What if we look at Ireland’s new Programme for Government differently? A Government source said it would be focused on “the big picture stuff”, but sustainable mobility measures, which are “local and social”, might be the biggest “big picture stuff” we have, writes Emmet Ó Briain.
Comment & Analysis: / Long read: Two important documents of interest to sustainable mobility advocates and professionals were published recently, thousands of miles apart but with direct relevance to each other. In New York, the US National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) announced the publication of its updated Urban Bikeway Design Guide. Meanwhile, last Thursday in Dublin, the new Programme for Government was released, including policy commitments on active travel.
Bloomberg describes the updated Urban Bikeway Design Guide guide as “not just a kit of parts for an individual bike lane” but “something of a political playbook for selling bike lanes to an often-sceptical public”.
Here, the new Programme for Government, under the heading of Active Travel, proposes to “review the structures and operation of the National Transport Authority (NTA) to strengthen their engagement with local authorities, communities and stakeholders” and to “ensure better collaboration by the NTA with local communities during consultation phases”.
One document provides direction for those working urgently to change how people move around US cities, so you could be forgiven for thinking that the other is seeking to qualify that ambition in Ireland.
A source involved in the recent Government formation talks was quoted as saying that “there won’t be as many cycle lanes built” because they were focusing on “big picture stuff”.
There is, of course, no contradiction between sustainable mobility and the “big picture”.
The “biggest picture” of all, climate change, requires policymakers to grasp that fact so that they can help the “often-skeptical public” to understand it too. But sometimes, even the existential threat of climate change is insufficient to make people embrace sustainable mobility infrastructure.
Whatever about the presumed disjuncture in their enthusiasm for active travel, the overlap between the two documents is a practical interest in how such infrastructure is delivered — and communicated — at a local level, for the benefit of local communities.
And it is in this emphasis on the framing of infrastructure delivery at a local level, on “playbooks” and “consultation”, the need to connect the work to broader themes, where there are opportunities to change the conversations that are prioritised so that more of the “often-sceptical public” (and lagging policymakers) might be persuaded that making our local communities better, healthier, safer, and more social is “big picture stuff” too.
Social theorist Harold Garfinkel employed a technique of “misreading” the work of other theorists for the purpose of deriving new insights from their ideas.
In that spirit, I’m taking at face value the commitment contained within the Programme for Government to “invest in dedicated infrastructure for walking and cycling, in consultation with communities and people of all abilities including older people and people with disabilities…allowing more community members to participate fully and independently.”
Which is to presume that the Government really does want to see more communities living in the type of inclusive environment that allows people of all ages and abilities to participate fully and independently, an environment involving less dependence on cars and fewer public spaces dominated by cars. And that the Government is willing to provide the resources and leadership to make it happen.
Despite the comprehensive evidence of their benefits, these Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods have become part of conspiracy-theory-fuelled “culture wars” in the UK.
The scoffing at cycle lanes in Ireland as ‘little picture’ stuff is part of the same discourse. If we want to avoid this, we have to continue to broaden the scope of our conversations and the scale of our vision for sustainable social environments beyond mere movement. And we have to be direct about the necessity of change.
It’s also worth pointing out, in the spirit of ‘local’ and ‘social’, that one of the population cohorts explicitly missing, as ever, from these discussions are children who might want to enjoy the places where they live in ways other than as a start- and end-point for journeys to school, e.g. for play.

Honesty is the best policy
The emphasis on better collaboration and stronger local engagement in the Programme for Government suggests a more communicative form of transport planning than has traditionally operated at a local level. As well as working with communities to ensure safe and inclusive local provision for all, communicating explicitly and effectively the reasons why the transition to sustainable mobility is both nationally necessary and locally beneficial is key.
I’ve written before about the folly of implying that “motornormativity” can be protected in conversations around active travel schemes. So, whether it’s public changes in road space allocation or public transport network redesigns, I think it’s important to acknowledge and explain that the motivation of these schemes is necessary change in service of a “bigger picture”.
Equally, we should be clear that, firstly, the purpose of consultation is not to ensure people can maintain their current patterns of mobility and, secondly, that consultation is not a ballot.
For this to be convincing, I think we need to continue to broaden the conversations to emphasise the benefits of active travel and sustainable mobility for local communities beyond the mere instrumentality of modal shift. Beyond even the environmental benefits or the benefits to the physical health and mental well-being of individuals, of which there are many.

Instead, in my opinion, the real “big picture stuff” for local communities is the practical, day-to-day rather than the abstract. There is no bigger picture than creating urban environments that provide greater safety for the oldest, youngest and most vulnerable members of our communities and secure their full participation in social life. The first-ever EU-wide survey on loneliness identified Ireland as the loneliest country in Europe.

We need to be honest about that too. And designing our cities and communities around provision for the car (or simply trying to accommodate them in environments that weren’t designed for them) has contributed to this.
The fundamental sociality of walking and cycling provides for and promotes social interaction and conviviality within communities. Better environments for cycling are better environments for walking. And better environments for walking are better environments for social interaction.
The updated Urban Bikeway Design Guide touches on similar themes to these.
Network effects

One of my takeaways from the Guide was the importance of a more global perspective to the design of a bike network. As most schemes would intend, the Guide instructs us to consider bike infrastructure within the context of the entire streetscape and to focus on integration with other sustainable modes of transport, including public transport and walking. Doing so increases safety and accessibility for all.

For many reasons (some good and some not so great), our network plans for active travel in Ireland necessarily reflect the instrumental-rationalist priorities of efficiency, throughput and scale, what Beth Popp Berman calls “the economic style of reasoning”.
Of course, if we make policy on this basis, then we evaluate it on that basis too, meaning that a long-distance (cycle) route for commuters will be prioritised above local network (walking and cycling) provision, as their value for money is easier to demonstrate. (Historically, there were alternative lenses through which we could make and assess policy, things like justice and equality, but I’ll leave that for another day!).
Intuitively, the idea of building dense local networks appeals to me more than concentrating on commuter journeys, mostly for reasons relating to liveability. Local networks facilitate the type of short everyday trips that are vital for developing a culture of active travel within communities, particularly amongst families and children and older people.
In its recent submission to the United Kingdom’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Cycling and Walking Active Travel and Social Justice Inquiry, Kidical Mass London, the advocacy group for children’s cycling, argued:
“We believe the solution to exclusion of children and families from cycling is relatively simple. Wherever high-quality safe cycling infrastructure is provided we see huge increases in children cycling. Highways Authorities need to provide suitable infrastructure in dense networks of safe routes and a reduction in exclusion of children will naturally follow. This facilitates cycling as a viable mode for families transporting children across a range of local activities in a given area: to school; to clubs; to friends; to leisure activities etc.”
And it is this type of movement within local networks that I think appeals more to local communities. Again, there are practical reasons why we don’t do this. Cultural shifts are difficult to measure in the short term, and if you’re being judged on the efficiency imperative inherent in “bang for your buck” (or km per €), then building tricky local schemes in areas that weren’t even originally designed for cars probably isn’t where you would start.
They’re inherently more expensive, thus more resource-intensive and on that basis are dispreferred. A focus on the local and social requires a reframing of priorities.
We know that other places that have successfully managed the shift to sustainable modes see the importance of dense local networks to a culture of active travel. Mostly, regardless of where you live, the majority of people’s trips are local.
The Urban Cycling Institute’s Marco te Brömmelstroet points out that, in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam, walking and cycling account for 64% of all local trips, more in some areas, and that “This is where the largest potential lies for other cities as well!”.

So, were we to reprioritise local contexts and local communities, were we to evaluate policy decisions on the basis of equity and accessibility rather than pure economics, we might find that there is merit in helping people to make the decision to get the bus, to walk and cycle, or play on the streets where they live, just as policymakers went out of their way to make it easy (and now necessary) for people to “jump in their car” whenever they wanted to go somewhere.
By doing so, we might even find that we are creating convivial environments where people want to dwell and linger, something that US pedestrians no longer do, walking faster and socialising less.
An emphasis on the “local and social” may help policymakers to consider the virtues of immobility, against a lens which presumes that few want to stay still and designs environments accordingly. What would an environment that supports children’s right to play in the streets where they live look like?
“Children are part of our society, and we need to take that into account when we build our environment. It’s always so excruciating to me to see people in New York City with their children doing what I did when I raised my kid here: yelling at them constantly, “No! No! No, don’t!” Because the way that they move naturally, which would be safe in a natural human environment, is not safe in this environment” —Sarah Goodyear
It’s important to note that local networks support, rather than undermine, the delivery of higher-impact, higher-volume corridors.
Quiet Streets: Dialling Down the Volume on Mobility
A shift in emphasis to the local and the social would also be timely, given other current mobility initiatives. In Dublin, for example. Both Fingal and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Councils have recently introduced “Quiet Street” programmes, low traffic residential streets which are designed to give priority to pedestrians and cyclists.
The Bus Connects program also plans using Quiet Streets as alternative cycle routes in Dublin City. These alternative cycle routes are planned for residential streets with low traffic, which will allow cyclists to share the carriageway with other vehicles where road widths do not allow them to use the Core Bus Corridors.
An opportunity exists here to aim for more than mere traffic calming and lean into the placemaking aspects of such interventions, as Dún Laoghaire Rathdown did with their Seafield Estate scheme, which involved a considerable redesign of road space within the estate as well as substantial landscaping features and play provision.
Again, leading on Quiet Street interventions takes resources, but as with active travel generally, the evidence for their benefits is there if we have the national leadership to fund them and local leadership to advocate for their realisation.
The effects of noise on different organ systems and on mental health

The UK’s Coalition for Healthy Streets and Active Travel summary of evidence from low-traffic neighbourhoods shows they: reduce road traffic injuries, reduce crime, reduce air pollution, and are more equitable and more popular than the current environments we live in:
With much lower traffic volumes children can play out, neighbours catch up, air pollution is lower, and walking and cycling are the natural choice for everyday journeys.
But, ultimately, Quiet Streets are about much more than mobility (and even health); they’re social streets that benefit local communities in less discrete ways than the volume of trips or kilometres travelled. They’re more than alternative cycle routes.
The small stuff of children playing out, neighbours chatting, and day-to-day “vision of the city as a series of small-scale interactions” can be the bigger picture.
Conceiving this work only in terms of cycle lanes and modal shifts misses the point that these are interventions that have the capacity to deliver much, much broader benefits: quiet streets are bike streets and bike streets are safe streets, and safe streets are play streets (but we need leadership on play streets too!):

Bringing it all together
The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets out a template for developing a Bike Network Plan with 3 different levels of action under 6 headings: People, Policy, Engagement, Planning, Design & Delivery, and Evaluation.
Level 1 of the Policy heading, titled “Shared Understanding”, tells cities to “establish shared values and a vision for a bikeable city”. For the most part, we’ve done that.
At a local level, Dublin City Council’s Active Travel Programme Office have a mission to: “develop a safer, inclusive and sustainable ‘walk-wheel-cycle’ network; enhance the quality of life by improving access, connectivity and sustainable mobility for all, whilst reducing transport-related carbon emissions; [and] to support the reprioritisation of road space away from private vehicles towards sustainable modes of transport.” This is all legitimately “big picture stuff”.
So, we have the vision — modal shift — and we have the motivation and values underpinning the vision — sustainability, broadly conceived, and inclusivity. If, as the Programme for Government implies, our levels of engagement or collaboration are failing us in our ambition to achieve this vision, then it is up to the Government to fund active travel sufficiently to do the scale and quality of work that the “big picture” mission deserves.
To this end, from a communications perspective, I like the emphasis in the Urban Bikeway Design Guide on the use of local networks for building momentum and maintaining progress e.g. outreach, local connections, and advocacy.
Under the heading “Engagement”, the Guide cites the use of “Trusted Partners”, advocacy groups and community organisations who build connections with residents, and “Expanded Capacity”, community members and organizations to share knowledge, to build support, harnessing the enthusiasm and lived experience of communities where projects have been successfully completed as advocates for newer schemes.
We still tend, normatively, to conceive of transport infrastructure delivery instrumentally, so all of this (consultation, communications, collaboration, evaluation, etc) is seen, in many people’s minds, to take time and people away from the design and delivery tasks that constitute the real work.
Reframing it all as the fundamental task it is, a vital socio-cultural intervention into our day-to-day mobility and the liveability of our local environments, may help us to appreciate its import for local communities so that a broader vision can be pursued collaboratively and supported.
Thus, if the Government wants “stronger engagement” and “better collaboration” on active travel, they need to provide the leadership at the national level to commit resources to this work and empower leadership at the local level too. Which, ultimately, is the recurring sticking point.
What’s left?
To the extent that existing plans for active travel or sustainable mobility remain unimplemented or under threat, challenges to progress mostly hinge on political will.
And this is one of the more frustrating aspects of advocating for sustainable mobility and active travel. As we’ve seen above, all the evidence for designing our environments around walking and cycling is in. And every bit of additional evidence just provides more support for ideas that we know a) work and b) are necessary. The policies are in place. There’s even popular support for more action.
A recent Ireland Thinks poll showed that 55% of Irish voters, including 59% of Fianna Fáil voters and 55% of Fine Gael voters — want the new government to do more than the last government on climate change.

Cynically, we could assume that these demands are largely rhetorical, given that the outgoing government included the Green Party, a party explicitly concerned with climate action, which the electorate largely decided not to re-elect. But the results still say something about the current Overton window.
More specifically, the 2023 Sustrans Walking and Cycling Index for the Dublin Metropolitan Area shows huge public support for the type of active travel initiatives that enhance the “local and social”:

It’s not just the public. A recent survey of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce reported that 82% of their members want the new Government to “prioritise investment in public transport and active travel”.

Anecdotally, locally, one of the things you notice from the experience of active travel infrastructure delivery is that even wide opposition to the development of a scheme generally becomes popular support about five minutes after it’s finished — echoing international evidence on this phenomenon.
Other examples of similar transitions internationally can also provide a template for us in transforming our cities. Returning to where we started a few thousand words ago, Janette Sadik-Khan, the former transportation commissioner in New York and NACTO’s current Chairperson, gave a talk recently in Dublin on Rethinking Our Streets, talking about her experience on reallocating 180 acres of road space in New York to use for walking and cycling. The three emphases I took away from it were the following:
- The importance of place — it takes more than cycle lanes to transform our streets, placemaking is key.
- The importance of political leadership — you need someone to take responsibility for it (New York had Michael Bloomberg).
- The importance of action — you need to just get it done.
Which is what we should do. Get it done.
Whatever about an “often-skeptical public” that people worry about when discussing new schemes, it’s often lagging policymakers and politicians that stand in the way of action. And, for them, the words of Mikhail Gorbachev who apparently told Erich Honecker when he moved too slowly to accept reform in East Germany: “Life punishes those who come too late”, may be prophetic.
There’s no turning back on sustainable mobility.
PS: How far we’ve come

- The new Urban Bikeway Design Guide is the third edition of the Guide and double the length of the 2012 edition, reflecting just how much conversations around sustainable mobility have moved on in the last decade, both technically and culturally. Our technical understanding of the challenges involved in reallocating road space in favour of sustainable modes has advanced through greater research and experience, and so the quality of infrastructure has generally improved. Locally, the Clontarf-City Centre route (I cycled the long way from Donnycarney to Phibsborough at the weekend just so I could enjoy it on the way home!) and Royal Canal Greenway schemes in Dublin are examples of that. (I would honestly think the photo above was an unrealistic computer-generated mock-up if I hadn’t taken the picture myself, mere minutes after this stretch opened to the public).
- And you can judge for yourself just how much progress we’ve made in Ireland since the last time the Urban Bikeway Design Guide was updated by reading comments on this Journal.ie article on bike lanes from 2012.
- Or what previous generations of transport planners had in mind for the Royal Canal…a motorway!

Emmet Ó Briain is a professional social researcher (www.quiddity.ie) specialising in discourse analysis and ethnography for policy and also a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture, Building & the Environment in TU Dublin researching the accountability of active travel delivery.
A version of this article was originally posted on LinkedIn, you can also follow Emmet Ó Briain on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Magnificent piece, thank you. Love the idea of consciously ‘misreading’ – accepting at face value – the statements inthose documents.
Great piece by Emmet.
This is key:
“Equally, we should be clear that, firstly, the purpose of consultation is not to ensure people can maintain their current patterns of mobility and, secondly, that consultation is not a ballot.”
This message has to be got across to those Cllrs and political parties who traditionally oppose active travel measures.