Dublin City Council to appoint cycling officer
The Department of Local Government last month approved a staff sanction request from Dublin City Council for a cycling officer. The appointee will be hired on a three-year contract.
A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said the job would go to an existing member of the local authority’s staff and that details of what the job entails would be revealed when the job is advertised in September.
“There is currently a dedicated team of six professional staff working full time on cycle designs and issues but there is no one individual described as a cycling officer,” the spokeswoman said.
“The competition to fill the position from within Dublin City Council’s current staffing will be advertised with a job specification, including details of pay scale, in September. The cycling officer will work as part of the dedicated cycling team reporting to a senior executive engineer,” she said.
Meanwhile, the National Transport Agency said there are no plans at present to expand the Cork Bike Scheme.
While the NTA said that it would be examining usage of the scheme with a view to adding to the number of rental stations in the city if required, no locations have yet been earmarked for expansion.
A spokesperson for the NTA said that, as the scheme had only launched in Cork at the end of last year, the authority is awaiting a “bedding in” of the project before identifying potential new locations for rental stations.
A total of 330 bikes are available for hire in Cork at present from 31 stations at locations across the city centre. Annual subscriptions, costing €10, are available from bikeshare.ie and bikes hired for under half an hour come at no extra charge. A sliding scale of charges then applies for hires over half an hour.
Last month the Evening Echo revealed that cyclists have made more than 100,000 trips on the Cork bike share scheme since it launched.
The NTA said that 5,040 people had signed up for the scheme by the end of May, and that 3,940 of those are active users of the scheme, making an average of five journeys a month on the bikes.
