Mr. Hugh Creegan:

I will address some of Deputy Murphy's queries. She identified the Lucan-city centre corridor, which is the easiest project. For the reasons that she outlined, we expect to improve the project. The route does not have segregated cycling along it and we will take the cyclists out of the bus lanes where we can do so. There are issues at some of the junctions where the bus priority is well back from the junction but buses get delayed by left turning or right turning traffic, as the case may be. The M50 junction is another place where we want to see if we can improve bus movement. There are a number of places where we can improve movement but the corridor already has a reasonably high level of bus priority at the moment. The Deputy could have picked another route and it would be a different story.

We intend to have segregated cycling everywhere possible. We cannot commit to getting it in everywhere because such a plan would prove too ambitious. It would mean we would have to knock down properties in one or two places and, therefore, we have not given such a commitment. We will end up with segregated cycling facilities on the vast bulk of the route, which is good for both cyclists and the bus system. It means that bus drivers do not have to interact with cyclists and vice versa.

We have not applied growth projections to this project but we will in due course. We have a transport model that has been kept up to date and all of the national development plan projections have been built in. All of our transport planning tries to take account of the future growth levels that are expected to occur.