Active Travel Frustrations

Ireland's Active Travel Programme is a bold and ambitious plan to make it easier to get walking and cycling to locations. It champions benefits for public health, environmental protection, and urban livability. With ambitious goals like slashing transport emissions by 50% by 2030 in Ireland, it shows a forward-thinking commitment to combating climate change and reducing car dependency, inspiring a greener future for the island.

However, it is not without it's flaws. And the reality of these plans have yet to touch Dundalk in a drastic way.

The particular bug-bear I have with Active Travel at the moment is that once an area is chosen as an area of interest for Active Travel, it pauses any and all investment in that area for things like; road improvements, bus shelters, pedestrian crossings or lights.

The logic behind this being that if they are going to spend millions on a patch, hopefully with large funding from central government, it makes sense to hold off spending limited council funding doing a job that could get funding from the government. There is also the danger that a short term intervention might have to be dug up, ripped down, replaced, when the new works are done, which is seen as a waste of money.

One frustration in particular being, as of yet, Dundalk and Louth have not yet had an Active Travel plan delivered. The problem I have, is that it also completely blocks necessary short term interventions that the public and councilor can see as needed. All because of the potential of a bigger plan coming down the line.

There are some 20+ Active Travel plans for Dundalk. At best, one or two might be delivered a year. This means that if a location chosen for active travel plans, like say Mill Street, are crying out for a traffic calming measure, a crossing or other intervention: that can could be kicked down the road for years!

It's infuriating. A solution needs to be found. A happy medium that will allow for interventions that are needed now to be carried out, and then married into a bigger undertaking when (if) they happen down the line.

Applying the same standards and design used in Active Travel Plans elsewhere, pedestrian crossings, patches of cycle ways, traffic calming measures can be installed and seamlessly blend into a bigger project at a later stage.

Our council needs to lobby for funding to do this, and if it's done right, it will lessen the cost of the active travel cost, by the value of the cost of the short term intervention.