Comment & Analysis: A senior Garda said this Bank Holiday weekend that you should wear high visibility clothing when walking and cycling and “think about where you choose to cycle your bicycle.” But what does that mean when motorists are clocked at 126km/h on urban roads? “Pedestrians, when you’re out walking is the road suitable for where you’re out walking and are you wearing hi-vis? Cyclists, the same, helmets and high-visibility gear and think about where you choose to cycle your bicycle,” said Inspector Padraig Sutton from the Roads Policing Unit in Limerick. He was speaking on RTÉ’s News at One yesterday, and his comments were further reported on RTE.ie today. Inspector Sutton was speaking as part of the communications around the Easter Bank Holiday Road Safety Enforcement Operation. Another part of the communications for that operation included a list of “Notable top speeds detected in each speed zone” as follows: 126km/h in a 50km/h zone on the Tonglee Road in Dublin 5 104km/h in a 60km/h zone on the R238 at Buncrana, Co. Donegal 124km/h in an 80km/h zone on the R458 at Kilcolgan, Co. Galway 136km/h in a 100km/h on the N25 at Kilmacthomas, Co. Waterford 193km/h in a 120km/h zone on the M1 at Bellewstown, Co. Meath. Now, it’s at this point some readers are thinking, “Well, maybe those speed limits are too low”. Tonglee Road in Dublin is a very urban road with a large number of driveways and junctions. It has shops and community facilities along it, including a creche, a primary care health centre. We don’t know for sure, but there’s a good chance that the speeding was likely at night when it’s less busy. The road is a common design that is too wide, and that width encourages and enables speed. There are no cycle lanes on Tonglee Road, so cycling is mixed with heavy traffic and fast-moving traffic. For anybody cycling from around Coolock to Kilbarrack beyond, there are slim pickings in the choices of routes. Meanwhile, the 60km/h zone on the R238 in Buncrana is a bit more of a mixed bag in design terms, having both wider and narrower sections — as pictured below, the more modern narrower section is further out at the 60km/h transition area. It’s not a road suited to be over 60km/h, and maybe with some redesign, it should be lower. The higher recorded speeds in non-urban areas highlight where design features cannot be placed, more enforcement measures are needed. As a side issue: How could you improve Tonglee Road? It could be narrowed, but that would force people cycling to act as mobile traffic calming on a long, busy road (or, more likely, push a lot of people to cycle on the footpaths). The council could try to squeeze in segregated cycle tracks on both sides of the road here, and that would act as traffic calming, but the cycle tracks would be too narrow. A quick solution for this road is to add a two-way cycle path on one side of the road — this type of solution is being used not just in London or Paris but also in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Limerick City, and South Dublin. It makes a lot of sense for a road like this and the Kilbarrack Road which it joins into. Dublin City Council seems to have an institutional, ideological view against two-way cycle paths, except for limited cases (alongside rivers or canals, etc), so, it’s worth saying why a two-way path along a road like this is a bit of a tradeoff but likely better than unidirectional cycle lanes: The roadway width is around 9m. If you cut the space for motor vehicles down to ~6m, ~3m for cycling (including kerb space), and there’s likely some grassed space that could be used without affecting the trees too much. The two options are: (1) to split that space into two unidirectional cycle tracks with ~1.5m usable space, which is too narrow for many bikes, for social cycling, and for overtaking etc; and (2) a two-way path of ~3m and in most cases making it easier to design safer junctions.