Photo: A still from Louth County Council’s video proposal of the Rathmullan Road Scheme
By Noel Hogan
Noel Hogan, Chairperson of the Drogheda Cycling Group, has called for urgent progress on active travel infrastructure in the town, saying delays are impacting daily life for residents and holding back safer, more sustainable transport options.
The recent jumps in energy costs are affecting us all, but it need not be this way. It’s worth taking time out to imagine an alternative.
Drogheda is like much of Ireland, with its growth designed around the use of the private car. Now that dependency on cars is coming back to bite us, time that could have been spent with family instead surrendered to sitting in traffic jams, ill health from a sedentary lifestyle (not to mention from pollution from cars), death and injury caused by frequent collisions on Ireland’s lightly policed roads and now the soaring cost of fuel caused by war in the middle east.
It’s worth taking a moment to imagine an alternative Drogheda, where we extended the DART to MacBride Station decades ago. Where we built bus lanes so cross town buses aren’t stuck in traffic as they crawl from Southgate to Ballymakenny. Where we created safe and segregated cycle lanes so people don’t need their car for short journeys (like children cycling to school). If we had done this, we would have been protected from the worst of this oil price shock (and does anyone think that this will be the last of its kind?)
Some might get depressed that we didn’t do this decades ago. But there is no need to get depressed. There is no reason whatsoever that we cannot do this. All that is needed is political will.
Louth County Council is responsible for the provision of at least one of these solutions, safe, segregated cycling routes in and around Drogheda. Yet five years on from the launch of the Pathfinder Programme (where Councils were provided with generous funding to build cycling infrastructure) almost nothing has been done.
It’s notable that the few developments that have taken place (the link from Rathmullan Road to the Boyne Greenway, the cycle lanes near Drogheda Educate Together school) have been built by Meath County Council. The rate of progress in terms of active travel in Louth has been described as “glacial” by councillors. It need not be. The experience of other Councils has shown that when the will is there, improvements can be delivered in a reasonable time frame.
We can go on as we are (and be badly impacted by events like the current war, induced fuel price shock), or we can adopt and change our approach to insulate ourselves from this.
We in the Drogheda Cycling Group have been engaging positively with Councillors, Council Officials and others. We have made submissions and have published our own proposals for a better Drogheda. It’s time for the Council to end the delays and implement the Active Travel schemes that the town badly needs.
