OBSERVER: New delivery time restrictions in Dublin city centre are well meaning but misguided since they'll clog the streets with vehicles, argues Bernard Murphy

From the end of August, retailers, suppliers, residents and shoppers in the city centre will be the subjects of a large-scale experiment - and most don't even know it yet.

There will be huge costs associated with the experiment - both financial and human - and there is little or no information on what the benefits of this experiment might be.

For the uninitiated, Dublin City Council is imposing a new delivery time restriction on key city centre streets in an area bordered by Parnell Street, Capel Street, George's Street, St Stephen's Green, Merrion Square and O'Connell Street. The restrictions mean that all commercial deliveries on key streets in this area will have to be done between 10 a.m. and noon. Deliveries that would typically have been made over a 10-hour period between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. are now being squeezed into a two-hour window. This is a logistical impossibility.

A group of concerned business organisations - including IBEC, grocery group RGDATA, the Beverage Council of Ireland, the Licensed Vintners Federation and the Food and Drink Federation of Ireland - has tried to convince the city council of the highly simplistic nature of its plans and to seek amendments to the proposals, but to no avail.

The response has been simply to tell suppliers and retailers to conduct their trade during the night, with no consideration of the implications of that shift in delivery patterns.

To fill the research vacuum left by the city council, the group conducted a study among its members to ascertain the scale of the issue facing them.

On the targeted streets in the proposed area:

there is an average of 5,620 commercial deliveries per week, or 936 commercial deliveries per day;

150 premises will be impacted on by the proposals;

the average delivery time per premises is 15-20 minutes.

These figures reflect food and drink deliveries to convenience stores, hotels, restaurants and pubs on the streets involved in the pilot area study.

This level of deliveries itself is considered conservative as not all commercial premises and deliveries affected are captured in the research.

If every business on these streets has to open at night to take deliveries you are looking at a cost of up to €2 million per year in additional staff costs alone. You can at least match that figure on the suppliers' side, and that is before you even begin to consider additional insurance costs, security costs and the obvious physical and noise disturbance for residents in the city.

These costs ultimately end up being met by the customer so the city council's director of traffic, who is behind this experiment, is not just penalising "big business" but he is hitting every consumer straight in the pocket.

In the absence of any genuine consultation with key stakeholders, the proposals are fatally flawed. With no attempt by the city council to quantify the impact of the changes on suppliers, no attempt to measure the costs to retailers and no attempt to evaluate the numbers of increased commercial delivery vehicles required on the street to meet the public's demand for every type of consumer good, we are simply left with an inept ideologically driven experiment that customers and residents will end up paying for.

The only fig leaf of justification for the changes is that it will "improve traffic flow" in the city centre. The director of traffic has never said how this will happen - especially if more vehicles are needed to meet the same delivery schedule - or by how much traffic flow will improve and whether the costs being imposed on customer and business alike are worth the, as yet, unpublished benefits.

During our consultation with different suppliers, they have predicted they will have to quadruple their fleet size (more costs on business) to try to squeeze their deliveries into the two-hour window. How putting more vehicles on the street will improve traffic in the city only the director of traffic might be able to explain.

The beverage council, and the other organisations that have looked carefully at these plans, are now calling on the director of traffic to revise his plans immediately. Extra delivery bays are needed, additional delivery hours are required, better enforcement can help and, ideally, any plans that have as wide ranging an impact as these should be implemented in conjunction with the Dublin Transportation Office's report on heavy goods vehicles in the city which is currently under way.

The current plans represent a very blunt tool seeking to achieve an ill-defined goal.

We all share the city council's objective of "giving the city back to the people" but do not see these plans achieving that.

All that they will achieve is the imposition of extra costs and burdens on retailers, customers, suppliers and city residents, while at the same time putting extra commercial vehicles on the street between 10 a.m. and noon.

Is this what our city fathers really want?

Bernard Murphy is executive director of the Beverage Council of Ireland, which represents the soft drinks industry in Ireland.