Workers’ Party Councillor Ted Tynan has criticised plans to increase the speed limit on the North Ring Road from the existing 50 kilometre per hour maximum to 60kph.
Cllr. Tynan said the North Ring Road was not a proper ring road and had been constructed in the 1980s as a compromise route due to the shortage of funds for a proper by-pass road.
He said, “There is a vast difference between the South Ring Road and its Northern counterpart. There is no comparison in fact. The North Ring Road is the only access for dozens of housing estates and quite a number of individual houses. It is impossible for traffic to flow freely and it is bumper-to-bumper most of the time. To increase the speed limit is looking for trouble”.
The Mayfield based councillor said that at present residents along the route of the North Ring Road have a nightmare scenario trying to leave their parks or return home. Hundreds of trucks trundle along the road every hour and crossing into estates is a lethal undertaking. “To increase the speed limit even further will inevitably lead to more collisions many of which are likely to lead to serious injury or worse”.
Cllr. Tynan has called for creation, as an interim measure, of yellow-box junctions at the entrance of four main estates at Boyne Crescent, Corrib Lawn / Ballinderry, Glencree / Gweedore, Lagan Grove / Shannon Lawn. “I will also be calling on the City Council to make provision in 2018 for the installation of traffic lights at these junctions. The North Ring Road was never designed to take the present levels of traffic and it is not, by any standard, a proper ring road. The Council should cancel the planned speed increase and take into account the safety and convenience of the people who live along this route. The long-term solution of course will have to be the construction of a real ring road, with proper slip-roads and overpasses on the northern periphery of the city. This is even more urgent now in the light of the planned boundary extension. This, in my view, is more important than a new Cork-Limerick motorway which will only increase pressure on the North Ring”, said the Workers’ Party councillor.