13 Jul 2016
Posted by Aoife O'Connor 
“Farcical limits that don’t fit the engineering of the road undermine road safety.”
Dublin City Council are proposing to bring in a 30km/h speed limit across the whole of Dublin city between the canals. They then plan to extend this even further to include places like Ringsend, Sandymount, Crumlin, Drimnagh & Phibsboro.
This is clumsy and unnecessary and will do more harm than good for road safety. It is being sold as a road safety measure but it is not.
AA does support 30 km/h zones and Dublin City should have plenty of them, but when you use 30 it should be properly designed. It should be in sympathy with the engineering layout of the road and should be essentially self-policing. Instead the Council have essentially coloured in the whole of the city centre.
This change would compel motorists to behave in a way that would fail the driving test today. That is just not sensible and people will know it.
It is of course true that when crashes happen at slower speeds they do less damage. If you have a choice between whether to be hit by a car at 30 km/h or to be hit at 50 km/h it is absolutely clear that you would be far better off at the lower speed. 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 kmh, very often involving heavy vehicles turning left.
This is why none of the bodies with any road safety expertise are asking for this measure – the RSA, Gardai, the Department of the Environment, the AA. The RSA’s policy on 30 km/h limits is very much the same as the AA’s; they should be used extensively but they must be properly designed and engineered and they must be supported by the local community.
One of the big problems for road safety in Ireland is badly set speed limits. They undermine respect for the system in general and feed conspiracy theories.
The AA lobbied strongly, and successfully, to get rid of ridiculous 80 km/h signs on country boreens with grass growing up the middle. We did this not because anyone was trying to do 80 km/h on them but because they brought the whole system into disrepute.
This will do the same. It will carelessly apply 30 km/h limits on clearly unsuitable roads. It will bring speed limits into deserved contempt and will be ignored.
The measure is going out for public consultation now. I hope that people will express their concern but I doubt it. Processes like this do not excite people, at holiday time with the football on. But silence should not be taken for assent. When the flurry of bonkers 30 signs appear on unsuitable roads everywhere there will be a backlash.
Better to get it right at the start. Use 30 km/h limits, use lots of them. Probably 90% of the city centre. But do it in the right way and don’t delude yourself that by putting a silly number on a pole you have done something good for road safety.
You can submit your views on the proposal to DCC here.
As always, send us your thoughts and any feedback you may have on this issue to: publicaffairs@theaa.ie. You can also follow me on Twitter: @ConorAAIreland
Image: Colm Milligan via Flickr
