Journalism and Cycling 2: the difficult second album

Its a good question and the answer, currently, is not fully yes or no. And that lack of clarity is largely reflected in the Strand Road case.

In simple terms, the Planning Acts and Regs cover built infrastructure, both public and private. The Roads Act cover the building of new road infrastructure, above certain thresholds of scale and cost, by public bodies. And the Road Traffic Acts cover the administration and regulation of traffic, including laws and offences and also regulations around road signs, markings, limits etc. It also covers things like traffic calming measures and cycle lanes and bus lanes being put in.

This is where our conflict arises. The Planning Act has associated regulations which include the famous Part VIII, which is a system for Local Authorities to consult and gain approval for projects of many types that are of significant cost or impact, for example housing, drainage, amenities and new local roads.

When DCC tried to use the Road Traffic Act (Section 38) to implement the Strand Road cycleway, at a cost of 200-300k if memory serves, and intending to close one direction of a major regional road, it quite deliberately exceeded the intent of that legislation and strayed heavily into Part VIII territory. This was a flag I raised at the time and which was borne out when it went to Court.

Its well within the Minister's right to bring forward legislation to cover larger scale cycle measures and trials and experiments and to put that under the umbrella of the Road Traffic Acts, so long as it reflects the level of consultation, engineering standards and Council oversight you would get with Part VIII, in my opinion. We shall see the colour of his money in due course, but as I said, its a concern that his intention seems to be to introduce it much later than the rest of the Bill. Any playing of games with this will be strongly challenged.

For the purposes of the deliberate misuse of the Road Traffic Act by the Council, Part VIII and the EIA and Habitats directives are essentially interchangeable, in that the petitioners had to pick one to go after them over and the latter are more onerous. Paragraph 44 of the judgement sums up the failure of the Council in this regard.

In short, I and others argued all along that the Council should have to go through the/a planning process. The High Court said we were right.

Put it this way, if the Council were preparing a scheme for an application under Part VIII, or under the other directives, it would be a very similar exercise that they would be undertaking.

More than a bit, I would have said . . . . If I as a pedestrian, bump into another person, would the headline say bus driver crashes into car driver?

It makes sense that it was a collision with the vehicle, but they chose to "humanise" that side.

I normally need the language used pointed out to me, but this one raised my hackles all by itself. Poor (to say the least) reporting/headline writing.

Listened back to PK there on speed limits

https://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/highlights-from-the-pat-kenny-show/today-is-slow-down-enforcement-operation-21

Interesting - I think thats a combination of the infrastructure but also the narrative around MAMILs being a nuisance on the roads, holding up traffic - ergo justifying driver impatience.

This was a particularly odd conversation to listen to. The jist of it was that speed limits are both far too high, and far too low and nobody should be close to either of these limits in either direction. Urban 30kph zones drew particular ire as "even fellows on bikes are going faster than you". This was seen as an affront to Pat's dignity and should not be allowed to stand (surely every single cyclist will be going faster than the cars in traffic in the city centre, no matter the limit?). Low speed limits should not exist in certain places because 'everyone' exceeds them and that's okay, but if a cyclist exceeds a speed limit (which, let us not forget, absolutely does not apply to them legally) this could bring about the fall of civilisation. Motorists must exceed these low limits because they really want to.

Texter pointed out that no matter how fast a bike is going, it's unlikely to kill you. Pat, quick as you like, brings up the one incident of a cyclist being directly involved in the death of pedestrian from 20 years ago on Merrion Row as a counter (notwithstanding the fact that neither high speed nor actual physical interaction between the two parties occurred in this freak tragedy).

Weird conversation with many many contradictions.

Possibly because the lack of empathy is not directed at the van driver. What value would it serve to say “man driving van”

As is always the case, Oisín O'Connor needs to make himself quiet.