Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I do not doubt that the National Transport Authority wants to promote cycling. I agree with Mr. Creegan that the BusConnects project offers us a real opportunity to get the radial routes and hopefully some orbital routes as well, but we should not underestimate the real difficulty of that. To date we have seen, for example, on the Clontarf route the difficulty in getting that right and not giving sufficient priority to cycling in the final design. Let us look at what the design does. Even if we do that, we also need other infrastructure, which is really high quality segregated and separate to the low network cycling. A coastal cycle route on the south side would have significant benefit in terms of commuting traffic, as well as leisure and other routes. It is the same along the Grand Canal and the Dodder, Liffey, Tolka and Santry rivers. Those off-road routes are significant pieces of infrastructure and the reality is no progress is being made on those major projects. There has not been and it has stalled for five years.

I am very supportive of the BusConnects project although in certain instances, and I mentioned the Rathfarnham one, I as a local politician, just recognise the reality. The roadway is a main corridor artery and is 9 m to 10 m wide but it is proposed to put a high-quality bus route and a high-quality cycle route on either side, which will require 7 m to 8 m from the 9 m to 10 m road. All the roads are full of traffic coming from the outside where the volume is going to increase because we are further upgrading the outer road to attract people into the city. I have been fighting for this for 25 years and have been sitting down with the engineers and the design teams and I know how much design work it takes. I would take every single engineer who is working in TII on the inter-urban motorway projects on the edge of the city off those projects and would bring them into the city and get them working on that project. If that were to happen, I would say it is for real but that is not what is happening. When I talk to people on the ground and ask them if they have the engineers, draughtsmen and resources at local authority level to deliver at the absolute urgency we need, the answer is no. We are still in the old system, where our money and our engineers work on the outer urban motorways to attract traffic into Dublin and the truth is that we are not addressing the really difficult engineering problem to retrofit a bus and cycling high-quality infrastructure into a city that is the target for all these long-distance commuters who have only one choice, namely, to drive because that is the only mode we have invested in. That is why I am so frustrated.