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Thank you for the opportunity to make a submission on the proposed BusConnects network for Limerick City, which I am making in a personal capacity. I’d like to compliment the project team on how they have run this consultation, in particular the wide range of materials produced, the in-person and online consultation events which provided an opportunity for people to learn more and feed back their suggestions. The use of Irish Sign Language interpreters at two of the in-person events is an initiative that is particularly welcome.

I’d like to express my broad support for the BusConnects network for Limerick, the increased frequency and coverage will make Limerick a better place to live, work and receive an education. With associated infrastructural changes, this network plan provides the basis for the bus to become the main form of transport for many people across the city, instead of a last resort option taken by those who have no other choice.

There is one area for improvement that I would like to highlight, and that is the lack of integration between the proposed routes, and in particular the decision to route two of the four high-frequency routes away from the main bus and rail station on Parnell Street.

I believe this arrangement is not consistent with bus networks in other small European cities with bus modal share far in excess of the modal share in Limerick. I have given three examples together with route network maps in this document.

In these examples, all significant bus routes interchange at the train station. It should be noted that in these examples the train stations are also slightly peripheral to the city centre, as is the case in Limerick.

Having all routes meet at the train station would offer interchange from and to a single bus route to:

• Other city routes

  

• Rural bus routes including those delivered under the National Transport Authority’s Connecting Ireland programme, which represents the largest increase in rural public transport in Ireland in decades 
• Intercity Expressway bus routes to Cork, Galway, Waterford, Killarney, Tralee and further afield
• Intercity train services to Dublin, Cork, Galway and Castleconnell/Birdhill/Nenagh/Cloughjordan/Roscrea

Having all routes meet at a single point would offer crucial legibility to the city bus network, where passengers could be confident that they can transfer to any route by going to a single transfer point. 

The only significant Transport-Oriented Development scheme planned for Limerick City is the scheme proposed by the Land Development Agency (LDA) around Colbert station, which the LDA has estimated could produce 2,800 residential units. It is appropriate to serve such a site with all the high-frequency city bus routes given the proposed population size and density.

Serving the bus and rail station need not need a large detour for buses.  For example, changing the path of route 4 involves a very small increase in route distance as can be seen in the diagram below. If route 4 was routed via Mulgrave St and Childers Rd as the current 304 is (and which would offer greater road width for bus segregation), the route via the station would be even shorter than a route serving O’Connell St. 

In conclusion I would once again like to welcome the proposed network, and to express my support for a small tweak to routes 2 and 4 so that they could directly serve Colbert Station.

Three years ago, I wrote an article describing how excited I was to be starting a Masters in TU Dublin. I thought it would be interesting to review my experience after finishing the course, in the hope that it might be useful to people who were thinking of applying. I’m told there might be one or two places remaining for the January 2023 intake if you are quick (apply here).

Classmates

I appreciate this is a variable factor but by far the best aspect of the course for me was working with my fellow students on the course. There was a fairly good mix of gender and age, and we were a mix of people working in the private sector, the public sector, and those of us from more diverse employment backgrounds who were coming from an activist background. Most modules contained quite a lot of group work and we quickly got to know each other well, with an active and sometimes raucous WhatsApp group discussing not only upcoming deadlines but general transport developments both in Ireland and further afield. I think we all learned a lot from each other and we’ve continued to meet semi-regularly since graduating.

Broad range of modules

The range of modules we studied was vast, ranging from the social science of behavioural change, to architecturally-related placemaking, to the sometimes challenging maths of transport modelling. It really is a well-rounded course and no matter what your academic background you will find some modules relatively familiar and others unlike anything you’ve studied before.

The importance of transport and mobility

During the course I was frequently reminded of how relevant our subject matter was to important and current issues in policy, which was a definite advantage for me as I was working in politics for most of my time on the course. In particular, challenges in climate, health and social equity. It felt like we were going to graduate with an awful lot of really useful tools to solve policy problems that many feel are relatively intractable.

Influential lecturers

Over the two years that I was studying on the course, at least 6 of my lecturers appeared in front of various Oireachtas committees: Lorraine D’Arcy, Dave O’Connor, Odran Reid, Suzanne Meade, Helen Murray O’Connor and Sarah Rock. I think this is evidence of the esteem that our lecturers were held by policymakers and it felt good that politicians were getting the same exposure to good practice as we were.

Dissertation

For many of us, the dissertation was the most challenging part of the Masters. We were all busy people with jobs and families and it was a challenge to fit in enough time for original research. I did struggle at times to keep going with my dissertation and I’m certainly grateful to Rose Anne for putting up with me as I got ever more grumpy towards the deadline, but I did submit on time, and I was fortunate enough to have a paper on my research accepted to the Irish Transport Research Network Conference (Public transport deprivation in County Limerick and the development of an effective rural public transport network – PDF), this paper was also covered on the front page of the Irish Examiner.

Summer School

Despite Covid restrictions we did get to have an in-person summer school: ours was hosted by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and it was fun to have our proposals to extend the famous Coastal Mobility Route assessed by Conor Geraghty and Robert Burns. We also had a guest input from one of the lead authors of DMURS.

Should you do this course?

In a word, yes! If you care about problems that matter and don’t mind having your brain slightly melted at their complexity, this is the course for you. It’s a course that’s fundamentally about people, and it is key to solving the singular challenge of our age: the climate crisis. I’m more than happy to chat to anyone considering applying for this course (contact details here) and it has certainly changed my outlook on life.

The twin towns of Killaloe and Ballina are served by the 345 service from Limerick to Scariff via Killaloe, and the 323 service from Limerick to Nenagh via the University of Limerick and Ballina.

Here is a summary timetable for travelling to/from Limerick to Killaloe by public transport. The service has expanded significantly with 12 buses each way per day Monday to Saturday, up from 3 buses each way in 2020 with no weekend service.

Monday to Saturday

K=Killaloe St. Anne’s, B=Ballina Church

Sunday

Notes

K=Killaloe St. Anne’s, B=Ballina Church

Bus Éireann has full timetables for the 345 Scariff-Killaloe-Limerick service and the 323 Limerick-Castleconnell-Ballina-Nenagh service.

All Ballina buses serve UL, Castleconnell and Nenagh. All Killaloe buses serve O’Briensbridge and Scariff.

All buses from Limerick Bus Station to Killaloe and Ballina serve Arthur’s Quay 7-10 mins later.

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.