Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late. I was chairing another meeting. I thank the Chair and committee members for agreeing to hold this meeting. This is an important issue that affects every city, town and village in Ireland. We all want to have safer roads for everybody, including car users. When car users step out of their cars, they become pedestrians, perhaps holding a child's hand. This is for our children, pedestrians, cyclists and grandparents walking round the streets. We want our streets and towns to be nice places for people to go. If we had slower speeds in our towns, not only would they be safer, they would also become quieter. A road with a 30 km/h speed limit is much quieter than a road with a 50 km/h, 60 km/h or 80 km/h speed limit. The noise where there are higher speed limits creates an unpleasant, unwelcoming place for people to go. If our streets are not welcoming, it is bad for local business, which is bad for a town and eventually sucks the life out of it. As we become more car-dependent, we end up in a negative loop where we all get in our cars to drive out of town, which sucks the life out of our towns. This is primarily about road safety for everybody.

There is a guidance document on setting speed limits from the Department of Transport. When I was a member of the local authority in Wicklow, we had a blanket 30 km/h zone for residential housing estates incorporating culs-de-sac.

That was important and it was important to put the signs up, but there were many highly residential roads in my area with the same characteristics as housing estate cul-de-sac roads, being narrow with parking on both sides and much footfall, to which the blanket 30 km/h speed limit could not be applied. There was potential to include slow zones that required interaction between neighbourhoods, but you could not just put up 30 km/h signs. Does the guidance document need to be changed?