New north-side route STILL needed to ease traffic
Continued Call for the DN01 Dundalk North Route
A year on, the north side of the town still needs a proper bus service — and families are paying the price
Last June, after raising this matter in meetings and with Active Travel and Transport Ireland, I wrote on this blog that Dundalk needed a proper bus route north of the Castletown River. I said the lack of one was forcing thousands of people into cars every week, and that Ath Lethan and the Lisdoo/Armagh Road were crying out for a service.
A year later, that is still true. What has changed is how personal it feels.
A resident told me recently that some weeks they are spending €100 on taxis just to get their children into town for school. Not as a treat. Not in an emergency. As the regular way of getting kids across a river that sits between home and the rest of Dundalk. That is the sort of figure that stops you talking about traffic counts and starts you talking about households.
I welcome what has improved. The 174 family of town services is better than it was — earlier starts, later finishes, Sunday buses. Conversations between the Council and the National Transport Authority have moved on from “is there a case?” to agreement that a north-side route — the DN01 in the Local Transport Plan — is merited.
And yet nothing is running.
There is no clear funding path. Routes and road bus providers have been discussed. The principle is accepted. The money, the vehicles, the timetable and a start date are not. Agreement without a budget is just a nicer way of saying later. But his is a case where a push from TII would make a real differnce, the figures from the LTP survey remember are Newry bridge has 5000 plus cars on it. The Táin bridge has traffic of 16000+ cars on a similar given day.
The underlying problem has not gone away. The Castletown River is still a barrier. People still leave the northern part of town in large numbers every morning to get to school, work, shops, the station and the hospital. . If you do not drive, or you only have one car, or the school run and the work run collide, you are left with taxis, lifts, or sitting in the same queue as everyone else.
That queue is not going to shrink on its own. There is more housing coming on the Lisdoo side. The north of town is growing. Water infrastructure strain on the south of town has already pushed development north and west. Build the houses first and the buses later and you lock in car dependency. Then, a few years on, we wonder why the bridges are jammed and why “active travel” feels like a lecture rather than a choice.
I said last year I wanted carrot before stick. I still do. Make it easier to leave the car at home before you take road space, parking spaces or extra cost off people who have no other option. A parent spending €100 a week on taxis is not refusing public transport. Public transport is refusing them.
DN01 was never a vanity route. The Local Transport Plan already set out a north–south spine, with a branch serving Castletown Road, and a northern mobility hub meant to take pressure off the bridges. Frequencies in the plan were in the 20–30 minute range at peak. Combined with the rest of the spine, that is the sort of service people will actually use — school, work, and the return trip in the afternoon.
What I am asking for now is simple. Keep the agreement. Name the funding. Put a date on a trial if a full service cannot start tomorrow. School-term peak hours would already change lives. A bus that only exists in a plan is no use to a child who needs to be in town at 8.40am.
I will keep raising this at municipal level and with Transport Ireland. If you live north of the river and this is your week — taxis, two cars, or missing activities because there is no bus — tell me. The case is no longer just congestion on Bridge Street. It is families paying a private fare for a public gap.
