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

I wish the NTA the best of luck with this because it will not be an easy job but it is an extremely important job. We discussed the metro upgrade earlier on and that is difficult at local level but the number of challenges with BusConnects are a multiple of that. I have experience of many years' involvement in QBC designs. On every street the allocation of space is the most contentious local issue, whether it is because local retailers want car parking inside their shops or a traffic lane is going to be lost, and if we are to take out gardens it will be very tough. I agree that we need to consult on this but we also need a sense of urgency as our city is grinding to a halt and it will not be good for the country if our economy crashes on the back of a city in which one cannot do business.

There is also an urgency around providing the switch to public transport and making the system work, which will avert a cost of €2 billion per annum arising from gridlock. I agree also that public transport should be reorientated to places which do not have choices at the moment or where communities are more dependent on public transport because the level of car ownership is lower. I believe the NTA may need a dedicated office for that, something I spoke about with Mr. Creegan at a previous hearing. If we always contract consultants for the detailed design, we may not get the economies of scale we would get from doing it as a single project. From the point of view of engineering resources, we should switch money away from our road building and into this programme. We want less traffic coming into Dublin city but we cannot achieve that while we are carving up road space. It is up to the NTA to make the strategic decision to scale back all the road widening work in Dublin and reallocate engineers towards road design. We cannot continue doing both because one makes the other more difficult.

I will not go into the details of any one specific design but this is an opportunity for radical change and we should look at College Green, the Liffey Quays and the entire gyratory system around the city centre, which I describe as like the Ben Hur racetrack. The system around Westmoreland Street, Pearse Street, the Millennium Bridge and St. Stephen's Green disadvantages pedestrians and cyclists.

This is not just for the bus service but for the entire transport system and this is an opportunity to turn Dublin into a cycling city, at scale and with real ambition. The gyratory system in the city centre is antithetical to cycling and we are competing with other cities which are realising the importance of transport systems. Our nearest big competitor is probably Manchester, which has just decided to invest €1.5 billion in its cycling infrastructure. Our national development plan has some €50 million for greenways and it is an utter disgrace that we are completely ignoring cycling. There is money in the BusConnects project for cycling but I am flabbergasted at what we are suggesting for my constituency. We are suggesting, for example, that we take cyclists off the main street in Rathmines, which is beyond belief because cycling is the main mode of transport on that street, something people would see if they went down there at 5.30 p.m. or 6 p.m., where it is like downtown Beijing 20 years ago. None of the alternative route options seems workable in any way or at all connected with the idea of making Dublin a cycling city. I could get on my bike now and be on any point on the M50 within half an hour but everywhere within the M50 should be an entire cycling city.

We need the bus network, which is essential, but it is time to develop cycling. We have been talking about it for 25 years but we have done nothing. We have put in patches of lanes here and there and if this is another case of squeezing cyclists in as an afterthought, and not giving them priority, we will lose out to the likes of Manchester where they realise that urban design, urban permeability and urban villages are the way to go. If kids cycle to school, morning rush hour traffic is reduced by 30%. It will be tough but we should do it big and do it properly, with real vision and ambition so that we include cycling as well as walking. The hardest thing will be the politics of it because we will all represent constituents who will have concerns that their front door is being affected by a need of someone who is coming from five miles further out, or 30 miles in the cases of people coming in on the motorways. They will cry foul but we have to do it. We have no choice because car-based Dublin has to stop and a public transport-centred, cycling city is where we need to go. The NTA will have the Green Party's support and we wish it the best of luck.