Athy set to ban HGVs from town in the New Year

A HGV ban in the centre of Athy is expected “early in the new year” after a motion at this month’s municipal district meeting was wholly agreed with by the area engineer.

Cllr Aoife Breslin had asked that ‘the council investigates all measures, including a HGV ban, to remove them from the N78 – the main street of Athy’. Surprisingly, this was very quickly agreed with by Dara Conlon, the acting senior engineer at the Transport Section of Kildare County Council.

“Kildare County Council are in agreement that this should be investigated as a priority,” he said in his formal reply to cllr Breslin. “Works are ongoing to prepare drawings for a HGV ban and will be circulated to the members in due course.” Despite the €40 million bypass – or the N78 Southern Distributor Route, as it is formally known – being open for almost exactly a year, there is still an unnecessary number of heavy goods vehicles making their way through the centre of town.

The motion’s author, cllr Aoife Breslin, agreed that the cause was probably satnavs not being properly reprogrammed to include the one-year-old new road on their databases.

“I don’t think Google Maps have updated to inform satnavs of the Southern Distributor Route,” she said, “but there is a build-up of HGVs still coming through the town. I appreciate that some deliveries have to be made into the centre, but we spent €40m on a new road for specific purposes – to take the traffic out of town,” she said.

“We need to do it, particularly on the Duke Street stretch. The path there is disintegrating, and if you were sticking out at all, you’d be gone.

“The council has applied to Transport For Ireland (TFI) or Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), or one of them, to do remedial work on Duke Street, or Main Street as we know it, to improve pedestrian access in the middle of the town. The traffic flow here at either the charity shop or outside solicitor Jacqui McManus’s office, particularly if there’s two HGVs meeting, you’re snookered. Some of those refrigerated lorries are huge.

“I’d expect this ban very quickly, maybe some time in the New Year.

“There’s no reason to be coming through town, and if you’ve no drops in Athy, you’ve no business being in town. We spent a fortune on a road that for years we’d been crying out for. Let’s use it properly, because that’s what it’s there for,” she concluded.

Kildare County Council has been approached for a formal comment but had not responded by the time we went to press.