Bids to design civic plaza for Dublin’s College Green to be sought within next month

Bids to design a new civic plaza for Dublin’s College Green will be sought within the next month ahead of the introduction of interim traffic reduction measures, Dublin City Council has confirmed.

The phasing out of cars from College Green from next year onwards is included in a list of 30 projects being brought to Cabinet by Green Party leader and Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan.

Council chief executive Owen Keegan said plans to reduce traffic in College Green were part of interim measures developed by the council to take to maximise the benefits of the BusConnects project.

“We intend to appropriate more of the road space and allocate it over to public space and pedestrian space, and that will start next year as the first tranche of bus routes are relocated off the square,” he said.

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“We will still be retaining a traffic lane in both directions, but over the next 18 months we hope to appropriate a lot of the road space and allocate that to pedestrian use, as an interim scheme to capture the benefits of relocating bus routes.”

These plans, which were submitted to Mr Ryan for funding, were “a completely separate traffic management project” to the development of the College Green Plaza, Mr Keegan said.

Contract terminated

The council had been expected to lodge a fresh planning application plaza last year, following the refusal of permission for the project by An Bord Pleanála in 2018, but in November it said the application would be delayed until this year, with a view to starting work in 2024.

However, in recent months it emerged the council had terminated its contract with the plaza’s designers Paul Keogh Architects due to a conflict with EU procurement rules. The council had engaged the architect’s firm more than six years ago to design the traffic-free plaza that was to be the capital’s premier civic space.

In November 2020, plans for the plaza were published, which would have seen the traffic-free zone double in size from that mooted in previous designs, stretching it from College Green to the junction of Dame Street and South Great George’s Street.

Due to the extension of the size of the traffic-free zone, it was decided to readvertise for architects, to comply with EU procurement rules.

The council’s project manager for the plaza scheme, Patricia Reidy, said the changes to the scope meant the council could be at risk of legal challenge if it did not readvertise the design contract. She said she intended to go to tender within the next month and would “establish definitive timelines once that design team has been appointed”.

Mr Ryan’s memo to Cabinet outlines 30 “pathfinder projects” selected across the State as part of his department’s national mobility policy.

Details of the various projects will be unveiled early next week, but Mr Ryan will tell Cabinet the 30 selected are “exemplar projects in cities, towns and townlands” that were submitted by local authorities in response to a call from the Minister for the most transformative public transport and active travel projects that could be delivered by 2025.

Rather than being a funding programme, the pathfinder scheme is a mechanism to ensure the projects can happen quickly. Rapidly rolling out the sustainable mobility policy is understood to be critical to meeting Ireland’s 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.