Author: thomasbibby

Submission on Limerick City and County Council Road Traffic (30 kilometres per hour Special Speed Limit) Bye-Laws 2021

We’ve spent a lot of time and money over the last few decades in Limerick, building bypasses:

Limerick is on a crossroads between, Cork, Galway, Kerry and Dublin. We built a lot of bypasses to facilitate this interurban traffic that had no real business passing our doors. But, despite promises of a future city that would be focused on people (just one more bypass!), none of our streets ever changed, and the interurban traffic was replaced with intraurban traffic.

If we want a better Limerick, a more prosperous Limerick, a more inclusive Limerick, one place we can start is our streets. The current proposal is a fairly modest expansion of the 30km/h zone into a few more housing estates in Limerick City, most of which are on the northside. This is welcome, but it is a small change. We are not proposing to expand the 30km/h area in our city centre, and the majority of the city centre, where we were promised that pedestrians would come first, is still a 50km/h zone. The towns and villages of County Limerick are similarly prioritised for motor traffic.

I would like to suggest a different approach, that we make all built up areas of Limerick City, and our towns and villages in Limerick County, a 30km/h limit, with certain exceptions, for reasons of safety, noise pollution, air pollution and climate.

Safety

The Road Safety Authority says that cutting speed from 50km/h to 30km/h will change the probability of a person in a car killing a person walking from 50% to 10%.

The main reason for this dramatic difference in the probability of fatalities is that the kinetic energy of the car is proportional to the square of the velocity: ½mv². What’s also worth mentioning in passing is that the other variable in the equation, the mass of the vehicle, has also changed, the best selling car in Ireland last month was the Hyundai Tucson which has a real world weight of 1.8t, in contrast to the slightly under 1.0t of the Toyota Corollas who used to drive the city’s streets back in the 1990s. We need a reduction in speed limit to compensate for the motor industry’s tendency to build much heavier cars.

We need to cut the speed limit in all urban areas to save lives. The headlines below all refer to different cases of pedestrians being killed by people driving cars in Limerick.

Noise pollution

Limerick is a noisy city, and it is affecting our health. The European NGO Transport and Environment says that reducing the urban speed limit from 50 km/h to 30 km/h reduces noise by 3 decibels, or approximately halving the background noise, allowing more of us to leave our windows open, or to converse comfortably on our streets.

Air pollution

We are exceeding the recommended level of particulates. Even during lockdown in April, we were exceeding WHO-recommended levels of particulates in our city centre.

Reducing the speed limit would particularly help reduce NOx levels from traffic.

Climate

The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 mandates that the next two carbon budgets, covering the period to 2030, must represent a 51% reduction in emissions over 2018 levels and also mandates that a public body (which includes Limerick City and County Council) must, in so far as practicable, perform its functions in a manner consistent with the national climate objective (net zero by 2050) and the objective of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the effects of climate change in the State

The planet is literally burning and we need to do everything we can to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, 20% of which in Ireland comes from transport. We need to encourage people to walk, cycle, or take public transport in urban areas. Reducing the urban speed limit will make driving less attractive.

Exceptions

Once the 30km/h default urban speed limit is established in Limerick, we can then look at very limited exceptions, perhaps on one or two of the many bypasses that have been built in the city, where the limit could be increased back to 50km/h. Critically this should only take place where there is a comprehensive safety audit and the provision of infrastructure to ensure that pedestrians and cyclists are physically segregated from traffic travelling at 50km/h, including at junctions.

Which counties in Ireland drive the most and least? What are the car ownership rates in each county? Ranking by kms driven per capita. Private cars only. Vehicle and km data from the CSO Transport Omnibus 2019. Population data from the earlier 2016 census. Link to a CSV file with the data.

Pedestrians should be top of the transport hierarchy but this can be difficult without a dedicated organisation to advocate for their needs. Neasa Hourigan was so frustrated last year by the inaccessibility of Dublin’s streets for pedestrians, especially walking with her daughter who has a visual impairment, that she set up the Dublin Blockers Twitter account to document some of the barriers Dublin’s pedestrians face in simply trying to get around. She later formed the Irish Pedestrian Network to try and formalise a group to advocate for pedestrians, inspired by the recent success of various cycling advocacy groups.

Neasa came to Limerick in September and there was good attendance for her meeting in Narrative 4. There was a sense that we needed a group in Limerick to be a local presence for the Irish Pedestrian Network, to be a voice for better facilities for pedestrians in Limerick City, and throughout the towns and villages of County Limerick.

A lot of people who attended the meeting in September got involved in the campaign to improve the plans for O’Connell St. The fact that we were unable to persuade councillors and officials to accept that even part of our main street should be reserved for pedestrians makes the establishment of Limerick Pedestrian Network even more urgent. Now that the council has passed plans for O’Connell St, it’s time to formalise a voice for pedestrians.

There will be a meeting on Monday 11th November 2019 in 2 Pery Square at 7pm to try and establish a steering group. The task of the steering group will be to properly establish the Network over the next six months, reaching out to different groups to make it as inclusive as possible, and linking in with groups who are already working in this area. No matter how we travel, almost all of us start and end our journeys as pedestrians. If you’re at all interested in helping to give a voice to footpath users, especially those with mobility needs, I hope you’ll consider coming along.

There’s evidence of a shift in thinking in Limerick about transport. My social media feed is alive with enthusiastic Limerick sustainable transport advocates eager to share best urbanist practice from other European cities. The government has set targets for a large reduction in emissions from transport, and there is an optimism that solutions to get us there might actually lead to a better quality of life for all. Thirteen councillors elected said they agreed or strongly agreed that 10% of the transport budget should go on cycling, in response to questions from  Limerick Cycling Campaign.

I’d like to go a bit further and advocate that 70% of our transport budget should go on walking and cycling. It sounds like a lot but it’s utterly achievable and would result in a healthier and happier city and county. It’s inspired by a graphic from the Design Manual for Urban Roads and Streets (the cool transport nerds call it DMURS apparently. Here’s a PDF link), the official guidelines for engineers designing streets in Irish cities towns and villages.

If that’s the hierarchy of sustainable transportation, then why doesn’t Limerick’s €38 million transport budget reflect that? Here’s how I’d split the money.

Forty percent on infrastructure for pedestrians

Whether we drive, use public transport, or cycle, we all start and finish our journeys as pedestrians. The only way of spending money that benefits everyone in Limerick, regardless of income or other status, is to spend it on walking. Yes we need a superblock in the city centre to make it a world class walking environment. But we need more: in our suburbs, our county towns and villages, we need space to walk, where a family can walk two, three or four abreast comfortably, where kids can play and old people can sit and we can interact and be comfortable in our environment. Spending nearly half our transport budget on walking (with a special emphasis on those with special mobility needs, like buggy and wheelchair users) will transform our city, our towns and our villages.

Thirty percent on infrastructure for cycling

Spending thirty percent of our transport budget on cycling has the potential to take a huge number of cars off the roads. The majority of journeys taken in the city are of a length that could comfortably be taken by bike, even by someone who isn’t athletic (proud slob cyclist and owner of zero items of lycra clothing here). We could connect all primary schools in the city with top-quality, segregated cycle lanes that kids could use to cycle to school. We could identify all the main areas of employment and make sure that workers can get there easily and safely on bikes.

Twenty percent on infrastructure for public transport

We need fully segregated bus lanes between Raheen and Castletroy via a superblock in the city. If we had the infrastructure, we could get to town in 15 mins, even at peak times. The distances are shorter between Caherdavin/LIT/Moyross and Roxboro/Southill but some bus priority measures on those routes would make journey times shorter. The most important bit is to surround a mostly-pedestrianised city centre with bus lanes in either direction.

Ten percent on roads

We still need to maintain our roads, and driving will always be necessary for some. But cars should be at the bottom of our hierarchy: and we certainly shouldn’t be spending the vast majority of our transport budget encouraging more people to drive. The new Limerick Transport Strategy will undoubtedly contain some white elephant road projects. We should have the courage to reject them and focus on a more sustainable and better future.