Cycling Officers should be appointed before new city development plan begins

Cycling Officers need to be quickly appointed to Galway City and County Councils according to the Galway Cycling Campaign, who has written to both councils seeking a timeline for the hiring process. 

The Programme for Government emphasises expertise and quality in the €360 million annual cycling infrastructure spend. It promises to appoint a Cycling Officer to every local authority, a role which has yet undefined “real powers”. 

The Cycling Officer in each council executive is to ensure that each local authority “adopts a high-quality cycling policy, carries out an assessment of their roads network and develops cycle network plans.”

Cécile Robin, deputy chairperson of the Galway Cycling Campaign, says that the Cycling Officer should be appointed at a senior level with the ability to oversee budgets and have authority to ensure local authorities implement national cycling policy and design guidance to the highest standard.

“Our Roads departments are filled with talented engineers. The Cycling Officers should have a complementary skillset, such as in urban geography, sociology or psychology. The council’s ambition should be to create liveable neighbourhoods that prioritise people who walk, use wheelchairs, cycle or scoot,” said Ms Robin.

The appointment is particularly urgent because the process for the new Galway City Development Plan begins in January. 

“We need an expert in sustainable safety to be at the heart of developing our city,” said Ms Robin. “The 15-minute city is the ambition of Paris, where everything you need should be within a 15 minute walk or cycle of your front door such as local shops, cafés, schools, and even work. To paraphrase a great Irish sports commentator, neither France nor Paris are known as cycling strongholds.”

“Paris is adding another 650km of ‘corona cycleways’ to it’s 700km network to enable people to keep cycling after lockdown. Our city needs a senior decision maker within the council executive to champion active travel like walking, cycling and scooting from people’s front doors to wherever they need to go on a regular basis, like school, work, the GP, shops, and restaurants. We are already a cycling city, second only to Dublin in terms of people cycling to school and work.”

Cycling Officers are to work closely with new Regional Cycle Design Offices, as promised in the Programme for Government. 

“The 2009 National Cycle Policy Framework, introduced when Fianna Fáil and the Greens were last in government, continues to have good guidelines for people-centred planning and sustainable development. It has ambitious national guidelines to enable cycling within urban and rural areas. This needs to be embedded within the new city development plan, and a Cycling Officer should have the power to do so,” concluded Ms Robin.

Dangerous Roundabouts to be Tackled Under the City Development Plan

Councillors passed a Galway Cycling Campaign/Community Forum motion at Monday night’s Council meeting that will see the notorious pedestrian- and cyclist-unfriendly roundabouts of Galway City tackled under the latest City Development Plan.

Under the new Plan, which will be in place by January 2011, the City Executive will be committed to addressing the significant difficulties posed by roundabouts for pedestrians and cyclists. The Plan will compel the Council to explore remedial treatments, such as raised zebra crossings, in order to improve the safety of non-motorised transport users.

Roundabouts on national routes in Portlaoise and Limerick City have already been re-designed to include raised zebra crossings and zebra crossings, and hopefully Galway City will be next

said Oisin O’Nidh, PRO of the Galway Cycling Campaign.

 

Roundabout in Portlaoise town with two lane entries and raised zebra crossings

The new City Development Plan will also endorse the ‘Hierarchy of Solutions’ in the Government’s National Cycle Policy Framework. This document, which supports the remedial treatment of roundabouts, prioritises traffic reduction, traffic calming and road redesign over dedicated cycling facilities in order to create a pedestrian- and cycle-friendly urban environment. According to Mr O’Nidh,

The inclusion of the Hierarchy of Solutions will enable the City Council to do more to promote cycling ith less revenue. It is the perfect solution for Local Authorities in ifficult economic times.

However, according to Campaign Chair Shane Foran, Galway’s development as Ireland’s Cycling City could be undermined by the actions of Council Director of Services, Ciaran Hayes, who successfully opposed a motion that would have provided primary school children with a network of backstreet routes to school. Mr Foran said:

Cycling to primary school has been in steep decline in Ireland for the past 20 years – down 83% between 1986 and 2006. Proactive approaches such as safe routes to schools are needed to address the low levels of cycling among school children and to foster a culture of cycling for the future. By opposing such measures, the City Council Executive has missed out on a perfect opportunity to dramatically increase the number of young cyclists in Galway, and at the same time ease the chronic traffic congestion that the city currently suffers from during school term.

Groody roundabout Limerick on the N7 out of Limerick towards Dublin