Sustainable Mobility Consultant Robin van der Griend recently hosted a Walk & Talk event along Lower Kilmacud Road in Dublin, Ireland, with Conor Geraghty, Senior Engineer for Active Travel at DLRCC. Robin had worked on redesigning the streets in this neighborhood during the COVID-19 pandemic and finally got to see the changes in person. This blog reflects on Robin’s experience and takeaways from the event.
Three years ago, I got the chance to support Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council (DLRCC) with their Active School Travel Initiative. This was at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and since I was still living and working in Sweden at the time, we could only work remotely. DLRCC wanted to encourage children and their parents to walk or cycle to school. They wanted this for the health and social benefits it would provide to children, but also because there would not be enough space if everyone drove their children to school.
With the Active School Travel initiative, we worked towards establishing a network of safe and inviting routes for walking and cycling, connecting residential areas to 65 schools across the county. Most of these consisted of relatively quiet neighborhood streets, which we linked together as coherently as possible.
However, due to the street pattern in DLR, the routes occasionally had to run along main roads as well. The challenge was that Ireland’s typical way of designing walking and cycling infrastructure was not inviting to children or their parents. Many felt unsafe walking or cycling with all the car traffic around. Only the typical MAMIL (middle-aged man in Lycra) dared to cycle here.
Therefore, we worked together with DLRCC on an innovative design for a section along Lower Kilmacud Road. We tailored best practice solutions from Denmark and the Netherlands into a custom design that matched the local Irish context. Where possible, we followed the existing Irish guidelines. However, we also decided to deviate from these guidelines when we saw the need for more safe and inviting infrastructure for children. After all, if we cater to this demographic, we end up with a design that is inviting to many more.
We added more separation from car traffic and introduced continuous footpaths and cycle tracks on side streets, which was still a novelty in Ireland at the time. In addition, we designed presumably the first protected intersection in Ireland. We tweaked this typical Dutch solution to match the local context and concerns better. We adjusted it by adding continuous footpaths at the corners to prioritize pedestrians more intuitively through the design.
Last but not least, we combined all of these infrastructure measures with measures on a network level. We added several modal filters on nearby streets to stop rat-running through the streets and keep through traffic on the main roads. One of these converted the intersection, as mentioned earlier, from 4 arms to 3, which significantly reduced complexity while improving efficiency.
Last week, I finally had the chance to visit the scheme in person. I hosted a Walk & Talk event together with with Conor Geraghty, Senior Engineer for Active Travel at DLRCC, and my colleague Brett Petzer. During a lovely drizzle, we showed around planning professionals from across Ireland. We discussed what had worked well and what could be improved.
It was incredible to see the scheme in real life as well as see the change in people that were using it. The scheme has resulted in more diverse people walking and cycling, including more children.
It was also nice to see that the design has inspired the recently updated Irish Cycle Design Manual, with many of the design choices from the scheme popping up across various sections of the design manual. This shows that sometimes you must deviate from existing guidelines to set new standards; innovation cannot happen without being bold.
The best part of the visit was probably when the group was discussing one of the modal filters, and a resident spontaneously came out to talk to us. Most planning professionals know that this usually means someone has a complaint. However, this man told us how the modal filter had utterly changed his family’s life, and he wanted to ensure we would not take it out.
He explained that before the modal filter was put it, there was a lot of rat-running on their street and his children hardly had any contact with their neighbours. But now with the modal filter, he can just let his children go out on their own. And they regularly meet up and play with the other children that live along the street. It was just amazing to hear this, and I feel proud that we managed to achieve this together. A few other residents nearby share similar experiences with the impact of the modal filters in this video here.
We hope the Walk & Talk event we organized inspired other planning professionals to be bold and do the same for children in their counties. If you are working on something similar and could use some support, feel free to reach out to us at Mobycon. We are happy to help.
">“I am passionate about mobility, especially in urban contexts. It is an exciting challenge to contribute to more liveable places by designing streets that work for people, regardless whether people are staying or going. Using my experience from the Netherlands and the Nordics I enjoy helping cities with becoming more sustainable, mainly through giving people better options to walk and cycle.”
