Dublin was founded by Vikings, who sailed their wooden ships from
the Irish Sea up the River Liffey to the River Poddle and found a
defensible body of water that they called Dubh Linn, black pool. They
built a stone wall that later became a castle, and today the black
pool is a garden in the castle complex. The river that fed it now
runs underground, and on the surface roam thronging hordes not of
Vikings, but of tourists. The central quarters are packed with
visitors who believe in this party capital's power to bring the fun
(or at least the Guinness and traditional music). Hen and stag
parties from the UK mingle with Croatian soccer fans as big blue and
yellow buses lumber past and small cars wind through the curving city
streets. A bike share system called
Dublin Bikes has been installed,
and I saw many people braving the densely packed traffic on
public bikes.
With local bicycle planning consultant and sociology PhD student
Damien Ó Tuama as my guide, I spent a day in late August biking
around Ireland's biggest city. I felt very fortunate to spend time
with such a knowledgeable participant in Dublin's bike movement. I
encountered many of the same bicycle infrastructure designs and
dilemmas that I know from the west coast of the U.S. I learned some
vocabulary:
Bike advocate = Cycle campaigner
Speed bump = Ramp
Bike lane = Mandatory or non-mandatory cycle track, cycle lane
Right of way = Priority
The travel-on-the-left thing made me feel totally disoriented, so
I followed Damien closely on the sturdy hybrid he'd lent to me for
the occasion. Bike lanes sometimes ran over double yellow lines, what
to me look like the divider between different directions of travel,
which here indicate no parking zones.
I had asked Damien before our trip if bike commuters in Dublin
find routes that run roughly parallel to major streets to avoid heavy
traffic like we do in the U.S. Turns out, in a radial rather than
gridded city, this method is less feasible, at least close into the
center. In the suburbs, where there are wider streets, the situation
is different.
The city's ancient core has narrow streets that will not
accommodate much widening, so bicyclists share space on major
routes into the city with cars and buses, with the right to ride in
bus lanes when available (though not in contraflow bus lanes). Since
the buses are generally double deckers, this made me feel pretty
small when they passed us.
Coming from the U.S., I really enjoyed seeing so many bus lanes. In many
cases I saw that on streets wide enough for three lanes, there was
one car travel lane on each side and a bus lane in the direction of
the city center. Damien explained that the bus lanes had allowed for
more certainty about travel times, which encouraged more people to
use buses.
In LA, I remember people acting like adding a bus lane on Wilshire
was tantamount to heresy. Burn the bus lane witch! Bike advocacy and
planning mean something different in landscapes where there are
already many people using public transit by choice.
Dublin allows taxis to use bus lanes as well. They deregulated
their taxi industry in 2000, and there are approximately 13,000 cabs
on the roads now. Their cabs are much smaller than the hulking yellow
sedans we use in America for such purposes, but I noticed similar
driver behavior there, with the cabbies darting and swerving as they
attempted to bend space and time to get passengers to their
destinations.
Here was a familiar thing: despite the infeasibility of developing
a city-wide cycle network on narrow streets, Dublin's city planners
have decided that installing separated bike/ped facilities is an
important symbol of participation in a global sustainable transport
culture. They, too, look to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, just like New
York, which has installed a number of Northern European-style
separated bike facilities in the last few years.
The Grand Canal Cycleway is Dublin's shiniest piece of new
infrastructure. It follows the Grand Canal waterway, with signalized
crossings at busy streets. It stops and starts oddly, with confusing
signals sometimes applying to peds and bikes, sometimes to one or the
other (apparently pedestrians are not supposed to use some portions,
though they do anyway, especially at crossing points).
The cycleway
has Ireland's first bicycle-only signals.
We passed a tram station that connected with the Grand Canal path. The station was on a newly opened line that had been built along an old
tramway, where they'd had to rebuild a number of bridges that had been torn down many years ago. More evidence of global
trends in transport infrastructure: people turned on streetcars here,
too, and now we're all having to rebuild things our great
grandparents took for granted.
Following the Grand Canal took us into a redeveloped industrial area that had the
same kind of glass and steel lofts that I see in every city. It
lacked a distinctive character, but maybe that will come with time as
people move into the empty spaces? Personally I fail to see the
appeal of such uniformity, but I think others might see it as a
meaningful symbol of participation in a modern global economy.
The bike lanes are divided into “mandatory,” which means they
are always restricted to motorists, and “non-mandatory,” which
means motorists can drive or park on them during certain hours.
Up
until very very recently, cyclists had to use cycle tracks (with the
correct statutory signage) where they were provided, and this has now
changed due to more than ten years of focused campaigning. Hooray for
bike advocates!
I also saw a lot of what I would call “bike boxes” and what
Damien called “advanced stop lines” painted before intersections
at stop lights. Apparently these have been around for about ten years
without necessarily educating drivers about sharing the road; many or
even most motorists just pull up into them.
One piece of infrastructure I learned about that has had a big
impact on road safety is the Port Tunnel, a major project that
removed HGVs (heavy goods vehicles) from Dublin's city center. In the
period from 1996-2000, 13 of 18 total bicyclist deaths involved HGVs.
Damien told me that pedestrian and cyclist fatality numbers have
dropped dramatically since the opening of the tunnel rerouted most
freight traffic away from the city's quays and city center routes,
combined with the initially controversial lowering of the speed limit
to 30km/h (17 mph) within the city center (
stats up to 2007 can be found here).
Damien gave me insight into the human
infrastructure that makes cycling in Dublin easier, showing me the
passages and routes that were not marked with signs. At one point, we
biked between the rails on a tramway. Cycle campaigners in Dublin
have been lobbying to change one way streets there into two way for
bicyclists and buses, but for now navigating can be complicated due
to the lack of parallel streets.
We stopped to admire the Samuel Beckett
bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava, a characteristically graceful
structure that looked like a massive harp made of bone. Damien
pointed out how much of the bridge's space had been given over to
bicyclists, pedestrians, and buses (the lane to the left of the car
pictured is a bus lane, and there is another in the opposite
direction).
As usual, exploring a new city on a
bike showed me things I hadn't noticed while riding the bus or
walking around, and the feeling of getting comfortable on an
unfamiliar bike kept my attention to my bodily experience of the
afternoon. I saw many kinds of people biking in Dublin, from students
to workers to people with babies. They clearly have a strong advocacy
movement, centered at the all-volunteer
Dublin
Cycling Campaign, which has been growing for 20 years. I was glad
to see that their bike advocates are working with the shape of the
city as it exists now, rather than imagining that massive shifts in
infrastructure are necessary to increase the numbers of bike
commuters. And innovations in Dublin have an impact on the rest of
the country, Damien told me, where there is less biking in rural
areas than in cities. I was about to see for myself what it was like
to live carfree in a place like rural Donegal Town.