Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 19 June 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Advancing the Low-Carbon Transition in Irish Transport: Discussion
Dr. Jeanne Moore:
I wish to pick up on that point. I was struck by the example of Vienna, where the city was designed on the basis of whether a child could navigate it. An approach like that puts pedestrians at the heart of public transport planning. I cycle and I nearly collided with a bus this morning. Thought must be put into urban design.
With regard to the forum for peer learning, there is considerable motivation to change. People recognise how serious the situation is with regard to climate action. Peer-to-peer learning is important. I am very struck by the example of the sustainable energy communities. Communities themselves come up with energy solutions and renewable energy planning. They then talk to other communities about how they did it and the lessons learned. Something similar could apply to local transport based solutions that would engage public participatory networks at a local level. The national dialogue on climate action has a lot of infrastructure at community level which could help people to arrive at bottom-up solutions. The policy system could learn from these and then roll out the approaches that work. One change I would make would be to resource bottom-up solutions and put in place a mechanism to learn from them and pick up initiatives that work.
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