248 new jobs are being created to improve walking facilities and cycleways across the country.
The Transport Minister Eamon Ryan says it’s part of the €1.8 billion being spent over the lifetime of the Government.
It’ll help local authorities deliver almost 1,000 kilometres of improved walking and cycling infrastructure by 2025.
Junior Transport Minister Hildegarde Naughton says the staff will be hired in all areas of the country.
Junior Minister and Carlow Kilkenny Green TD Malcolm Nooonan says “Having campaigned for many years on cycling and walking in my own hometown, I think that this investment marks a radical departure in how we configure our urban centres; large and small towards a new way in how we get about. This is the single biggest investment and policy intervention in making that change, in encouraging walking, cycling and use of public transport and in reconfiguring our public spaces away from private car travel”.
He adds that “Through employing dedicated, public realm and modal shift specialists, villages, towns and cities could not only be transformed for mobility but improve air quality, free up urban space from cars and bring vibrancy back to town centres in line with Government’s ‘Town Centres First’ policy” and notes “It is important now that as councils across the country prepare new city and county development plans, that this radical shift in thinking and additional resources are exploited to best advantage’.
While Green Party Kilkenny City Councillor Maria Dollard said that this was a transformative initiative, one that could turn the fortunes of towns around for the good.
She commented “We have witnessed so much decline in our town centres through out of town retail, a move to the suburbs, the moving of services to the periphery; and all the while we thought our solution lay in providing more car spaces. Well it doesn’t and now through the deployment of Active Travel Teams, we can work together to afford equal space to the needs of vulnerable road users and embark on innovative public realm and landscaping plans to green our towns and cities”.
Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing this week of one local councillor’s Greyway vision for South Kilkenny – more on that here
