Michael Moynihan: A traffic calming plan for Ballinlough would be such a cool move
There are four schools in the Ballinlough area. This constellation of schools makes for chaos every morning: traffic jams and hold-ups, minor arguments and major confrontations, accidents, tips, and scrapes, mirrors and bumpers damaged.
A couple of weeks ago we featured one of the coolest neighbourhoods in Cork in these pages.
St Luke’s, with its views over the city, its coffee places, its bookshop, that long haul up Summerhill.
(Why are cool neighbourhoods always on a slope, or slope-adjacent? In Brooklyn, one of the coolest even has a slope in its name. Is it to make you feel like you’re ascending the ranks of coolness, being lifted up to the heights of trendiness? The temperature drops as you rise so, you know, science.) Anyway, St Luke’s. I acknowledge the achievement.
And the traffic.
St Luke’s occupies a key part of the northside transport ecosystem — in the absence of a proper ring road cars, lorries, and bikes have to fight their way through a transport network designed for carts bearing churns of butter from all over the county a couple of centuries ago.
The results are predictable, and sometimes bracing. If there is anything that can puncture the coolness you absorb going through St Luke’s it’s a large lorry, half-over the dividing line in the middle of the street and barrelling towards you, as happened your columnist there recently enough.
It’s either that or gridlock, a binary replicated all over the city.
The irony is strong. If you leave the very centre of Cork you’ll encounter places which on paper would be ideal for that old 15-minute city concept. From Blackpool north of the river to Turner’s Cross on the southside there are plenty of former villages and mini-neighbourhoods which would be perfect feeder suburbs — if only their inhabitants could get to the centre of town safely and quickly.
Then again, in many areas simply getting around the neighbourhood itself is a challenge, as your columnist knows from the experience of his own area of Ballinlough.
If St Luke’s is synonymous with droll hipsters who are serious about their caffeine then many residents of and visitors to Ballinlough may identify the latter with a particular, time-sensitive obstacle to smooth progress.
I refer to the school pick-up and drop-off. There are four schools in the Ballinlough area, including St Anthony’s national school, one of the biggest in Ireland. This constellation of schools makes for chaos every morning: traffic jams and hold-ups, minor arguments and major confrontations, accidents, tips, and scrapes, mirrors and bumpers damaged.
The potential for really serious incidents is the real worry. Anywhere you have approximately 2,000 children you have approximately 2,000 children crossing roads and dashing out of school — nipping out from behind enormous SUVs, for instance, though enormous SUVs nipping close to children might be a more accurate description.
Or an emergency vehicle being unable to gain access to one of the schools in the area because of cars blocking the way, some of them (of course) beached on double yellow lines.
Others may have more colourful stories, but I’m not sure if I can include them as directly school-related. It is true that when a member of my household got a bus out of the city centre to Ballinlough a couple of weeks ago the journey featured a driver asking for directions along the way; the voyage ended with the bus hitting a parked car.
Now that I think of it, that happened outside one of the schools in question. This led in turn to congestion, unsurprisingly, with the cars parked carelessly, lawlessly, and uselessly around the school contributing to the ensuing mess.
What's interesting to me is that rather than cursing the darkness, people in Ballinlough are striking a light. Getting to work.
I recently got in touch with the Ballinlough Residents Association, who shared the results of a traffic survey they’d carried out in the area.
The survey involved six hundred people — which is the kind of commitment to the community you don’t see all the time — and those results advocated strongly for improving the traffic situation.
The intriguing thing was that Ballinlough isn’t looking for a subterranean traffic system or some kind of ambitious flyover — or even an extra couple of dual carriageway junctions, per Dunkettle.
The area wants Cork City Council to implement an overall traffic calming plan for the area, and the infrastructure needed doesn’t seem that onerous: implementing measures such as junction tightening or traffic tables surely wouldn’t break the bank for any local authority. The residents are keen on new and improved signage as well, and given the fondness of the authorities on Leeside for signs of all kinds, this must be an achievable goal also.
We are, after all, talking about the local authority with enough funds to hand for the famous Fireman’s Rest: spending one half of the amount earmarked for that project on safety measures would be a welcome development. The results would benefit thousands of citizens through improved traffic flow and safety measures for children.
In fact, the very best news comes at the end. Funding for traffic calming infrastructure can be sourced from the National Transport Authority, specifically through its Active Travel Scheme.
The NTA’s website makes a fair amount of noise about this programme, and with good reason. The site outlines impressive successes in places like Clontarf (“6km of cycle route improvements and significant public realm enhancements, making walking and cycling safer, more accessible, and more enjoyable”) as well as a countrywide scheme intended to help schools.
The latter is the Safe Routes to School programme, which also comes under the Active Travel Scheme. Late last year the NTA site announced “an additional 141 schools across the country will benefit from Round 3 of the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programme,” so I opened the list of schools attached.
I found two schools from Cork City funded under Round 3.
Yes, a city of quarter of a million people with the same representation as Leitrim. It’s difficult to articulate how striking this is without insulting the good people of Leitrim, but shouldn’t there be a few more examples of these SRTS in a part of the country with hundreds of thousands of road users?
If it’s a matter of local authorities having to make the running in order to access NTA funding then shouldn’t they be ... making the running? What could possibly be delaying such action?
If local and national political representatives have a role to play here then they should do so as a matter of urgency. We hear a good deal from such representatives about the carnage on our roads, and here is a neighbourhood offering a way to make its own roads safer by putting in the hard work to consult people in the area.
What could be cooler than that?
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