Sustainable Swords

Project Overview

DBFL delivered the Sustainable Swords Public Realm and Transport Strategy, in collaboration with urban design partners, Nicholas de Jong Associates (NdJ). DBFL closely followed the NTA’s Area Based Transport Assessment (ABTA) methodology to ensure an integrated approach to land use and transport planning. Since the completion of the Strategy, DBFL has been further commissioned by Fingal County Council to assist with the implementation of some of the Strategy’s recommendations.

The Sustainable Swords Strategy was shortlisted for two categories in the Irish Planning Institute (IPI) Awards 2023 – ‘Plan Making’ and ‘Climate Action and Biodiversity’.

Capitalising on the transformational opportunities offered by Metrolink, BusConnects, the reallocation of road space for active travel and public transport through the R132 Connectivity Project, the Strategy focuses particularly on placemaking within Swords Town Centre. One of its key proposals is to reverse the historic shift away from Main Street that commenced in the early 2000s (e.g., relatively high turnover and vacancy rates and movement of smaller premises towards the Pavilions and business parks along the R132 corridor) to facilitate a more resilient, vibrant, inclusive, child friendly and healthy urban environment that will underpin Fingal County Council’s ambitious vision for Swords.

The Challenges

The preparation of the Sustainable Swords Strategy took place in part during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ireland, when many government restrictions were in place. As a by-product to the restrictions and national lockdowns traffic and transport volumes dramatically decreased. All modes of transport and means of travel were affected. Conversely, all journey purposes dropped with mandatory working from home, e-learning and different industries and sectors being closed. This meant that the baseline transport environment from March 2020 was not reflective to pre-covid conventional and traditional traffic and transport conditions. Due to these difficulties, obtaining and basing the modelling framework on 2021 traffic conditions was deemed unacceptable to best practices and standards. As such the baseline year of this assessment was based on historic traffic survey data. DBFL successfully utilised pre-pandemic traffic and journey time surveys to validate assumptions instead.

DBFL used this data to validate travel patterns within the NTA’s Regional Modelling System (RMS) and to build a Local Area Model (LAM) to further inform the Strategy’s evidence base and sense-check the proposals

The Outcome

A key element of the Sustainable Swords project entailed a close working partnership with the An Taisce Green-Schools team who undertook several quantitative surveys and audits in partnership with local schools in and around the Study Area to identify key barriers to walking and cycling to school. This information was supplemented by a simplified Healthy Streets™ DBFL-led audit of some of the key streets within the Study Area. The audit focussed on the perceived walkability and cyclability of the surveyed streets using the ten Healthy Street indicators and was undertaken both by people familiar with the Study Area and remotely by newcomers bringing a “fresh eye” perspective. The information gathered by this process informed the setting of transport objectives and the development of transport options to address shortfalls in walking, cycling and placemaking.
The Study was also informed by collaboration with our multi-disciplinary partners and stakeholders including a Town Centre Health Check, townscape analysis and several parking and traffic surveys that we scoped and commissioned separately on behalf of Fingal County Council (FCC).