I recently got my wife to drive from Inchicore to Rathgar as I had to drop my bicycle in for a service there and needed a lift home. It was a Saturday afternoon, so traffic was relatively light, but I was able to keep up with her along the way, and our journey times were the same, even though she stopped short of Rathgar Village to avoid particularly slow motor traffic at that point,

These are the 19th and 20th Century suburbs of Dublin: the places that were built when horses and carts, walking and cycling were the best way to get around. In fact many of the homes were not designed for car parking and many of the roads don’t have the width for high volumes of mixed traffic.

A whole circle of the city, from the M50 into the canals is similar, with the Herbert Simms houses in a semi-circle from Cabra to Terenure built from the 1930s onwards, and more or less the same density across the other areas. As these were not houses built for the landed gentry they have space for bicycles, but otherwise you are better off catching the bus. The squeezing in of multiple cars to households, particularly in recent times with the bloating in size of these cars, has caused challenges.

The thing is, that these parts of the city developed with all the services, schools, employment and shops that were (and are) needed, making these parts of our city ideal for a 15 minute life – if only there were less cars in the way holding up the buses!

Being within 10km of the city centre, for the most part, there is a lot that can be done to ensure that most residents here have to spend 30 minutes at most getting in to town. Because of the over reliance on the private car, however, all the main arteries are congested and a network of well established minor roads which have become well established “rat-runs” since the 1980s, are just as slow and congested.

We need some radical action. The new default 30kmh zones, the revamped orbital buses and the bus priority measures with Bus Connects are going to help, particularly if they are implemented, supported and enforced. We need to tackle the scourge of footpath parking – something the council and Gardai have turned a blind eye to and allowed worsen for two decades. We might have to start restricting what kind of cars people can bring in to these areas (ban the “Ranelagh Tractor”) and incentivising people (more) not to have cars, and not to use them.

That might mean in some parts, which are further away from village centres that we need more casual trading: supermarkets have caused consolidation of shopping habits, bringing with them traffic chaos (e.g. Ashleaf in Crumlin, Rathfarnham SC) and grocery deserts (Chapelizod) turning this on its head by bringing greengrocers or fishmongers back, even on a one day a week basis to all parts of the city so that everyone can “pop out to get the messages” without needing to power up 2 tonnes of a steel machine, and then park it in a big car park. Individual action to change our shopping habits back to small independent retailers can help this too – those who can afford it should be the first to leave behind the discount supermarkets, but you will be surprised at the saving you can make at local butchers and greengrocers, and these can be packaging free too – saving you again on bin charges.

School patronage and offering needs to be better planned too. Traffic multiplies exponentially on school days, and part of this is the uneven spread of school places – children living in Inchicore looking for non-denominational secondary school places must travel to Sandymount. For secondary education through Irish, they can try Cabra, Rathfarnham or Clondalkin.

Undoubtedly, traffic coming into the city in general from places further out is a huge factor affecting quality of life here – more park and ride or park and bike facilities are needed along the M50, linking with public transport. We need a serious study of where the drivers circling the city on the canal ring, Griffith & Collin’s Avenues and other orbital routes around the city are actually trying to go. We then need to find ways of changing their modes of transport.

From Sandymount in a big circle to Clontarf has always been the best place to live in Dublin. The City Council have a huge role in making this the 15 minute city that it can be, but that’s going to need people to change. The cycling and public transport revolution is part of this. We can have a better, healthier life for all of us, but we have to try!