A bike storage unit put in place in the front garden of a house in north Dublin is now at the centre of a planning dispute after a complaint was made.
Dublin City Council has now effectively ruled against the family involved, saying they cannot keep the unit in their garden. The council says the plastic dome structure, for keeping four bikes, it is out of step with the character of the listed houses on St Lawrence Rd, Clontarf.
On foot of a complaint about the unit – which is installed on a concrete base – the council has ruled the unit would cause “serious injury” to the street, of mostly listed houses. It also said the unit was “unsympathetic” in appearance and added “visual clutter” to the street.
However, the family at the centre of the case is appealing to An Bord Pleanála in the hope they can keep the storage unit. They added they had no idea they would need planning permission, saying they always planned to plant around the unit to obscure it, as they have already done with their wheelie bins.
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The case promises to be something of a watershed as bike storage units are becoming much more popular in Ireland. The outcome of this dispute will have implications for cycling households across Dublin and may also set a precedent for other parts of the country.
Vanessa Pearse, who installed the storage unit in her front garden, said Dublin City Council was currently engaged in a major push to promote cycling, with a two-way segregated cycleway also being installed from Clontarf into the city centre in a bid to encourage cycling.
However, while those efforts were underway, she questioned where people were supposed to store their bikes if they were not allowed by the council to keep them in storage units in their gardens.
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Ms Pearse told The Sunday Times, which first reported on the story yesterday, that four people in her house had bikes, which they brought through their terraced home and kept in a downstairs back room.
She further explained to RTE Radio 1 on Monday that the “dark lane”, into a rear entrance of the property, was unlit. Bikes had also been stolen from the garage at the back of the house, making the storage unit at the front a more attractive option, on safety and convenience grounds.
"I don't like looking at it and I never intended for it to be visible," Ms Pearse said when asked by Claire Byrne on RTE Radio 1 if she accepted that some people might "think it's not pretty on the street".
"When we originally thought of doing it we were visiting our daughter in the Netherlands and saw similar bike storage units. And then I saw one in a front garden in Marino. And I went in and asked them about theirs and they were really enthusiastic about it.
"So I immediately started planning for it but I actually drew up landscaping plans as I planned for it. And so where I positioned it in the front garden was to make sure I could make it disappear (by planting around it). And I was also going to put trellising across the top with climbers so you wouldn't see it even from above."
Ms Pearse said it "never dawned" on her that planning permission would be required. She said there were a large number of storage units, used by people to store their wheelie bins, outside houses in the area, including on her road of listed properties. Those units were not much smaller than her bike unit.
When she applied to the council for "retention" of the bike storage unit, the council ruled against the family, even though landscaping plans were contained in their application.
Ms Pearse added if the family lost their appeal to An Bord Pleanála they would be forced to remove the unit and sell it, though they were very hopeful the board would not take the same view as Dublin City Council.
