New 30 km/h limit in Dublin only for areas that want it

The proposed expansion of the 30 km/h speed limit throughout Dublin will be limited to residential roads and will not include the arterial roads until a further review has taken place.

Dublin City Council is seeking public submissions on where the 30 km/h speed limit might be expanded to.

Rory O’Connor, of the Dublin City Council transport department, said “the areas we have selected so far are ones that have made requests to Dublin City Council to change the speed limit”.

He added that the onus is on the public, “if they want it; it’s up to them to support the changes in their community”. He also said the proposed changes will be enforced on residential roads and not arterial roads. The speed limit on the arterial roads will be examined at a later stage.

The lower speed limits will extend journey times by about 20 seconds on average, Mr O’Connor said.

‘Farcical’

However, AA Ireland has described the proposed changes by Dublin City Council as “farcical” stating such limits “don’t fit the engineering of the road and undermine road safety”.

AA director of consumer affairs Conor Faughnan said the proposal was “clumsy, unnecessary, and it will do more harm than good for road safety. It is being sold as a road safety measure but it is not”.

“The AA does support 30 km/h zones and Dublin City should have plenty of them, but when you use 30km/h it should be properly designed. It should be essentially self-policing. Instead, the Council have essentially coloured in the whole of the city centre,” he added.

Mr Faughnan said speed was not the only determining factor when considering safety on the roads. “It is of course true that when crashes happen at slower speeds they do less damage. There are plenty of studies that demonstrate this and I don’t know of a single sensible argument against it.

“But that is not what is actually happening in Dublin or in our other urban environments. Most of the truly horrible crashes that hurt or kill people involve trucks or buses in collision with cyclists and pedestrians at speeds lower than 30 km/h, very often involving heavy vehicles turning left.”

A lower city centre speed limit has been implemented in a number of cities across the UK such as Edinburgh and London. Edinburgh is currently in the process of implementing a 20mp/h (32 km/h) limit across part of the city, which includes residential, shopping and city centre roads, it is due to come into force on July 31st.