What is the council looking to change about transport in Dublin city next year?

Reviewing speed limits, and imposing more conditions on construction vehicles that want to enter the city, are among the things Dublin City Council’s transport chief says the council plans to work on in early 2025.

As are improving traffic and driver behaviour around schools, introducing emissions-based parking charges, and looking again at the council’s policy on footpath parking, Brendan O’Brien told members of the transport committee on 4 December.

“These are the first couple of items that we propose in 2025, to start bringing forward,” O’Brien told members of the council committee, formally the Mobility and Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee. “But it’s not an exhaustive list.”

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, who chairs the committee, has her own agenda too. She’s not just there to facilitate meetings at which councillors work on council managers’ agenda, she said Monday by phone.

Horner too wants to work on a review of speed limits in the city, and of the council’s policy on footpath parking, she said.

But beyond that, she also wants to focus on implementation of the city’s road-safety strategy, improve maintenance of streets and footpaths, introduce retractable bollards to keep drivers out of car-free areas at car-free times, and continue efforts to find strategies to make deliveries work for delivery drivers, shops and all kinds of road users.

And she wants to push forward the long-delayed plans to roll-out bike bunkers in the city, come up with a vision for what shared-bike schemes in the city should look like in the future, and provide more vigorous oversight of active-travel funding the council gets from the National Transport Authority (NTA), she said.

O’Brien and Horner will work together to set the agendas for the committee’s meetings. Members of the committee, who include elected councillors and others with an interest in the subject matter, will discuss and in some cases vote on proposed policies.

These policies might then be forwarded to the full city council of 63 councillors, for consideration at one of its monthly meetings. “These are all kind of, you know, policy issues, which ultimately will go to the city council for deciding whether they want to go ahead with it, or be informed of it, or whatever,” O’Brien said.

Speed limits, construction vehicles, and schools

In 2020, a majority of councillors voted for an amendment that scuppered a proposal to lower speed limits to 30km/h on most roads in the city.

Last year though, in September 2023, the government published the results of a review of speed limits nationally. It said that default limits on urban roads should be reduced to 30km/h, although “arterial roads and radial routes around urban settings” could stay 50km/h.

“After many successful years bringing road deaths down, however, there has been an alarming increase in fatalities more recently,” a Department of Transport statement at the time said. “Reducing speed has been fundamentally proven to significantly reduce the risk of death or serious injury in road collisions.”

At last week’s transport committee meeting, O’Brien, the Dublin City Council transport head, said that “Obviously, the speed limit review, there’s a requirement again for us to look at the speed limits, and particularly with the new guidance on setting speed limits so that’s something that we’ll be bringing forward.”

Horner, the committee chair, said that it’ll take more than reducing speed limits to get drivers to slow down though. “It’s about changing the culture of a road,” she said. “It’s about the architecture of the streets.”

At the 4 December committee meeting, O’Brien also said he plans to bring forward a proposal to further regulate construction vehicles in the city.

“This is something we’ve discussed with the Freight Transport Association, looking at how we might start to try and impose more conditions on construction vehicles in the city and what the likely safety requirements are before we would issue them – particularly the large vehicles – before we will issue any permits for them,” he said.

And he said he wants to look again at reducing traffic congestion and increasing safety around schools.

There’s issues around schools, with traffic congestion, with behaviour problems, just sometimes even our school wardens are subjected to abuse and so on,” he said. “There is kind of more, perhaps, that could be done around this area, more to make people understand the context of a school area.”

Emissions-based parking charges

The council has been working for a couple of years on emissions-based parking charges.

The idea is that drivers have to pay higher rates to park if their vehicles are high emitters of CO2 emissions, and lower rates for hybrid or electric vehicles. In 2022, O’Brien brought a report on how it might be done to the transport committee.

At the time, some questioned whether encouraging drivers to switch to electric cars should even be the goal. “Electric vehicles aren’t going to solve the problem either, they will simply replace the existing vehicles which isn’t a great solution either,” said Joe Costello, a Labour Party councillor, who has since retired.

Vehicle size is just as big an issue for the city as emissions, said Green Party Councillor Michael Pidgeon.

Cars are getting bigger, meaning they take up more street space, do more damage to footpaths when drivers park them there, and pose a greater danger to pedestrians and cyclists.

If the parking charges are linked just to emissions, says Pidgeon, then streets may end up stuffed with electric cars, causing all the same problems as petrol and diesel ones, apart from pollution.

At the 4 December transport committee meeting, O’Brien did not mention size-related parking charges, but said he planned to work further on emissions-based ones.

“There is an objective within the climate change plan for us to introduce emissions-based parking charges and so we’ll be bringing forward proposals on that – our parking-enforcement colleagues will be starting to bring forward some proposals on that,” he said.

Parking on footpaths

O’Brien said he was also planning for a review of the council’s policy on footpath parking.

In 2021, the transport committee looked at the issue, and decided the council should turn a blind eye to footpath parking in residential areas outside the canals – even if it’s illegal – as long as the way the vehicle is parked leaves at least 2.5 metres of footpath free.

At the time, a council spokesperson said that, sure, footpath parking is illegal, but “Dublin, in many areas, it would not be practical to enforce this law rigorously”, they said.

At the transport committee meeting last week, O’Brien said that “I suppose we’re often caught in a cleft stick with this particular one, where you know, we enforce then people get annoyed because we enforce, we don’t enforce people get annoyed because we don’t enforce.”

“It’s a very tricky subject, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, so we do think that a review of that policy again is needed, and to get people’s thoughts on these,” he said.

Horner has in the past called for footpath parking to be eliminated, and said on Monday that as chair of the committee she’ll continue pushing for that.

Not just by calling for stricter enforcement by the council’s parking-enforcement contractor, Dublin Street Parking Services (DSPS), but also by looking for solutions for people who need legal places to park.

For example, around Ballybough, there’s church car parks that are empty a lot of the time, and maybe the council could help broker agreements so local residents could park there instead of on footpaths in front of their homes, she said.

The issue of footpath parking has come up again and again in council meetings, and councillors – and council officials – are clearly split on how to handle the issue.

At last week’s meeting, Social Democrats Councillor Paddy Monaghan told O’Brien he thought “I don’t necessarily agree with it not being one-size-fits-all, I think that it’s against the law and it needs to be enforced.”

And, he said, what about “a campaign around the impact that it has on people and how selfish and how socially really I suppose it should be like smoking in front of kids, we need to make it socially unacceptable.”

“The only places cars should be is on the road, and parked on the road and if you can’t find somewhere convenient to park, go somewhere slightly less convenient to park if needs be,” he said.

On the other hand, at a September meeting of the Central Area Committee, independent Councillor Cieran Perry raised concerns that he’d “had a couple of reports of cars being clamped for parking two wheels on the path”.

“As we’ve discussed on numerous occasions, given the size of the roads in the Cabra area it’s not possible to park four wheels on the road without blocking the road,” he said.

Similarly, Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said earlier this year that “In general we don’t want people parking on the footpath in the city – but in some areas there’s no other way of doing business.”

Cutting off lockboxes

Since the transport committee now also covers public-realm issues, O’Brien, the council manager, said at last week’s meeting that he planned to bring to it a policy on how to deal with Airbnb lockboxes.

“People will have noticed around the city a lot of these boxes locked to Sheffield [bike] stands, to public lighting poles, to traffic poles which are actually to allow people to access keys to get into rented properties,” O’Brien said.

Horner raised this issue in September 2023, and independent Councillor Mannix Flynn raised this issue at the South East Area Committee meeting in February 2024.

The council executive’s response to Flynn’s query was that Dublin City Council staff will remove the boxes. “Any lock boxes at the locations above that are on the public roadway will be removed by the environment and transportation department,” it says.

But O’Brien said last week the issue was more complicated, and the council might take a softer approach.

“While it’s kind of sometimes tempting to just say well let’s take them all off but we’re very conscious of the fact that people might then arrive into the city and actually have no way of contacting anybody,” he said. “So I think we do need to formulate a policy on this.”

Earlier this month, the head of Italy’s Polizia di Stato in a circular ordered the end to the use of lock boxes for guests to check in to rentals without their host ever seeing them. They’re a security risk, he said.

Banning them is “aimed at preventing risks to public order in relation to the possible accommodation of dangerous people and/or people linked to criminal or terrorist organizations”, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera quoted the circular as saying.