— “We’ve never seen cycle lanes in space,” campaigners say, but highlight the cycle lane will serve schools communities.
A campaign group has said it is baffled that professional motoring advocate Conor Faughnan “is still considered to be a ‘transport expert'” as they said his latest regular appearance on the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk was “riddled with errors, inaccuracies, outlandish claims, and displays a very poor understanding of road safety.”
Faughnan is known for regularly declaring that he is all for cycling and public transport while also arguing to the hilt about basic priority measures and funding.
He said a protected cycle path under construction on the Firhouse Road is “absolutely ludicrous” and “never even needed,” but the project is a key section of the Dodder Greenway. It will link existing parts of the greenway together, which means there will soon be a continuous route from Tallaght to Rathgar.
I Bike Dublin, a cycling campaign group, said that Faughnan wrongly conflates the 2:1 funding ratio of public transport to roads with what he describes as the “ridiculous, unnecessary, over-engineered cycle lanes.”
On Newstalk, Faughnan said the “artificial”, “silly”, and “forced 2:1 ratio” had “distorted spending with some ridiculous, unnecessary, over-engineered cycle lanes being built in various places just to comply with that ratio.”
Faughnan later said: “The 2:1 is probably a reasonable rule of thumb, but it’s very silly as a rigid rule. So, there’s loads of stuff we need to build, including metros and Luases, but to make a religion out of not building roads is a bit silly.”
However, while some governments internationally went much further and paused major road building for climate reasons, the last Irish government’s 2:1 spending on transport included starting new major road projects and funding the continued planning of other large roads and motorway projects.
He said that he didn’t know if the Green Party was rejected because of their transport policies and said that it was common for smaller parties to take a hit after going into Government.
Faughnan is best known for his former role as the voice of the AA, which is now mainly an insurance company but has a strong history of fighting against road safety measures after being founded to oppose the original speed checks on motorists.
He left that role in recent years, and after a stint of being the CEO of the Royal Irish Automobile Club (RIAC), he is now introduced on air as a transport expert and an independent consultant who works with the RIAC.
In a statement posted on LinkedIn, I Bike Dublin said: “Anyone with the faintest knowledge of transport policy over the last few years would be aware that active travel funding (for walking and cycling) is not included in the 2:1 ratio but comes from a separate budget entirely.”
“He supports increasing road spending relative to public transport, claiming, against decades of evidence to the contrary, that this will ease congestion,” the group said.
On air, Faughnan took aim at the cycle paths being built on the Firhouse Road — a key part of the Dodder Greenway which has wide-ranging support — as well as talking about the council having dug up the road already in recent years, an apparent reference to Firhouse Road West cycle paths, which are part of Pathfinder project to accelerate climate action.
“He describes the new cycle lane on Firhouse Road as ‘absolutely ludicrous’ saying it looks like something out of Star Trek. We’ve never seen cycle lanes in space, but we can tell him that the one on Firhouse Road will serve three primary schools, one secondary school, a GAA club, a rugby club and two other sports pitches as well as providing access to the Dodder Greenway, Skate Park and Playground in Dodder Riverbank Park, not to mention the Firhouse Shopping Centre,” the I Bike Dublin said.
They continue: “It is an essential piece of infrastructure to allow people to safely access these facilities without having to rely on the private car and forms part of a comprehensive network of cycling infrastructure that South Dublin County Council is building that will be transformative for the area and will help deliver a safer, cleaner and more healthy environment for all, including people driving cars.”
On the Pat Kenny’s show, in reference to planned new traffic enforcement cameras such as red light cameras, Faughnan claimed that the cameras are “physically there” when there are only two red light cameras in place in Dublin City, and these need to be replaced before enforcement starts.
Ireland is behind the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia in terms of the use of red light cameras, in most cases by many decades. Belfast, a much smaller city than Dublin, has six active red light cameras.
Faughnan said red light running is more about city centres and talks about “occasional bad behaviour” — both of which do not apply to red light running. Data shows red light running is far from occasional behaviour and, across the world, a key safety use of red light cameras is on larger road junctions away from city centre.
I Bike Dublin said: “He consistently dismisses all proposed road safety measures that might create the merest of inconveniences for people driving. He dismisses red light cameras, a technology that has been used in other jurisdictions for decades with very positive impacts on road safety, as ‘universal camera monitoring by the state’.”
The campaigners also took issue with criticism from Faughnan for road safety groups like PARC and IRVA about Google’s sharing of speed camera locations “even though he admits that it is against the law to have a device designed to frustrate enforcement.”
Faughnan said on air that it is better than the locations of speed cameras are published for motorists to slow down. He noted that the Gardaí publish a list of speed camera locations. “The purpose of speed cameras is to slow motorists down…. so, personally, I’m very relaxed about that information being published. I don’t think it undermines enforcement,” he said.
The group added: “It’s time for Newstalk to stop presenting this nonsense as ‘expertise’. It is nothing of the sort and spreads a dangerous message about road safety and sustainable transport infrastructure that we will have real-world consequences for people on our roads.”
Plenty of new cycle lanes in Dublin are completely stupidly designed, but that doesn’t meant there shouldn’t be any.
The council should just hire a planner who’s actually ridden a bike once and focus on putting down more mileage instead of 10 yard contra-flows and barriers that get broken after 2 months.
I agree with Conor Faughnan. I cycle myself but also drive. I have no problem with cycle lanes and use them when I cycle. Butt the amount of space given to them in some places, such as the quays in Dublin, is ridiculous and certainly not justified by the number of cyclists who use them.
At peak times there’s more people cycling on the quays than those in cars — cars just take up a lot of space and are slow moving when people cycling can keep going.
Anyway, the cycle lanes on the quays are non-continuous and we’re only put in where it was relatively easy to do so without discommoding motorists too much.
One would think that all cyclists were angels. Cyclists diobeying and breaking the rules of the road are equally as dangerous and wrong as the drivers of motorised vehicles.
There is a thing called mutual respect & patience which some cyclists think doesn’t apply to them.
My first driving lesson 51 years ago, I was told the most important person on the road is the person that you can’t see. To many cyclists & drivers don’t know this or have respect & patience for other road users.
RE “One would think that all cyclists were angels.”
That’s something in your head. Nobody has said it.
RE “Cyclists diobeying and breaking the rules of the road are equally as dangerous and wrong as the drivers of motorised vehicles.”
Equally as dangerous? Thousands were killed and many more severely injured in the last decade in collisions with cars vs ~2 killed in collisions with bicycles.
“Cyclists diobeying and breaking the rules of the road are equally as dangerous and wrong as the drivers of motorised vehicles.”
That is a patently, laughably untrue statement. The most dangerous of bad cyclists poses significantly less danger than a bad driver for the astoundingly obvious reason that they carry only a tiny fraction of the kinetic energy of a heavy, fast-moving car.
This is why cars are responsible for hundreds or thousands of times more road deaths than bicycles.
It boggles the mind that there are still people arguing a false equivalence between bicycles and cars, as if the rules of the road are some sort of religious punishment that everyone has to put up with for fairness’ sake. No: the rules of the road were created because cars kept killing everybody, and they’re still killing tens of thousands worldwide every year. Yet we still get people insisting that a bad cyclist is the equivalent in risk to a bad driver. They’re not — I’d rather deal with 100 bad cyclists than a single dangerous driver.
Mr.Ginty, your reply to John Coyle is wrong. He didn’t say that someone had said it re the comment
“one would think that all cyclists are Angels”.
Now that Mr. Coyle has said it, I agree fully with him.
Take your blinkers off and take a serious look at the poor respect cyclists show to others, particularly elderly people like myself.
Regards,
Phil
Correction – the poor respect “some” cyclists show. In the same way as I experience every day the poor respect that many motorists show me as a driver, bike user or pedestrian – especially as a pedestrian. Might seems to trump right these days. That motorists seem to think it is fine to coast on through pedestrian red lights is staggering. It is getting worse and worse by the day.
Not that this should distract from the patently spurious false equivalence of the OP that people in 2 tonne cars and those on 20kg bikes are “equally as dangerous”. Yes, both can and do break the rules of the road, however, the impact of a car is exponentially more than that of a bike.
Unfortunately, there are “blinkers” on many people on our roads as well as on those discussing them.
You have said that I am wrong to say nobody has said it, yet here you are saying I need to take my blinkers off.
I would only need to take my blinkers off if I thought, “all cyclists are Angels”. I don’t.
I don’t know what this has to do with the topic at hand. I guessed that the other John/Adrian/or whoever was confused. How did you get here? Why do you think your general gripes about people you meet on the streets were relevant to the topic at hand?