Maybe it’s time to put in bollards or something part-way along Kilmainham Lane, to stop drivers cutting through, says Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon.
Kilmainham Lane – the high road, home to the Old Royal Oak pub – is pretty narrow in places, not wide enough for two cars to pass each other in without one pulling in.
With a leafy hedge separating the road from the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s grassy grounds on one side, and a row of low cottages on the other, a stretch of it feels more like a country lane than a city street.
But for drivers it’s an appealing way to bypass the low road through this part of the city – the route along James’s Street, Mount Brown and Old Kilmainham – which is often clogged with traffic.
So the lane gets busy and loud and smoggy as commuters stream through it at peak hours, especially midweek evenings. It’s an issue residents have been raising concerns about, and which a council engineer said late last year the council is not inclined to make changes to tackle.
Said Sinn Féin Councillor Máire Devine said, last Thursday: “It’s like they’re too busy with all the other changes happening around the city and they’ll deal with it when it gets unbearable.”
Now some local residents are concerned that the situation is going to get even worse.
A BusConnects corridor approved in December is due to go in along the low road. The National Transport Authority (NTA), which is behind the BusConnects corridor, said as part of its planning application that it “will not result in additional trip generation on the surrounding road network”.
But some local residents and local councillors say the changes will make the low road even less appealing for drivers than it is now, probably pushing more of them up onto Kilmainham Lane.
A planned “bus gate” – rules restricting private cars, to make way for buses – on Mount Brown “obviously will divert traffic onto other roads”, says Aidan Waterstone, who lives on Kilmainham Lane. “Then this issue will have to be addressed.”
In December, An Bord Pleanála approved the Liffey Valley to City Centre bus corridor – part of the BusConnects redesign of the city’s bus network.
The plan includes “a substantial increase in the level of bus priority provided along the corridor, including the provision of additional lengths of bus lane resulting in improved journey time reliability”, according to a description in the planning application.
Footpaths and cycle lanes will also be upgraded along the route, the document says. Although the board’s inspector, reviewing the scheme, criticised the designs’ lack of ambition when it came to cycle lanes.
“Cyclists take up little room, yet only 68% of the route in both directions has segregated cycle tracks,” he wrote in his report.
That corridor runs through Kilmainham, along Old Kilmainham, Mount Brown and James’ Street.
Although, the inspector says, “There are no segregated cycle tracks along Sarsfield Road, Grattan Crescent, Emmet Road, Old Kilmainham, Mount Brown and parts of James’s Street.”
The reason for that is that in Old Kilmainham and Mount Brown the roadway is too narrow, with buildings on either side which block expansion, his report says
So not only will there be no segregated cycle tracks through this section, but it will also have to use a so-called “bus gate” to keep buses flowing through that corridor and try to keep them from getting caught in private vehicle traffic.
“A bus gate is a short length of road that is exclusive to buses, taxis, cyclists and emergency vehicles,” the board inspector’s report says.
In this case, the bus gate would be a somewhat complicated system of restrictions, blocking cars from driving a certain segment going eastbound in the mornings, and going westbound in the evenings.
“General traffic is directed by signage to divert in other directions,” the inspector’s report says.
This will push more through traffic onto the Kilmainham Lane-Bow Lane corridor, says Devine, the Sinn Féin councillor. “It’s a crazy situation.”
While some locals believe these changes will mean more traffic on Kilmainham Lane, the NTA’s Transport Impact Assessment Report, part of its planning application for the scheme, says it won’t.
Instead, “it will reduce general traffic volumes due to the projected modal shift from car to sustainable modes of transport, given the proposed implementation of improved bus, cycle and walking facilities along the direct study area”, the report says.
It’s unclear so far when construction might start or how long it will take, but it is likely to be years before the changes are put in place.
In his report, the An Bord Pleanála inspector sounds concerned about the potential for the success of the new bus corridor’s design from Emmet Road in Inchicore to James’s Street in the Liberties.
Buses will be squeezed in with private vehicle traffic and cyclists and pedestrians, which could mean buses will be jammed together, stacked up and delayed through this section even after the changes.
One suggestion he made was to make more space along the low road by making it one-way in one direction, while the high road along Inchicore Road, Kilmainham Lane and Bow Lane West could be one-way in the other direction.
“The reallocated general traffic lane could then be used to free up pinch points along the CBC [core bus corridor] for a higher standard of bus lane, cycle track, wider footpaths, shorter pedestrian crossing distances and improved public realm,” he wrote.
In the end, An Bord Pleanála didn’t take this suggestion, approving the planning application without making this change a condition.
So the way things are headed, Kilmainham Lane will remain the same as it is now, but local residents and councillors believe it’ll have even more traffic buzzing through to circumvent the low road than it does now.
Asked whether the council would support making the high road one-way in one direction and the low road one-way in the other, a council spokesperson referred the query to the National Transport Authority – which is behind the BusConnects scheme.
Among residents of Kilmainham Lane, some have been campaigning to make the lane one-way, said Waterstone, who was walking along the lane on Friday morning, as either the clouds dropped to touch the ground or a light mist fell – it was unclear which.
“Maybe that would help” to reduce through traffic at peak hours, Waterstone said.
But at a meeting of the council’s South Central Area Committee in October, council executive engineer Neil O’Donoghue said he’d examined that idea, but having two-way traffic on the road actually “helps slow the speeds down on the road at present”.
The road’s so narrow in places cars have to pull over and stop to let each other go by. If it was one-way, they could buzz right through without obstruction.
Another idea is to put bollards across Kilmainham Lane to block through traffic entirely, Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon said last Thursday by phone. That kind of scheme is, in council jargon, sometimes called “filtered permeability”.
Residents could still drive to their homes, they’d just have to choose which end to get their from as they wouldn’t be able to pass the bollards. And reducing the through motor-vehicle traffic would open the lane up to more cyclists and pedestrians.
Not only that, it would reduce air pollution along the lane, Pidgeon said. “It’s a confined lane, in such a small space, you can feel the pollution in the air,” he said.
Another benefit to ending through traffic along Kilmainham Lane would be to “make a dent” in the regular peak-hour traffic back-ups along the South Circular Road headed north across Old Kilmainham and past the end of Kilmainham Lane on the way to the Chapelizod Bypass.
If there weren’t cars turning into or out of the lane, cars could flow more freely along the South Circular, Pidgeon said.
Gardaí might object to ending through traffic along Kilmainham Lane, Pidgeon said, as they have a station near the west end of it, and might sometimes need to leave it going east – and so could be concerned about being blocked by bollards or planters or whatever put in there to stop through vehicle traffic.
But there are solutions to this, says Pidgeon, like removable bollards for example. “That’s do-able. It’s not rocket science,” he said.
Asked whether Gardaí would object to blocking off through motor-vehicle traffic along Kilmainham Lane, a Garda spokesperson said that “Until any such proposal is formally made to the relevant local authority, An Garda Síochána has no comment to make.”
Eileen Hickey, who was walking along the lane on Friday morning and said she lives there, said the bollards solution would “make it very awkward for a lot of people”.
On the other hand, Waterstone, who also lives along the lane, said he “wouldn’t mind” that change.
Asked whether the council would support blocking through traffic along Kilmainham Lane with bollards part-way along it, a council spokesperson referred the query to the National Transport Authority.
However, O’Donoghue, the engineer, addressed the idea at the October meeting of the South Central Area Committee. There’d have to be a broad public consultation on a change like that, he said.
“If you wanted filtered permeability or making the road one-way that would have to go through our neighbourhood schemes team,” he said. “Because it would affect all the roads in the area.”
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