Local authorities will be breathing a collective sigh of relief following the decision by the Court of Appeal on Dublin City Council’s Sandymount cycleway scheme.
They had been holding their breath for quite a while. The High Court had in July 2021 ruled in a case taken by city councillor Mannix Flynn and a representative of a Sandymount residents’ group, that the council should have obtained planning permission to run a six-month trial of the Strand Road route, which it had proposed to do the previous March.
The council appealed this ruling and the Court of Appeal heard the case in June 2022. In February 2023 the court said it was reserving judgement for a later date. That later date finally came last week when it ruled that the High Court had been wrong to determine the cycle scheme required planning permission.
It is not that local authorities around the State will have had particularly strong feelings about whether 2.5 km of cycle path in a South Dublin suburb went ahead. However, the principle at the centre of this case was one that had to be preserved if local authorities were to have any hope of rolling out active travel projects effectively.
The case hinged on whether the council needed planning permission to run the trial cycle route, or could use its own executive powers, specifically section 38 of the 1994 Road Traffic Act. This is the legislation which empowers councils to implement safety and traffic-calming measures such as speeds bumps, chicanes, protective bollards, and pedestrianisation or traffic restriction schemes, without having to go through a planning process.
It is true that the Strand Road scheme would have been out the other side of a planning process in the time it took the courts to reach a determination in this case, but again that is not the point.
Much is made of the limited powers of local authorities’ elected representatives – city and county councillors. However, the council management is also severely restricted in what it can do, as evidenced by the laborious process any council has to go through to develop social housing, which requires multiple references back to central government.
While sending traffic calming schemes through the planning process may look like greater democracy, in reality it would just be a way of tying the hands of local authorities and clogging up the system. What is more likely is that these initiatives would be abandoned altogether.
More broadly, the proper role of local authorities needs to be recognised in any measures to expedite and improve the delivery of key housing and other infrastructure. Local planning needs to operate better in a wider national framework – but it must still have a vital role and the local authorities need to be resourced to deliver on this.
