Despite repeated complaints, a stretch of James’s Street remains hazardous for cyclists

Heading out of town along James’s Street, approaching St James's Hospital, the space for people to cycle suddenly becomes very, very narrow.

The painted-on cycle lane disappears as the Luas tracks coming up the hill from Heuston Station join James’s Street. 

Then all that’s left for people to cycle in is a sliver of bumpy road with periodic drainage grates, between the footpath to the left and the tram tracks to the right.

On Monday afternoon, a Deliveroo rider navigating this gutter on his bike nudged ever so slightly out into the lane of traffic, likely to avoid a portion of seriously uneven road surfacing underneath his tyres.

The car approaching from behind gives him a warning beep.

Minutes earlier, Andrew McGowan was cycling along the same spot. “It’s really bad there,” he says, gesturing to the road.

“It just forces cyclists up onto the footpath,” he says.

At that exact moment, another cyclist approaches and mounts the footpath, barely slowing as they do.

This short stretch of James’s Street has been flagged as hazardous for cyclists again and again over the years. 

Yet plans to resurface the road – to make it even and smooth, which would make it easier for people to keep their bikes in control and on track while squeezing through this section – have yet to materialise. 

And plans to run a BusConnects corridor through do not include a fix for cyclists to this section of James’s Street, instead telling them not to cycle on it – go around on smaller streets instead.

Concerns

People have been reporting this stretch as a hazard at least as far back as 2016, and as recently as January 2025 on collisiontracker.ie.

"There is no space to cycle safely. Being forced to cycle along LUAS tracks, with traffic coming from behind & beside is a hazard,” a report that month said.

"Cyclists then mount the footpath, putting pedestrians in danger. When they attempt to rejoin the road, they can encounter cars turning into St. James,” it said.

It’s a death trap, says Peter Laurent, who works in the hospital and cycles to work.

Laurent also commented on the Collision Tracker last year, about the dodgy cycle lane.

He tends to cycle further out on the road, in between the Luas tracks, he said on Wednesday, on the phone.

“Just to kind of get past it because the side part, between the track and the pavement is so bumpy that you could lose control of the bike,” Laurent says.

The alternative is to cycle on the pavement, he says – but the last thing he wants to do is hit one of his hospital colleagues while they’re out grabbing a coffee. “It wouldn’t be a good look.”

There is no way that vehicles are able to give the 1.5-meter distance between themselves and cyclists, as they are expected to do, he says.

He suggests that painting a cycle track on the pavement might be something of a fix.

Improvements?

In April 2024, the appalling condition of the road surfacing along the length of cycle track by the entrance to St James’s Hospital was flagged by then-Councillor Máire Devine of Sinn Féin – now a TD.

She asked the council what plans there were for its maintenance and extension.

The council’s Road Maintenance section had agreed to a full resurfacing of that section of road, she was told at the time.

Devine was then told that a time frame for the works would be forwarded to her, she said by phone on Thursday. To date, that time frame has still not arrived, she says. 

It might be, she said, that that roadway is now thought of as the responsibility of the National Transport Authority (NTA), and its BusConnects project.

As part of BusConnects, the ongoing, years-long rejig of the city’s bus network, there’s a plan to make some changes to this stretch of roadway.

That’s part of the Liffey Valley to City Centre core bus corridor, a €274 million, three-year project meant to upgrade bus lanes, cycle routes, and pedestrian facilities along 9.2 kilometres of roadway.  

The project has planning permission, the National Transport Authority has appointed a contractor, construction was due to start this month, out near Liffey Valley – and take about three years.

But the drawings for the project do not show improvements to the cycle lane along this stretch between Basin Street Lower and the entrance to James’s Hospital.

The inspector at An Coimisiún Pleanála who examined the proposed plans for the route before the commission granted permission for it to go ahead, noted this.

“Where roadway widths cannot facilitate cyclists without significant impact on bus priority, alternative cycle routes are to be explored for short distances,” the inspector wrote in his report. 

“Constraints at James’s Street resulted in a quiet street route option along Newington Lane, Basin View, St James’s Avenue, Grand Canal Place and Echlin Street,” the report says – and the map shows.

Basically, the idea is to tell people to just not cycle down this bit of James’s Street, instead taking smaller streets around a kind of back way.

The Kilmainham Inchicore Network, objected to this, according to the inspector’s report, saying that it’s “Not realistic that cyclist will take detour along Echlin Street – designated cycle track needs to be provided on James’s Street.”

Not only that, but the project was proposing no traffic calming along the back way to make it nicer and safer to cycle along, the Dublin Cycling Campaign had pointed out, the inspector’s report said.

But the inspector said he didn’t think this was necessary. “I would be satisfied that traffic calming along these streets is unnecessary because of the low traffic volumes utilising them,” he said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.