Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 26 June 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Active Travel and Urban Planning Focusing on Cycling: Discussion

Mr. Brian Deegan:

That is completely in my zone. I am a highway engineer and have been through that journey to thinking about designing around people. That is what I explain to engineers. They are all trained. I do not know the training in Ireland but the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges is fairly international. There are no footways, pedestrian crossings or cycling in it. Everybody comes out trained to deliver roads and bypasses and are highly skilled at doing so and managing them. I then have to tell them that I need to retrain them because they are working on streets with people.

It is the kind of technical way I come in. I say we should design for a child. If a person wants to talk to engineers in their language, he or she will explain how a child sees the world and how the child cannot perceive speeds in areas. As a person grows older, his or her focus gets wider, so a child cannot tell the difference between a car approaching at 40 miles per hour and one approaching at 20 miles per hour because of that. There are articles in medical journals about this. We must think about visibility on the part of a child if we are designing a street because children will be on that street and will want to cross it.

It makes a very strong and compelling case for vehicles travelling at 20 miles per hour and moves against the kind of paradigm that says that if we slow down cars, it is bad for air quality and that we need to keep as many cars as possible moving through the system. We must look at a different design paradigm involving other vehicles. We could talk all day about the cycling design vehicle and how we establish that in practice. That is the technical side, which is a large part of what I do. I retrain engineers. On the political side, that is why I have people like Chris Boardman to help sell the case on a larger policy level. We can start selling it using some of the stuff we have been talking about here like climate change, air quality, regeneration and economic vitality.

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