Broken traffic lights lead to 'chaos' at Dundalk junction

Cllrs at the Dundalk Municipal District November meeting last week, raised the issue of broken traffic lights at the Xerox junction on the old Dublin Road, as well as at the junction of the Gateway Hotel/DkIT and the Inner Relief Road.

Cllr Yore raised the issue of broken traffic lights at the November meeting, saying that she was at the Crowne Plaza (now known as the Gateway Hotel) a few days prior when the traffic lights were out of order, and there was “absolute chaos” and that it was “a road traffic accident waiting to happen”.

Cllr Yore asked, “can we expediate the traffic light upgrade, I know we got funding, and there's funding allocated in the budget, at the major junctions”.

Cllr Shane McGuinness also spoke on the matter and asked if it was an ESB outage that caused the lights to go out, or was it a fault.

Cllr McGuinness asked that if there is a planned ESB outage, “does the ESB send us a letter letting us know there's going to be an outage within six or seven days?”

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Replying to the councillors, Senior Executive Engineer with Louth County Council, Patrick Callan, said that there were proposals for traffic light upgrades along the Inner Relief Road as part of the Active Travel programme, and that there was money available for additional upgrades for traffic lights at four junctions.

Mr Callan said that the broken traffic lights was called by an ESB outage, that was a planned ESB outage, but Louth County Council had not been aware of it.

He said from his understanding, ESB send through in writing, a notification of areas without power for specific dates but nothing specific for traffic lights. Mr Callan added that he would chase the ESB up on it.

Mr Callan went on to say that there was also issues at the Crowne Plaza junction, where the lights were installed by the same contractor in relation to timing sequences, but believed they should be all ironed out by now.

Cllr Emma Coffey pointed out that she was at the Crowne Plaza junction that morning and the timing issues were not sorted. She said she was concerned as the road was not open at the moment “but when it is, and traffic flowing through, it is causing serious backlog”

Cllr Kevin Meenan commented that the Xerox junction was “very dangerous” and put forward that An Garda Síochána should have been carrying out point duty, having said they would be open to such a move at a previous JPC meeting.

Replying to Cllr Coffey, Mr Callan said that the timings at the junction are under review, adding he also spoke to the contractor that looks after the Gateway junction, and that it was going to continuously be reviewed to ensure it in right order particularly at peak times.

Replying to Cllr Meenan's comments, Mr Callan added that they spoke to An Garda Síochána the previous Friday in relation to point duty, but said gardaí had asked Louth County Council to do it.

He said however, that Louth County Council does not have the facilities to carry it out at a junction of that size, but added that if an outage continued into darkness, then gardaí would have manned the junction, but the lights had been repaired in advance of that.