Mr. Conor Faughnan:

I thank the Chairman and other members for the opportunity to address the joint committee. The AA is Ireland’s motoring organisation. It has acted as a lobbyist for motoring interests and in a leadership role supporting road safety and progressive transport policies for over 100 years.

The AA provides roadside breakdown cover for about 300,000 Irish motorists and attends well in excess of 100,000 roadside breakdowns every year. It is also a significant provider of insurance being the largest intermediary in Ireland providing motor, home and travel insurance. The AA employs about 450 people in Ireland, of whom about 350 work in Dublin city centre, in two buildings in South William Street. We are also well known for providing traffic and travel information via AA Roadwatch.

The AA is well placed to see how Dublin has been affected by its traffic and transport challenges over the years. While we are a lobbying organisation, the AA does not just represent cars but also the people in them. AA members are not just motorists, they are also citizens. They use public transport, they commute and they work. Some 10% of AA members identify themselves as regular cyclists, including myself. We do not like the false position of thinking of car users versus bus users versus cyclists, as if they were sworn enemies. Everyone has an interest in getting transport right.

Dublin is my city and I am proud of it. It is a fantastic place in which to live, work and raise a family. Our quality of life is excellent. However, we have made a number of strategic mistakes on transport and I fear that we are in danger of repeating them.

Our city with a population of approximately 1.5 million suffers more from congestion than it should do for a city of its size. Compared to places like Munich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen, it has a transport system that is relatively inefficient, unpredictable and frustrating. The lazy diagnosis for this is that we have too many cars or that we have a population that is unwilling to use trains or buses. However, that simply is not true. That can be demonstrated by the fact that every public transport asset we have is full at peak times. It is not as if individuals are refusing to get on the DART or Luas, quite the reverse. We have some good quality public transport that passes through some of the most affluent suburban areas in the entire country, yet in those areas individuals readily take to public transport when it is good.

When I say that the current situation is underfunded and poorly planned, I do not mean that to sound disrespectful to Dublin Bus or to the other existing public transport operators, quite the reverse, as we would be lost without them. However, in peak periods we can just about cater, if one looks at mode-share, for people coming into the city centre. All our public transport assets in combination fall just a bit short of catering for half the commuters. Therefore, the rest have to travel in some other way, which is a recipe for traffic jams.

On any given working morning, just under 200,000 travel into Dublin city centre during rush hour. Of that number, just under 50% take public transport. Some 32% travel by car, which is actually down quite a bit in the last ten years. One bright sign is that cycling is on the way up. It has more than doubled in the last decade but still only accounts for 5% of commuters into the city centre. More and more people are taking to bikes, however, which is obviously good.

In the greater Dublin area, the numbers are even worse in terms of car dependency. Public transport is designed radially so it is even harder to use in the suburbs. The M50 finds itself carrying massive volumes that in most other European cities would be travelling by train or bus. Daily traffic on the M50 is now averaging at about 140,000 vehicles and the motorway is shockingly vulnerable to congestion. A single incident on the M50 can cause major problems through whole sectors of the city on a given morning, and that has happened more than once.

Unfortunately, Dublin has made things worse through poor choices. The most obvious of these is the fact that we have allowed the city to spread out horizontally rather than making best use of space. Back in the boom, a developer with money to spend got a better return building on a greenfield site in Carlow than by filling in a messy site somewhere close to town.

Hence, that is what we got. These new estates further and further out in the new commuter belt are inherently difficult to serve with public transport. Hence, people use cars. This is not the only mistake we made during the Celtic tiger era. I recall that the AA took much criticism at the time for being trenchant supporters of the Port Tunnel and Luas. The estimated cost at the time for the first part of the first two Luas lines and the Port Tunnel was €750 million per project. In the context of the bills we later had to pay, this seems very cheap. It is a pity we did not build a dozen Luas lines in Dublin, six in Cork, three in Galway and plenty more besides when we had the chance. The Port Tunnel has also been an immensely valuable asset to the city in improving road safety, reducing congestion and improving quality of life. We have also been painfully slow to build infrastructure because of delays in the planning process. The M50 took about 30 years to build, a rate of roughly 1 km per year, which is pretty ridiculous when one reflects on it. The first Luas lines opened 11 years after the intention to build the system was announced, which is absurd. We have not heard enough about how and when Government will address the slowness in the planning process, which is an inherent part of the problem.

Having said all that, I try to remain upbeat and I believe that Dublin remains a fantastic place and that there are plenty of positives. The infrastructure improvements we have managed to put in place have been an immense boon to the city. The increase in cycling has certainly helped. In Dublin city centre, traffic congestion, while not great, is better than it was perhaps ten years ago. The congestion tends to be a little further out. As the committee will know, it is proposed to turn College Green into a traffic-free urban space. This is potentially a very good idea once it is nicely designed, and I am inclined to favour it. I would warn, however, that there is too much of a tendency to assume that if one blocks or frustrates car use, this is an objective in itself. As a mindset, this is wrong. I would rather we focused on the positive measures that genuinely offer choice. For example, we suggested about ten years ago that the city should try to encourage multiple-occupancy cars. We put forward a proposal whereby a scheme would be trialled, subject to tight controls as one cannot interfere with the bus service, to allow people to apply for permits to the effect that if one's car had three or more occupants, one would be allowed to use certain bus corridors. One would have to introduce this with great care but, potentially, for every car that signs up to the scheme, two cars could be removed from the road, so we believe this should be tried.

The Dublin Bikes scheme has been highly successful. We supported it from the very start and we support its extension now.

However, after all, Dublin is still a city with no metro and with a chronic public transport deficit. Therefore, realistically, the motor car, which is a much cleaner and greener entity in the 21st century than it was before, will continue to be a very important part of our transport mix. The role of the car should be prominent but not dominant in a vibrant, busy, active and pleasant urban environment.