COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, June 09, 2025

MOTION NO. 13

MOTION: Councillor Joanna Tuffy

That this Council calls on the Chief Executive to review how upcoming Active Travel projects are planned and designed to ensure that they are informed by ground up consultation with Councillors and the local community, the aim being to make our active travel schemes emerge from ground up and be as transparent and democratically accountable as possible

REPORT:

The Active Travel team brings a large number of schemes to consultation each year, these consultations are both statutory and non-statutory and are frequently combined with briefings to Members and Headed Items to Area Committee. When each consultation goes live, a notice is given to internal departments, to statutory consultees and to key stakeholders (such as the PPN).

Schemes that have not yet reached consultation stage are, by their nature, not ready for consultation as sufficient detail has not been developed to enable meaningful consultation. The Cycle South Dublin Programme (CySD), adopted by the Council in 2021, is available on our dedicated Active Travel website (Here; https://www.sdcc.ie/en/active-travel/) which indicates the proposed routes on the programme. Many of these schemes have not been initiated,  are not at the consultation stage yet and have no Active Travel staff assigned to them. The NTA has provided funding of €21.5Million in 2025 to deliver or progress over 40 CySD projects that are currently live and at various stages of the project management lifecycle.

The Active Travel team has continued to improve the type and quality of the consultation material to promote engagement on projects, through regular updates to the members, the promotion of public consultations by the erection of posters along the routes and the delivery of leaflets, promotion of the consultations on all of the SDCC social media platforms, the frequent use of additional non-statutory consultations to gain an understanding of the views of stakeholders, the introduction of virtual consultation rooms as well as the improvement of the drawings, photomontages and images that are available to help people gain an understanding of the various proposals. Further innovations have seen the Active Travel team using virtual fly-through videos to demonstrate how the proposed scheme would look like at the end of the construction period, it is intended to further enhance this approach in future consultations.

The Chief Executive, through the Active Travel team, is committed to public consultation on the progressing Active Travel schemes and will continue to be innovative to achieve optimal engagement.