Why does Dublin City Centre feel more dangerous to cycle in than many suburban areas?

Comment & Analysis: One reason that the Dublin City Centre feels more dangerous cycling than suburban roads is that on most routes, it’s hard to avoid one of the city’s several ‘gyratory’ systems, where one-way roads circle around buildings and squares, including Parnell Square, Custom House, and the gyratory, which goes from the quays to College Green via D’Olier Street, College Street, and Westmoreland Street.

These were built for car capacity at a time when those planning traffic movements were only concerned with traffic flow. Now they are left as monuments to failed projects and are significant barriers to cycling, but few attempts have been made to make them safer or more attractive to those outside of vehicles.

Some minor improvements have been made around Dublin’s gyratories, but progress is mostly way behind where the city should be. For example, on Parnell Square, you can now cycle northbound up the east side of the square to avoid the madness of the south and west sides. But there’s nothing in any other direction.

There is also a vague vision to change the area around Custom House, although it’s not clear if there is enough will or vision to provide both space for a plaza and space for cycling all the way around the landmark building.

This is in stark contrast to London, where a policy of removing or redesigning gyratories is in place, and steady progress is being made on that task.

Camden Street/Harcourt Street gyratory

Last week, this website called for a quick review of the permanent Sandyford to City Centre active travel route.

One reason the project should be reviewed is its scope — weirdly, it does not include the Camden Street/Harcourt Street gyratory, which can be one of the most nail-biting parts of cycling from the suburbs around the M50 to the city centre.

This one-way system circles from the south end of Camden Street onto Charlotte Way, then to the south end of Harcourt Street and to Harcourt Road, where it returns to Camden Street.

Like many projects in Dublin City, the Sandyford to City Centre route has been planned for many years. When Dublin City hosted the international Velo-City conference focused on cycling, this website reported that images from the conference gave a “glimpse of the long-awaited Dame St to Ranelagh and Clonskeagh cycle route upgrade.”

Fast forward another six years and the long-awaited project is still in its design stage, and the project has been cut off from the city centre core. The NTA’s revised Greater Dublin Area Cycle Network Plan weirdly removed the primary route nature of the route north of Adelaide Road.

Some core city centre streets, such as South William Street, were included in the project. Understandably, there’s a good reason for South William to be removed from this project — faster progress has been made on the street, at least to reduce traffic.

But while faster progress has been made to make the street car-lite and generally better, Dublin City Council has dragged its heels in making any efforts to make cycling northbound on South William legal and legible.

This is a systematic issue with the council, which can also be seen on the northside where, on Capel Street, cycling both ways was promised but never delivered along the full length of the street and out onto the quays. Making Parliament Street car-free is key to getting it right, but some progress could be made in advance.

And while it might have been a good idea to remove South William from the route and the project, there’s no good reason that the project should not have included Harcourt Street around the Luas stop and connections to/from Camden Street and Hatch Street.

This is where higher-level route and project planning are detached from reality, leaving project teams with their hands tied. It’s yet another example of planning in the abstract and divorced from reality.

What is less understandable is the exclusion of the Camden Street/Harcourt Street ‘gyratory’ (pictured on Google Earth below).

Here’s how the Sandyford to City Centre route stops short of the core city centre:

Maybe somebody somewhere has a plan for how people in the city centre will get to the start of the Sandyford to City Centre route without mixing it up with traffic on the gyratory but, if they have, I hope it’s better than what’s planned for going into the city centre.

Here’s the Sandyford to City Centre drawings combined with the BusConnects drawings:

To get from (A) the end of the Sandyford route to (B) Harcourt Street northbound people cycling will be faced with up to 5 or 6 red lights (the 6th at the end):

And while one-way systems were in the past set up for car capacity, nobody seems to be thinking of how the planned Dublin-style protection junctions or the planned narrow cycle tracks on Camden St would be able to support the flow of bicycles from two primary cycle routes.

And nobody seems to care that shared crossing, which mixes people walking and cycling, are not suitable for busy city centre areas:

When people dismiss the idea of two-way cycle paths because of fears around the possible delays at switchover points, they need to look at the significance of time savings two-way paths can have over designs like the above.

It has been said that for the infrastructure part of BusConnects to make sense, cycling capacity needs to be a strong element of the project. The extra bus capacity alone would not be worth the expenditure and energy needed to progress the project. But there’s no sign of a focus on cycling capacity unless it’s happening quietly with some radical changes at the detailed design stages.

Cycling still seems to be an afterthought in BusConnects’ designs.

The worrying thing is that nobody seems concerned. Politicians supportive of cycling and sustainable transport campaigners were too focused on countering the opposition to BusConnects to make their support conditional.

There’s nothing inevitable about a cycling-friendly city. And when it comes to city centres, even in most Dutch cities, suburban areas are more cycling-friendly.

In Dutch city centres where mistakes were made 30 or 40 years ago, they are only now fixing or have only recently fixed those issues. A large issue for any place where cycling is growing is a lack of capacity available in what has been built, making the infrastructure less safe and less comfortable.

And the Dutch are generally far better at accepting and fixing mistakes — once BusConnects or other active travel street changes are finished, there will be little appetite for digging streets up again adjustments.