The Secret Cyclist: The benefits of Bus Connects mean making compromises

A car blocks a cycle lane on Liberty Street while parked on a pedestrian-priority crossing zone behind the courthouse, Cork City. Pic: Larry Cummins

I cycled past a sign adjacent to a proposed Bus Connects route last week. It seems to have been erected by nearby residents. 

It has a large picture of a bee followed by the word ‘OFF’ and also states: ‘Save our 60 trees and 2,000 shrubs’. It is addressed to the National Transport Authority.

Signs like this are catchy and emotive. Stories we read as children tend to have three characters; a hero, a victim, and a villain. 

The humble bee is the victim in this case. Those who seek to protect the bee must be the heroes surely? There’s only one role left for the NTA and their supporters: the villains.

For the adults, Bus Connects is a complex and demanding project that seeks to achieve significant modal share shifts to unlock significant economic, health, environmental, and societal benefits. It’s a lot harder to capture that on a 4ft by 5ft sign on the side of the road.

As someone who cycles a lot, particularly for day-to-day activities like going to work or the shops, I welcome the Bus Connects plans as they will provide for dozens of more kilometres of safe cycle paths across the city. 

I expect daily bus users will also support the plans, as more bus corridors means more reliable buses. 

Sure, they aren’t ideal and come with a lot of difficult decisions, but I don’t see the ‘do-nothing’ approach as a responsible way forward.

Transport engineers and planners tend to put us all into neat boxes like ‘motorists’, ‘cyclists’, ‘public transport users’, etc. 

However, they often fail to mention another hat we all wear, citizens. 

I went to a talk on local government years ago in UCC and the speaker mentioned that we all love to hear about our rights as citizens but we rarely talk about our responsibilities as citizens.

There are dozens of ways one can practice one’s civic duty. I try to do mine by supporting plans like Bus Connects that will promote clean, affordable, and healthy transport. 

There’s two ways you can voice your support for these plans; formally and informally. 

All transport plans, whether they are for multi-million-euro projects like Bus Connects or a new pedestrian crossing at the top of your road, go through a public consultation. This is the formal approach. 

Equally, you can use your voice informally, whether it’s on social media or at the water cooler at work to discuss the issues surrounding the plans and let people know why you think it’s a good idea.

In an ideal world, public consultation would take local or user knowledge to enhance a project.  What tends to actually happen is that people who don’t like the project use it as an opportunity to stop the project or parts of the project. 

Public consultation is not a popularity contest or a referendum.  That’s what elections, both local and national are for. 

In the case of Bus Connects, we voted in people and these people in three political parties made a group that has a majority in Dáil Eireann. 

These parties then agreed on a programme for Government which stated very clearly that the Bus Connects plans will be prioritised.

To date, the Bus Connects project has raised lots of interesting discussion points. Firstly, there’s the issue of ‘the whip’. 

This practice tends to ensure that Government politicians support Government plans. 

From time to time, political parties don’t call the whip and allow their elected representatives to vote according to their moral or ethical views. I doubt a transport plan falls into this category. 

In fact, I would say it’s the height of hypocrisy for some Government parties to direct the NTA to launch a plan and then sit back and allow their own party members to lambast the plans.

If the Government doesn’t like the look of Bus Connects, then scrap it and show us the alternative plans. 

There are numerous Belgian cities that have ‘Traffic Circulation Plans’ that have achieved similar increases in cycling and public transport trips in recent years.

Secondly, there’s the faux hysteria over street trees. 

We all understand that trees offer many benefits across a wide range of criteria. Nobody is denying that. However, in some instances, some street trees need to make way for wide footpaths or cycle paths. 

If you want to tie a ribbon around a sycamore tree and light a candle over its possible demise, please do so knowing that someone might die at this very spot in the future because they were cycling on the road and not on a segregated cycle lane. 

You don't love a tree more than someone else loves a person. 

If you really do care about trees, use your voice to ask the NTA to provide replacement native trees in gardens, on adjacent and side streets, or along green corridors.

Finally, there’s the privatisation of the public space. Once you leave your property line, that space in front of your house isn’t yours. 

It doesn’t matter if you’ve parked there or driven there for twenty years. It belongs to the public and ought to be used in a way that will bring the most benefits to the public.

Bus Connects is slowly opening people’s eyes to the fact that living in a city requires trade-offs. It’s a pity they weren’t informed earlier. 

Oh, and the buzz-off sign? A similar sign was placed nearby last year that proclaimed ‘Save Our Right Turn Lanes’.