Council should look, again, at London-style system to force companies to use safer trucks in the city, councillors urge

Dublin City Council should look at bringing in a new system to force companies to use safer trucks in the city, councillors agreed on Monday.

“The most dangerous vehicles on our streets are heavy goods vehicles,” said Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham, introducing his emergency motion at the council’s April monthly meeting.

“As any pedestrian or cyclist knows, often drivers of these vehicles can’t see the pedestrians and cyclists around them,” Cunningham said at the meeting.

His motion proposed requiring heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) to meet requirements for better “direct vision” – how well the driver can see out of their cab through windows – before being allowed to operate in the city.

He pointed to London’s Direct Vision Standard, which requires this – or, if a truck doesn’t meet this requirement, that it be retrofitted with cameras outside feeding images to screens in the cab, to compensate.

This is not the first time there's been a proposal like this for Dublin.

Back in 2020, Brendan O’Brien, the council’s head of traffic then (and now), said it was looking to introduce stricter safety measures for HGVs, similar to London’s.

It’s not clear what happened to that effort back then. The council hasn’t responded yet to a query sent yesterday afternoon asking that.

At the meeting on Monday, O’Brien said that “the broad thrust of the motion is really welcome, you know we do want to make sure that the trucks that are used in our city are as safe as possible”.

But he also raised several complications to Cunningham’s proposal and, in the end, councillors agreed to support the motion and – on O’Brien’s suggestion – to send it to committee for more discussion.

The danger

Cunningham’s motion said the death of Johnny Santos Xavier De Abreu recently “reminds us how vulnerable cyclists are, and how great a risk is posed – to cyclists and pedestrians – by Heavy Goods Vehicles”.

Santos died on 1 April following a collision with a cement truck when he was cycling at the junction of Middle Abbey Street and O’Connell Street.

Back in 2020, when the council was previously looking at ways to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe from HGVs, the discussion mentioned the death of Neeraj Jain.

Jain had died when the driver of another cement truck hit him while he was cycling in November of the previous year, near St James’s Hospital.

The Director of Public Prosecutions did not direct a prosecution of the driver of the truck, but the coroner declined to rule the death “accidental”.

At the time, there were protests, including a “die-in” by dozens of cyclists, outside the Dáil, calling for better cycling infrastructure.

Ciarán Ferrie, on behalf of the cyclist group iBike Dublin, wrote that, “We demand that the killing of Neeraj Jain marks a turning point – and that those responsible for safety on our streets ensure that no more cyclists are killed.”

However, the injuries and deaths have continued.

For example, on Saturday 8 April 2023, just after midnight, a woman was cycling east along the north quays and stopped for a light at O’Connell Street, next to an HGV.

When the light changed, and they both set off again, the HGV turned left across her path and ran over her, she said, in a report to collisiontracker.ie.

“I was in hospital for months,” she said later. “I couldn’t walk for six to seven months.”

In November of that same year, Josilaine Ribeiro died after being hit by an HGV while cycling at the Dolphin’s Barn Bridge.

The proposed safety improvement

At the moment, HGVs with five or more axles must have a permit to enter restricted areas of Dublin city – mostly the city centre – during certain hours.

Cunningham, at Monday’s meeting, proposed that the council should use this existing system to enforce higher safety standards.

Under the scheme he was proposing, when someone applied for one of these permits, they would have to put in the make, model and year of their vehicle.

Based on that, the system would know how good the “direct vision” on the HGV was, and if it didn’t meet the standard, it wouldn’t get a permit to come into the city.

The system would kick in next year, requiring at least a one-star direct-vision rating, with the minimum rising one star a year to reach five stars in 2031.

He pointed to Transport for London’s (TfL’s) Direct Vision Standard as a model. TfL has said that programme has made the city safer.

“In 2023, there was a 62 per cent reduction in the number of vulnerable road users killed by an HGV, compared to the 2017-19 baseline,” it said in 2024.

Seconding Cunningham’s motion, Green Party Councillor Janet Horner said she’d previously suggested something similar for Dublin.

When she’d talked to Brendan O’Brien about it, he’d pointed her to the central government, she said, who pointed her back to the council.

Horner told the story of a friend of hers who’d been knocked down on the quays by an HGV and suffered life-changing injuries.

“It is urgent that we deal with it and I hope that this week when we see someone losing their lives in the street, we will not again be found wanting when it comes to the opportunity to actually improve safety for everybody,” Horner said.

Into the weeds

At the meeting on Monday evening, O’Brien, the council’s head of traffic, welcomed the motion, but raised several issues.

For starters, the scheme Cunningham was proposing would not cover all trucks in all parts of the city, O’Brien said.

Because the permitting system only covers trucks with five or more axles, so smaller ones wouldn’t be covered.

Also, it’s only for the city centre, really, and only for 7am to 7pm (except in Sandymount, where it’s 24 hours a day).

“So anything that’s four axle, three axle, two axle or anything that’s coming to the city at nighttime is not taken into account to the permit system,” he said.

However, Cunningham said that haulage companies would still be incentivised to buy trucks with better direct vision.

It wouldn’t make sense for them to buy certain trucks to operate in the city centre, and others outside that area – certain ones to operate in the day, and others at night, he said.

O’Brien continued: “There is a number of EU legislation requiring for example the blind spot detection to be in all trucks, to be in all HGVs from 2024, and that is perhaps more of a mechanism that we need to look at.”

Indeed, the EU brought in a 2019 regulation that, among other things, requires manufacturers to improve visibility on trucks if they’re going to operate on roads in the EU.

Since 2024, they’ve been required to have “blind spot information systems” – cameras basically, transmitting to screens in the cab images of what’s happening in trucks’ blind spots.

But that’s “indirect vision”, not “direct vision”, says Green Party Councillor, and transport spokesperson, Feljin Jose. “Cameras are an improvement but it's not a substitute for actually being able to see around you.”

The same EU regulation requires manufacturers to improve direct vision from the cabs of their trucks – but not until 2029.

Ireland’s Road Safety Strategy for 2021 to 2030 included among proposed “high impact actions”, was to “prioritise lifesaving technologies” including “direct vision for commercial vehicles”.

That was in the strategy’s “action plan” for the first part of that period, 2021 to 2024. But in the more recent action plan, for 2025 to 2027, it no longer appears, Jose, the Green Party councillor, pointed out at Monday’s meeting.

Neither the Department of Transport nor the RSA have responded to queries sent on Tuesday about why this is.

View from the cab

Eugene Drennan, deputy vice president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, said on Thursday that he didn’t think Cunningham’s plan would really work.

A lot of HGV drivers coming into the city are coming from abroad, and may not even know there’s a requirement for a permit to drive into the city centre, Drennan said.

“A lot of others just come in and deliver and go,” he said.

What if the new safety requirements were added to the current permitting system?

“For the most part, they’d ignore it,” Drennan said. “Who would enforce it anyway?”

But would improved direct vision on HGVs make the roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists?

Lots of the HGVs coming into Dublin already meet a high standard, because they also operate in London, Drennan said.

They have cameras to show drivers what’s happening in their vehicles’ blind spots, Drennan said.

Adding more cameras and screens could actually become a problem, he said. “There’s too much to watch, too much going on, it distracts the driver,” he said.

What about bringing in vehicles with designs – windows down low on the sides, for example – that let drivers see more directly, eliminating blind spots?

Those would leave drivers dangerously exposed when parking up at night to sleep on long hauls, Drennan said.

The best thing that could be done to keep cyclists safer on Dublin’s streets, Drennan said, is to bring in a mandatory system of education for them, teaching them the rules of the road, and how to keep safe.

And also an aspect to continuing education for drivers that emphasises taking extra care to look out for cyclists, Drennan said.

That’s better than new regulations, he said. “Regulations that’ll be semi-enforced, half-enforced, it’s really not much use having it,” he said.

Back to committee

At the meeting on Monday, O’Brien suggested sending Cunningham’s idea to the council’s Mobility and Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee for further consideration.

“I do think it’s one of those items that we’d really like to see some progress on,” he said.

“Perhaps the more appropriate way to deal with this is to actually bring it to Mobility SPC and to actually decide what we can do,” he said.

Councillors agreed to back the motion, and to send it to the committee for further consideration.

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