Danger for people who cycle: a junction near Heuston Station

On Thursday about 10am, a woman in a white coat cycled north across the Liffey on the Frank Sherwin Bridge, and turned right along the quays towards town.

It was a bit of a wet morning, Heuston Station receding behind her, and the Floozie in the Jacuzzi reclining in the park in front of her.

She had her head on a swivel, and the people driving vehicles around her were watching out for her too.

The cars turning left into Parkgate Street opened a gap for her to slip through. And the cars coming straight along Parkgate Street onto Wolfe Tone Quay through the yield sign yielded and let her cross and thread her way into the cycle lane on the far side.

It all went fine. But bad things do happen here, from time to time. There’s a small cluster of four reports here on the Active Travel Collision Tracker map – which people who experience or witness hazards or collisions can use to record what happened.

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Stephen Fitzpatrick reported that on 26 February 2024 about 9am he was taking the same route as the woman in white when a person driving a car in the bus lane from Parkgate Street into town through this intersection failed to yield.

“I had to break hard. I fell off my bike,” Fitzpatrick said by phone on Thursday. “It was in the middle of the junction in front of cars that had stopped.”

Cornelia Raftery cycles often but was driving her car through the same yield sign on 15 June 2022 when, despite her best efforts to look every which way at once, she didn’t see a person on a bike crossing in front of her car until the last moment.

“I braked hard but I just touched her. She was okay, she tipped over and fell on the ground but she was okay. I felt terrible,” Raftery said. “The whole junction layout is dangerous.”

Dublin City Council hasn’t responded to queries sent 4 April asking whether it sees this intersection as dangerous, and whether there are any plans to make changes to it. But local Green Party Councillor Janet Horner says it needs improvements.

“I’ve heard a lot of people saying that that junction is a nightmare to navigate on a bike so it doesn’t surprise me that there is a cluster there,” she said by WhatsApp on Sunday. “I think the junction needs a redesign.”

Complex

Oisín Ó hAlmhain, who lives in Inchicore and works in town, says he goes through this intersection once or twice a week usually.

The thing about the junction, as a cyclist heading north across the bridge and turning right onto Wolfe Tone Quay to go into town, is that it’s just quite complicated.

If you’re in the bollard-protected cycle lane on the left side of the bridge, you’ve got to be looking out for drivers behind you to your right who might be turning left into Parkgate Street – across your planned route.

At the same time you’ve got to be looking forward and to the left to see if drivers in the bus or car lane are going to go through the yield sign and hit you.

“So you are looking for cars both left and right, often moving at speed and not always indicating,” says Horner, the Green Party councillor.

By phone on Monday, Ó hAlmhain called the junction “one of those perfect storms of bad design and bad motorist behaviour”.

On a Friday morning last month, 15 March, about 8am, he was going through the junction when he saw a person in yellow and their bicycle lying on the ground.

A car that looked like it’d been coming from Parkgate Street was stopped, with its hazards on. “I didn’t stop as others were looking after them,” he reported on the Active Travel Collision Tracker.

Raftery also pointed to the complex, uncontrolled nature of the intersection as a reason it is hazardous.

Like many junctions across the city, “This junction leaves cyclists to take all the risks to get where they are going,” she says.

She was driving from Phoenix Park towards town on that June day back in 2022, she said. “I cycle and drive so I’m very aware of cyclists,” she said.

Raftery clocked a woman cycling north across the bridge, but thought she was headed left into Parkgate Street, she said.

“I was coming through the yield so I slowed but didn’t stop, and the cyclist shot across the quays and right in front of me – now, she didn’t do anything wrong, but I had looked and thought she was turning so I then looked forward and headed out through the yield sign,” she said.

She says she reported the collision to the Gardaí – and also to the council. Since then, the council coloured the surface of the cycle lane red, she says. But they didn’t fundamentally change it.

“They said they were holding off because they had some bike infrastructure project coming,” she said. “You’re holding off on some project that’ll be five years down the line and it’s dangerous now.”

How to improve it

Although the council hasn’t replied to a query about its plans for the intersection, a map of active travel projects on its website says there is a plan.

Or at least there was one back in 2022 when that information was last updated, according to the map.

At that time, the junction was included in the “Liffey Cycle Route S 4”, which was in “Design and Consultation” with delivery set for “Post 2027”.

Bad news on that though, says Horner, the Green Party councillor.“Unfortunately the permanent Liffey Cycle route is paused indefinitely under the new Active Travel team, who have decided that other schemes are their priority,” she says.

“So I think this junction should be reexamined in isolation because I don’t think it will work to wait for the permanent scheme,” she said.

What could be done to make the junction safer in the meantime?

“The yield sign is half the problem,” says Raftery

“The one thing that struck me was that there was a yield sign, which was surprising,” says Fitzpatrick.

“I think it should be a stop sign,” says Ó hAlmhain.