Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Only in Ireland could we have a Bill entitled the Roads Bill where the subject matter is almost exclusively railways. It says something about how we collectively think about transportation - it is all about moving vehicles rather than moving people and goods. That is not just a recent pattern; it has been the traditional pattern, but it needs to change. It has certainly been evident from the 1960s onwards.

If we really studied it we would see that it is part of the problem in respect of how we develop and the additional infrastructure that we require as a consequence of a very scattered settlement pattern. Transport is very important. The merger of the Railway Procurement Agency, RPA, and the National Roads Authority, NRA, will be significant. There has been disproportionate expenditure over the decades on road, as opposed to rail transport. I hope that the merger will inject some new thinking but we cannot take that for granted. The Government and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport must give a lead.

The renaming and amalgamation of the RPA and NRA to form the transport infrastructure service will hopefully go some way towards creating new thinking but it would be useful to reflect on the present culture of the NRA. I have some concerns about that. Anyone who has tried to deal with the NRA knows that it is an impossible organisation to penetrate and very difficult to hold to account. It is a Teflon organisation. I hope there will not be added responsibility in the new organisation without the kind of accountability we require. A change in culture is essential, with the merger. An example of my concern is the shadow tolling clause on the M3 in 2006. This was withheld from public consultation. In effect, the NRA guaranteed the vehicle numbers on the motorway but when they did not materialise up to €30 million of taxpayers’ money was paid to the developers of part of the road. For them it was a win-win-win situation. They won the contract, the profit from building the road and they won again from the taxpayer when the vehicles did not materialise. That, unfortunately, is just one example. We have to do things differently. The NRA was at the helm, making that type of decision. The RPA has suffered over the years from having a great deal of expertise but very little capital to develop critical projects. Will there be a scrap between road and rail within the new agency? Where will the balance lie?

In the early 1990s I was a member of the Dublin Transportation Initiative, which was set up to develop several models for land use and transport planning. The model ultimately developed was the worst case scenario and was not one of the well thought-out and fleshed-out models that would have matched land use and transportation planning. That is part of the reason for the dispersed settlement pattern in which people travel great distances to work and land banks were held by a few. European funding was sought at the time because the greater Dublin area was seen as being at a huge disadvantage due to the serious problem of traffic congestion. We were told it made us very uncompetitive. The greater Dublin area was the driver of much of the industrial development in the country and it was critically important to deal with that. More than 20 years since that initiative and since European funding was leveraged to assist in dealing with that congestion, we do not have the vital piece of infrastructure, the interconnecter that would be the game-changer. If the National Transport Authority has the upper hand and continues to be dominated by the roads lobby and to spend money on roads that deficiency will continue and we will have an uncompetitive arrangement.

The big amalgamations of the railways took place from the 1920s on. Prior to that, the system had developed from private funds throughout the nineteenth century when it was seen as the biggest form of investment. We ended up with three railway headquarters, Broadstone, Kingsbridge and Amiens Street. That was illogical then but it is even more illogical now, given the numbers who need to use it. Connecting it would not only be of significant benefit to the city but would have a national benefit, particularly for the counties on the periphery of Dublin, of which Meath, Kildare and Wicklow are the nearest. We need to develop a transport system that is efficient and makes us competitive. We talk of being competitive in respect of wages but the waste of valuable time when people sit in traffic jams needs to be factored in too.

When we consider the total investment in transportation initiatives we must look at the whole picture, which is not confined to cost but includes impact on air and noise quality and on accident rates. A good rail-based public transport system would bring serious improvements because it would take people off congested roads, assuming we produce a high quality rail infrastructure. The Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport produced some figures on the cost of a fatality. It does cost-benefit analyses all the time. The cost is approximately €1.5 million per fatality, without speaking of the human cost.

This merger may reduce the number of quangos but what is its object in re-balancing how we move people and goods? Our system should not have a disproportionate bias towards the NRA, at the expense of investment in public transport, in whatever guise that takes. I have concerns about that and about the culture within the NRA. It will not be acceptable to proceed in such a way that something like the shadow tolling can happen, at gigantic cost. The cost of introducing the free medical card for children under six was calculated at €37 million but when one sees the amount of money transferred from this State into the pockets of developers through shadow tolling one sees the opportunities lost. We must make sure that does not happen in future.

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