Ms Anne Graham:

To answer Deputy Dooley's, we take responsibility for strategic park-and-ride facilities and, certainly, the planning thereof. What I mean by that are locations on key rail, light rail and bus corridors. It is generally proposed to locate them around the M50, the kind of area where one encourages people to interchange to public transport in order to get into Dublin city. The situation in our regional cities is similar. We would take responsibility for the design and implementation of those. In some cases, it is about improving existing infrastructure like the Red Cow roundabout and some of the key rail stations.

In terms of bus purchases, Dublin Bus is purchasing nine test vehicles. It is in the process of purchasing that low-fleet emission fleet from three manufacturers and will run testing early next year. That will help us develop our procurement strategy for low-emission double-decker buses. We will start that procurement next year. As Mr. Doyle said, a deliberate decision was taken to purchase as many Euro 6 vehicles as possible because that provides other benefits for the city centre, particularly lower levels of noxious substances and much lower levels of particulates. We want to see those improvements as well and to have as young a fleet as possible operating in our city centres. We need to move forward to address carbon emissions. Dublin Bus will be starting the trial, which will inform our procurement strategy, next year.

We are also looking at where we can pilot the use of electric buses. In association with Bus Éireann, we are looking at a small electric pilot scheme in one of the regional towns. The exact location for the project has not yet been identified. By 2023, we hope to have 500 low-emission vehicles in the operation. This will comprise approximately one third of the public transport fleet.