, who lives in the area thinks the plan will create “a lot of discomfort” and is an “unrealistic approach.”
The project is part of the Kilmainham to Thomas Street Walking and Cycling Route. It is also proposed to also include a bus gate in the northbound direction out of planned redesigned junction from Slievenamon Road. The bus gate would give priority to the 123 bus route, which is due to be changed to the 73 under BusConnects and increased in frequency.
The design of the project is also viewed by the council as likely increasing the safety and reliability of Luas as it crosses part of the junction.
An extra information event on the project is to be held from 4-7pm on August 1st in Good Counsel, Liffey Gaels, GAA and Camogie Club, Davitt Road, Drimnagh, Dublin D12 AX61.
Details of how to respond online can be found at consultation.dublincity.ie while drawings are also available to view in Dublin City Council, Block 1, Floor 0, Civic Offices, Wood Quay, Dublin 8, D08 RF3F and Dolphins Barn Library, Parnell Rd, Saint James, Dublin, D12 ET22
The council said that the new public information leaflets will be “distributed to local residents and businesses located directly adjacent to the scheme”.
Cllr Pat Dunne (Independents for Change) said: “I get it, and I voted for measures that make travel and active travel safer for pedestrians and cyclists. I fully support public transport, the bus and the Luas services in that area, but I also get that a lot of people still need to have a car and access to a car either to go and do the weekly shopping for families or for work reasons or whatever.”
But he said that there had been “major traffic tailbacks” since the installation of pedestrian crossings and safety measures at another junction along the canal at Herberton Road, which previously lacked signalised crossings. He said: “I think anyone who’s planning changes to the transport and to the roads should be conscious of those delays.”
He said that in relation to what he called “the main proposal here for a bus gate”, he said he’s “spent a lot of time studying the BusConnects proposals for the entire Dublin 12 area” and there are no bus gates on the main roads such as the Crumlin Road so he said: “I can’t say why we would want to put a bus on a small slip road which is at Slievenamon Road.”
However, BusConnects includes significant road widening to allow for bus lanes on Crumlin Road and bus priority signals — also a type of bus gate — in the east and west directions where continuous bus lanes are not possible.
The presentation given to councillors outlined how the delay for the bus route at that junction was the longest delay for buses in the city.
Cllr Dunne said: “I’d like to see the statistics on that. They can have delays there, yes, but I would be very surprised if it’s the longest and the way to prioritise buses is what the NTA are doing in the BusConnects proposals is to put in traffic lights with bus priority.”
Generally, signal priority type of bus gates requires bus lanes to be effective.
He said: “I’m asking is that once again you go back to the residence and engage with them… everybody wants to see better safety for cyclists and pedestrians.”
Cllr Dunne said that a consultant working on the project “Had used the expression rat run to say Slievenamon Road is a rat run. But it is not a rat run. It’s a main road. It’s the main road out of Drimnagh.”
Cllr Mannix Flynn (independent) claimed that pedestrians were not mentioned much in the presentation. However, pedestrians and pedestrian crossings were mentioned ten times, while cyclists were mentioned half that number of times.
He also claimed that the presentation did not break down the different modes of traffic, but the presentation did go into detail about how buses were being prioritised while residents would still have access to their homes by car, the different possible detours the bus gate might cause and the new improvements for people walking and cycling.
Cllr Flynn also said: “In terms of the kind of greening area, again, this kind of terminality that is used, you didn’t break that down…. you know, who’s going to be sitting beside a roadway?”
The planned green area is an expansion of the existing green. It is currently encircled by traffic but will be made larger and linked to an existing park. It will also partly buffer the park from the roadway. Many people also benefit from seating along roadways, including older people and people with some disabilities.
After complaining that traffic lights were changed to give pedestrians extra crossing time during Covid, Cllr Flynn then said that “pedestrians were to the forefront of all of this”.
Cllr Kourtney Kenny (Sinn Féin) said that she has met with Cllr Daithí Doolan, another Sinn Féin councillor, on the issue and that residents are “very concerned.”
She said: “They’re real genuine concerns about the effects of the plan. I understand what you [the person presenting] are saying about how it’s only a two or three minutes, if not six minutes, added on to their journey, but at the end of the day, that’s where they live, and residents are really starting to feel like there hasn’t been enough time for proper consultation.”
Cllr Kenny said: “The residents feel like they haven’t been given enough time and the proposal has very practical implications on residents that are living in Slievenamon Road and Galtymore Road also the ability to leave and enter their homes is very much affected.”
Cllr Punam Rane (Fine Gael) said that “most of the residents” have written to her and that Senator Mary Seery-Kearney also lives there, and she thinks the plan will create “a lot of discomfort” and is an “unrealistic approach.”
Cllr Rane said: “What I am asking is should we not give enough consideration before we go ahead with the implementation plan? My understanding already of the BusConnects plan in the areas of Rathgar and Terenure is that it has already raised lots of concerns from the residents. Should we now not be a bit careful about our implementation of these plans, which will be permanent plans, and there is no way to go back…”
Cllr Carolyn Moore (Green Party) said that there is a lot of be welcomed in plan but that “there were definitely issues with the communication of this”.
She said: “This brings its own issues in terms of how people perceive the projects that we’re trying to present to them and the intent behind those presentations, and so we have experienced this previously with other projects where you start things off on on a bad footing when people feel there’s something if not underhanded then just you know a little bit not very upfront about what we’re trying to achieve.”
She said: “I would also have questions about the proposal for a bus gate and what is the measure that we intend to use to enforce that because we don’t have camera-based enforcement at the moment and if there isn’t a kind of a robust adherence to the presence of that bus gate we’ve created bigger problems with wider implications.”
“From a cycling perspective, I have a few concerns that it’s not quite maximising the potential to create a proper safe cycling infrastructure along this route. I’m concerned that the approach is possibly a little bit over-engineered, and I wonder how intuitive it’s going to be for people who are using it,” she said.
She also said that there were “ongoing issues” with toucan crossings further down the canal and that there “seems to be a basic lack of knowledge in Ireland about how toucan crossings actually work.”
Cllr Eoin Hayes (Social Democrats) said that residents are “all aligned on the idea of making sure that there is safe active travel at this intersection making sure that improved bus services are part of how we redeveloped the city… however, there are some serious concerns from residents that I have heard and I think in the whole one thing that I just like to emphasise is that they have been reasonable.”
“It has been a reasonable contribution of question marks around how these different roads will lead to different traffic congestion, what will mean for them what will mean for people with disabilities or older people and how they will be able to get around the city, so, I think I just encourage you to engage in that that more extensive process in terms of consultation for another two weeks,” he said.
He added: “It is notoriously a bad intersection for everybody that goes down it, and I’m just wondering if there were other alternatives that were considered, whether that was roundabouts or bike bridges or anything like that. I’m wondering how much of this is constrained by the budgets that we have and the innovation that we’re allowed to have on some of these issues.”
Just another example of how convoluted and wasteful the Irish planning process is. What other countries would have such a lengthy consultation including public consultation on a single junction. One junction! jeez. Unsurprising to see this from DCC.