A date’s been set for the start of a trial one-way system in part of a county Kilkenny town.
From Saturday, October 17 Bridge Street will see traffic moving from its junction with West Street and Mill Street towards its junction with Flaggy Lane and Kilkenny Road.
It’s set to continue that way for 12 months.
Motorists are reminded that they can also use the N76 Callan Bypass.
Councillor Joe Lyons says the mood locally on the topic is good, so far noting “The feeling is fairly positive, Bridge Street is in a long saga with traffic, heavy traffic, and it’s not getting any easier and with the schools over there it’s dangerous, highly dangerous, with young pupils going over and back there so this is a trial exercise with the Kilkenny County Council to get the traffic moving in one way out of the town towards the school and onto the bypass and back around, they’ll try it and see how it works”.
A small number of people have objected to the plan and Cllr Lyons outlines why saying “There’s very few objections and the council looked at all the objections but they’re going to see how it goes and they can easily tweak it and see, there’s a few people on the far side, there’s three housing estates over there and I suppose if you’re coming into the town you’d like to come the shortest route, but you see the shortest route is two-way traffic and that is a headache the whole time and then you have parking on Bridge Street which people kindof had to do, anyone who’s living on it would like to park obviously near their houses, so that was another issue”.
Hope is that the system will help improve the experience for those visiting or shopping in the town as Cllr Lyons adds “Without a doubt yeah and, you see, as well as that we have free parking which is great, not many towns have free parking and like there’s great parking on the Fair Green, at the parish church, up here at Molloy’s on West Street and over in the Abbey Meadow carpark, like there’s plenty of parking around, people just need to walk a little bit extra, a small bit extra, it’s good exercise and they can see the town as well and the whole place is open up, like you have plenty of walkways around and the new Moat walkway is fantastic at the moment and hopefully a lot of that will be continued on, the plan is to eventually link it to Edmund Rice in West Court as a walkway from Callan town out”.
