Ms Laura Behan:

Ecodriving has mostly been tackled within larger fleets under Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, programmes as part of an overall energy efficiency approach. Our public transport companies - Dublin Bus, Irish Rail or whatever - have undertaken ecodriver training for their drivers and technologies are deployed in the infrastructure to secure the most efficient driving. We have examined how we might scale this up and are considering behavioural economics around private cars and the potential to use ecodriving by drivers to manage their own fuel consumption. That is a difficult area. A study is under way, which we are co-funding with the Environmental Protection Agency, to examine how we might deploy ecodriving in the most efficient and most effective way to reach the target audience. One can spend a great deal of money on ecodriving programmes while their benefits are dissipated within a short timeframe as the training that people have undergone slips. It is difficult to get right on a sustained basis. We hope the study, which is looking at the Irish context specifically and HGV drivers in particular, will provide useful information for a programme of scale that we can deploy nationally.