An Irish Planning Students Blog

A ROAD safety and traffic management measure that would have meant hundreds of large lorries removed from Dublin city streets daily has been set aside because the city council has no budget for the plan.

Despite the success of a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) ban introduced following the opening of the Dublin Port Tunnel, the council said it does not intend to go ahead with its planned extension to four-axle vehicles at present. It said the extension would cost €3 million over the next five years.

The Road Safety Authority (RSA) last night said it was disappointed by the decision.

The HGV management strategy introduced in February 2007 banned lorries of five axles or more from the city streets between 7am and 7pm. The measure was to have been extended to four-axle lorries this year.

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THE NUMBER of large lorries using the Dublin Port Tunnel has halved in the last two years according to figures from Dublin City Council.

The tunnel, which brings vehicles from the M1 to Dublin Port avoiding the city centre, opened in December 2006 and has had a steady increase in use by four- and five-axle lorries to a peak of 7,044 a day in August 2007.

The number of lorries taking the tunnel has since declined sharply to an average of just 3,582 a day in August 2009.

Five-axle lorries taking the tunnel fell by 42 per cent from 5,246 a day in August 2007 to 3,013 last August. The reduction in the numbers of four-axle vehicles using the tunnel has been greater still with 1,797 a day taking the route at the peak, down to 569 – a drop of almost 70 per cent.

However, the decline in use of the tunnel is not a result of large lorries taking to the city streets. Dublin City Council said traffic counts at North Wall Quay, East Wall Road, and Seán Moore Road, the three routes lorries would previously have used to reach the port, revealed a reduction of up to 96 per cent in five-axle vehicles and 83 per cent in four-axle vehicles using the city streets since the opening of the route up to last September.

This decline coincides with the council’s ban on five-axle lorries in the city from 7am to 7pm.

However the reduction has also been recorded during night time hours and the prohibition does not apply to four-axle vehicles which can use the city streets at any time.

The reduction appeared to be a “reflection of the economic and particularly construction downturn”, the council said.

IrishTimes

The Irish Waste Management Association (IWMA) today claimed the proposed Poolbeg incinerator was “grossly oversized” relative to waste needs and called for an urgent review of the project.

The IWMA was releasing the findings of an independent report on the facility it commissioned.

“The report firmly establishes that the facility is grossly oversized and goes on to clearly demonstrate that a facility with a capacity of 250,000 to 300,000 tonnes per annum would be more than adequate to meet Dublin’s requirements until at least 2037 for residual waste management,” a statement from the IWMA said.

The proposed Dublin City Council (DCC) incinerator, in which Covanta and Dong Energy are commercial partners, would be one of the largest such facilities in Europe having an annual capacity to treat almost 600,000 tonnes of waste for a population of approximately one million people, the IWMA said.

“Given that we produce on average 750kg of waste per head per annum this means that DCC and Covanta/Dong Energy will have to burn almost 80 per cent of our waste arising in Dublin to fill the plant, something that no other developed society does.”

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