Safe passing signage.

Many local authorities have availed of funding for the roll-out of safe passing signage from the Dept. Of Transport.
We hope your local authority is one of them.

We have had a few enquiries here recently from individuals wondering about safe passing signage.
This blog covers some background to funding application along with some recommendations as to where to best place these signs.

Our pursuit of cyclist specific dangerous overtaking law involved 3 prongs.
1. The awareness element is now being regularly played of TV and radio. It is also part of the rules of the road.

2. Legislation was delivered in November 2019.

3. The final prong was the roll out of safe passing road signs to act as a permanent reminder to drivers of their responsibilities when overtaking people on bicycles.

We felt that it was crucial to get this signed off and ultimately funded by the Dept. Transport rather than trying to get some cash strapped local authorities to follow Wexford Co Co & Fingal Co Co to individually roll out these.
I had done some presentations to local authorities and despite some early traction none of them ultimately followed the lead.

Safe Overtaking for Cyclists Signage

Circular RST 04/2019, relating to new signage concerning the Safe Overtaking Width for Cyclists, was issued to all Local Authorities on the 19th of December 2019. The circular was accompanied by 2 appendices –

Appendix 1 – Extracts relating to the new signs/supplementary plates from the Traffic Signs Manual (TSM).Appendix 2 – Advice Note on the implementation of the new signs/supplementary plates.

In conjunction with the appendices, Local Authorities were requested to conduct a review and submit returns outlining their unit requirement and the costs involved in the new signs within their jurisdiction.

It is our belief that 19 out of the 31 local authorities applied for this funding. These are the 12 of the ones that we know of at this stage.

Clare, Cork County, Donegal, Limerick, Longford, Mayo, Meath, Offaly, Roscommon, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford, Sligo.

We know that Mayo and Sligo have now received funding and we have no reason to believe why other authorities that applied for this haven’t received their allocation by now too.

My advice to everyone is to make contact with your council’s Road safety officer or Director of services to see where they are at regarding this.
My (hopefully unfounded) fear would be that this funding might get repurposed at a time when some councils are struggling for funding.
If your council didn’t bother to apply in the first place, you need to ask them why they didn’t consider cyclist safety as part of their remit.

If your council has secured funding and wondering where exactly to put these signs, there will be some limitations as to where they can go;
Each engineering area will be need to examine each location in accordance with the Traffic Signs Manual and the advice note.  For example if a solid white line exists in the centre of the road which makes it impossible to provide an overtaking distance without illegally crossing the white line and thereby providing conflicting messages and creating potentially unsafe situations.

Once these are established, then I believe that we can get the best use of these signage by placing them outside some local councillor’s home area…NOPE!


For this we need to go to data preferably from the following two sources:

I would suggest starting with this strava heat map (Link below) and identifying areas where most cyclists ride in your county.

Just hit the bicycle symbol and navigate to your county and that’ll give you a first decision based on data

https://www.strava.com/heatmap#7.00/-120.90000/38.36000/hot/all

In addition to this, the Road safety Authority issued a map of cyclist collisions 2005-2016.

https://www.google.com/mymaps/viewer?mid=1PpqLW_G84YQc26WQ1fFMFifHNfAz3fys&hl=en_GB

Using a combination of both these links will help with best placement of these signs.