Dublin City Council has said today that it will stop building sub-standard cycle routes that include narrow cycle lanes, shared areas with pedestrians, and are often left disjointed, with convoluted junction design, which poorly serves all road users. Council officials have after years of going against national and international best practices has said it will push ahead with cycle lanes but will design them better.They said that designs which they claimed were more pedestrian friendly were not being used how they expected by pedestrians, and increased the crossing distance, and so danger, for pedestrians who did use the designs as expected.Agnes Hathaway, a spokesperson for Dublin City Councils CEO Richard Shakespeare, said: In a change of direction, Dublin City Council is now admitting that it was wrong to say it was all for cycling, but then keep planning routes that would hardly accommodate the current levels of cycling, never mind any growth in cycling. Our engineers years ago admitted in a publicly available online presentation that our preferred junction design dubbed by pesky cycle advocates as Dublin-style junctions do not work the way we expected them to. Years later, we now accept this as a council, she said. She said: We were following our motto that the obedience of the citizens produces a happy city, but our citizens are not that obedient and keep using our lovely designs the wrong way.Hathaway said: We now accept that we dont know better than the Dutch at how to design cycle routes. We will now look to follow best international practices with some rather than using convoluted junction design, which poorly serves all road users.IMAGE: Draft plans for the junction with Islandbridge on the Conyngham Road Active Travel Scheme were given an example of a convoluted junction design.She said that the councils approach to date has been trying to signalise the interaction between cycle track and footpath users at some junctions, while mixing all those users on the same surfaces at other junctions was contradictory.IMAGE: Junctions along the Gracefield Road to Vernon Avenue Active Travel, where everything possible is done at one junction, not to use Dutch-like designs because people walking and cycling could not possibly mix without traffic lights to guide them and then at another junction in the same project, where people cycling are directed onto footpaths to make basic turns.It was wrong for us, collectively as a council, to claim to be all for cycling, but continue to propose active travel projects and cycle routes with narrow, sub-standard cycle tracks and convoluted junction designs, said Hathaway.It is expected that the council will now adjust the design of the Gracefield Road to Vernon Avenue Active Travel project again before it goes to construction this summer, and it will also revise the design of the Chapelizod Road and Conyngham Road Active Travel Scheme.Hathaway said: We now accept that the cycle track on the Clontarf to City Centre route is narrower than it could and should have been. We found that officials were wearing noise-cancelling headphones when members of the public repeatedly tried to tell them that overtaking is an issue on the route. IMAGE: Narrow cycle lanes such as those in the current drawings for the Gracefield Road to Vernon Avenue Active Travel project would be a thing of the past a council spokesperson said with the fingers crossed behind their backs.