After years of talk, councillors push for a refocus on traffic in East Wall

Six years ago, the council had listed East Wall as a priority area for improved traffic management, said independent Councillor Christy Burke at last week's meeting of the Central Area Committee.

Almost five years ago, councillors agreed a motion calling on officials to survey the neighbourhood to see what measures were needed. 

Today, locals are still waiting for changes, said Burke. “We have the same problems.”

In fact, they’ve more problems, he said by phone on Wednesday. Traffic and rat running at peak times have been a nightmare for decades, and now parking chaos is also in the mix, he says. 

The construction of Marshall Yards, a big apartment complex on East Road, brought with it hundreds of builders, parking at all times of the day on nearby roads, Burke said.  

Constituents complain that they are blocked into their driveways by parked cars, unable to leave, he says.

At the Central Area Committee meeting, Máire Nic Réamoinn, a council engineer, said that residents are welcome to apply for a pay and display scheme.

“We've looked at it and looked at it, and it's the only solution we can come up with,” she said. “We don't want to be removing people's parking. That's not our aim.”

She also agreed to a suggestion from committee chair Cat O’Driscoll, a Social Democrats councillor, that a meeting of different council transport units would be helpful.

A fine idea, said Nic Réamoinn. “Because a lot of the time we don't even, due to whatever communications issue, we don't always know what's going on with other teams.”

Whose space, my space

Sean McCabe rarely gets to park outside his own house on Church Road, a narrow residential road that curves away off East Road. 

He usually has to park a distance away, he said on Tuesday, stood out on the footpath.

He works night shifts. When he drives back from work at 6am or 7am, any spaces around the area are already gone, he says.

Said Burke, of the competition for parking: “You’d have builders, and some working in the offices, getting there at four or five in the morning and catnapping till eight before they start their shift.”

Caledon Road, Ravensdale Road, Boolavogue Road, Bargy Road, East Road, and Church Road. They’re all badly affected, he says. “It became out of control.”

Recently, tired after work, McCabe parked around the corner in front of his friend’s house. He was clamped, he says. “It’s very frustrating.”

The worst is coming back with a car full of kids and shopping and finding no spaces anywhere near the front door, says Tara Casey, who lives on East Road. “It’s a disaster to manage.”

At last week’s meeting of the Central Area Committee, Nic Réamoinn, the engineer with the Traffic Advisory Group (TAG), said the parking squish in the area has eased a bit.

Marshall Yards is finished, she said, so work crews are mostly gone.

There has definitely been an improvement, said Rohan Butler, owner of the East Road Café, on Tuesday afternoon.

He gestured out the door at two or three parked cars with some free space in between them. “That just wouldn’t have happened, not long ago.”

But what happens when people move into the 550 homes in Marshall Yards? said Casey, the East Road resident on Tuesday.

As the homes fill up, Casey said she and others worry that parking will spillover again.

Some locals put cones out in front of their houses to block out parking spots, she said. Sometimes it can work, sometimes it doesn’t.

Concerns over the number of car parking spaces included in new developments – and spillover of new residents parking their cars in surrounding streets and footpaths – are common across the city.

Efforts to reduce transport emissions to tackle the climate crisis – coupled with attempts to reduce construction costs – led to a change in rules several years ago, reducing requirements for parking spaces in new apartment complexes and estates.

Instead, council policy has been to encourage developers to put in cycle parking and car-share spaces, said Brendan O’Brien, a council official back in July 2019.

Marshall Yards’ planning permission includes 230 parking spaces – so less than half of apartments could get one, the others will need to go without a car, or if they have one, park elsewhere.

Of course, the development is in the city centre, within walking distance of many workplaces, shopping, and much more. For those who’d need to go further, there’s about 1,160 bicycle parking spaces, plus Connolly Station’s trains, the Luas, and buses nearby.

The Dublin City Development Plan 2022–2028 explicitly calls for a decrease in car use in the city and a move to more public transport and active travel. “Promoting modal shift to more sustainable modes is a key requirement in adapting to climate action,” it says.

Figures on car trips into the city show progress towards that goal. 

The Canal Cordon Count – which captures traffic passing over Dublin’s canals at peak times – has shown the continued gradual decline of car traffic as a share of all traffic over the past two decades, from 37 percent in 2006 to 25 percent in 2024.

But data does not show progress towards people choosing to ditch car ownership altogether.

Census figures show more households than ever in the city have at least one car that they need to store. The percentage of carless households in Dublin city fell from about 34 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2022.

A holistic view

In the past, neighbourhood transport schemes were held up as the solution to clusters of traffic issues in areas.

They were billed as a way of looking more holistically at safety challenges in areas, such as rat running or heavy vehicles.

East Wall and Cabra East were both flagged for attention in the council’s administrative Central Area, said Burke.

A neighbourhood transport scheme was agreed by the council and locals, and engineers were appointed, he said. Covid put paid to that, he said.

Then, engineers left the council for the private sector, he said. And neighbourhood schemes as envisaged then have since been dropped. 

Last May, a council spokesperson said that the schemes were gone, in the sense that they aren’t running them as they had been.

Now, an area engineer assesses all the traffic service requests that come in and if there are multiple ones for one area, they are assessed for a single traffic management solution, they said. 

“Which in effect is a neighbourhood scheme,” they said.

Searching for solutions

At the Central Area Committee meeting, Nic Réamoinn said that the council has received “an awful lot of service requests” regarding East Wall.

A pay-and-display scheme was the best option they have come up with, she said. “That will actually manage the parking on the road.”

Casey said there is a hesitancy among neighbours who worry that pay and display wouldn’t solve it, as people could still park in the same spots that they always have.

Burke says parking problems in East Wall also relate to the lack of enforcement. “They park on corners, on double yellows. They don’t care.”

Sure, he isn’t an engineer, he says, but wants to explore all options. 

What about a one-way traffic system around East Road, with no parking on both sides at certain spots which are prone to bottle-necks, he said. That might help flow, at least.

On East Road, when cars park on both sides and buses are passing up and down, traffic becomes particularly chaotic, he said.

O’Driscoll, the Social Democrat councillor, asked for Nic Réamoinn to set up a meeting with councillors, and representatives of the traffic advisory group, parking enforcement, and the active travel unit.

That would be useful, said Nic Réamoinn. “Together, then we can come up with some kind of solution or strategy for making roads safer and East Road safer.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.