Mr. Brian Coll:

I will give one or two examples. We talk about modal shifts and things being long-term. We heard Mr. Neary talk about metrics and accountability. We cannot improve what we cannot measure. We have no measurement of traffic in Ireland today and we do not know if things are easing, slow, bad or heavy. We need to get a metric in place. If we are talking about journey times on key routes, that would be a success because it would drive changing behaviour.

Let us look at modal shifts. The 1986 census showed that 46% of people travelled to work in their cars. In 2016, 65% travelled to work in their cars. We are now saying that we will miraculously reverse that trend over the next 20 years and shift everyone back again. I support the initiatives but the data do not show that. That is what I am talking about today. Another example is incentivising people to share cars. The Seamus Quirke Road in Galway is a 2 km stretch of road that cost us €15 million or more to build. It took nine years from when planning was granted. Currently its bus lane does not allow carpooling. There have been decisions made at Galway City Council and there was a vote not to open it to carpooling. Was the decision driven by opinion or data? We can only conclude it was driven by opinion because we do not have data.

The only way we could identify whether carpools will work on that lane is to baseline the data. What is the journey time from Threadneedle Road to Tuam Road? Currently the free-flow time on that route is nine minutes, driving legally at 6 o'clock in the morning. The evening traffic time is about 45 minutes, which is a 500% increase. It should be somebody's job to get it from 45 minutes to nine minutes. We may never get to nine minutes but perhaps we will reduce it to a 200% increase. One of the things we could do is baseline it. We know what it takes today and we can have much more real-time data. We could open it up for two weeks to carpooling because a lot of people drive that route. If 50% of people who drive that route decide to drive around to their friend's houses and pick those people up, there would be half the number of cars on the route. We could also continue the bus lane. There are seven buses an hour scheduled on that route. That is what we keep it open for. There are two lanes going the whole way out to Parkmore but we do not have bus lanes out there because the buses do not go across the bridges. That could be considered. We want to use the data, technology and tools to make data-driven decisions. That way we will know they are the right decisions.