Mr. Brian Deegan:

We probably all agree that active travel is the key to climate change as one of the clearest methods of tackling it. I want to talk about other issues like health, safety and social justice as well. Our focus on such issues has helped us to make the case for active travel in the UK.

Before I get into the more technical side of this issue, I will set out my personal experience. I was raised in the Moss Side area of Manchester, which is a quite rough inner-city area. When I was young, I used to play football on the cobbled streets. I see nodding faces around the room. I am sure we all had similar childhoods that involved playing outside. Asphalt was put down on the streets one day in the name of progress. We wondered what was this new stuff that had arrived on our streets. It suddenly became quite difficult to play football because we could not get out of the way of the cars in time. We did not have enough space. The streets ceased to be places in which we could play. My friend Stephen got run over by a car. He was not killed but it made it difficult for him to concentrate and he slipped out of school and suffered from social problems. Parents started to wonder what they were doing letting their kids play outside when so many cars were speeding around. They began bringing their children back into their houses. I am sure we all recognise this pattern. The only kids who were left outside were bad kids like me. All of this was in the late 1970s. A few years on, in the early 1980s, the presence of young people on the streets in Moss Side meant they were up to no good. The police started coming around, throwing us in the back of vans and beating us just for being on the street. That is how socially uncohesive it got. When one kid eventually got killed, the riots started. All the streets were burned down and all the shops were smashed in.

That is my personal experience of the design of streets. I know it is a powerful way to start my presentation. I see some faces wondering where this is going. I will get to the technical part of my presentation. I want members of the committee to understand that the way we design streets has a strong effect on people's lives. We must acknowledge that we can create behaviours through our decisions. A simple change in material ruined my entire childhood and cultural experience. I will mention some evidence that supports this contention. A famous study by Donald Appleyard showed that social cohesion is inversely proportional to traffic flow. The more cars there are going down a street, the less likely people are to talk to one another. According to new research in the UK, children in deprived areas are three times more likely to be involved in road traffic accidents. We have a great deal of evidence about London thanks to the work of Dr. Aldred and others. Research has shown that in London, where most people do not drive, car ownership is the greatest indicator of poor health. The sheer ownership of a car means that one is more likely to get certain conditions. All of this must be unpacked.

I want to talk about the network planning that can be done to overcome these problems. I will start by setting out what we have done in Manchester over the past year. As I have highlighted, it is a very car-dominated area. When I began to work with Mr. Chris Boardman, we decided to start from scratch by doing some network planning sessions with local councillors, engineers, planners and cycling and walking advocates. We got them in a room with a pen and a blank map and asked them to look at the situation. I pulled out a red pen and asked those present to list the locations where things were bad. I recommend that a similar approach should be taken elsewhere. I asked people to tell me about all the busy roads, rat runs and streets that were difficult to cross or cycle on. I wanted to get people to focus their minds on what they had done to the area and to acknowledge the barriers that had been created. When that element of the project had been finished, we flipped it to look at the other locations where we were being told that everything was okay. We found from doing this network planning session that 80% of the streets in our urban areas are okay. That is the good news side of it. We have not quite ruined everywhere yet. There is still time to address climate change issues. I pulled out a green pen and invited those present to plot some crossings across the difficult roads to connect areas that were all right with other areas that were all right. We went through a process of joining the dots across the network to open up certain areas.

In most cases, the immediate place where one lives is normally quite all right for walking and cycling purposes, but one does not have to go too far before one comes across a barrier. Then it is a case of how to get across the barrier. If one is riding on one's bike, one will turn around because one cannot go that way. There are plenty of factors to be considered in that context. We realised that if we put in a crossing in order that people could get to the other side where the other stuff is all right, people would understand how a network could be put together quite simply. We showed that by strategically placing crossings around greater Manchester, in three years we could open up a network of over 1,000 miles from which 92% of the population would benefit. That is one of the key things I want to talk about.

I also want to mention the economic side of this argument. As Dr. Aldred has said, the problem is the car. Research recently published by the EU Commission quantifies the true cost of subsidising cars across the EU as €1 trillion per annum. This research has been broken down on a national level by the technical institute in Dresden. I do not know whether members of the committee are aware that Ireland is paying €3 billion a year to subsidise cars. This is not what car owners are paying in taxes; this is the external cost for everybody. Every man, woman and child in Ireland is paying €650 a year to subsidise cars. The family of a child in a deprived area, who is three times more likely to get hit by a car, is also much less likely to own a car. Members can see why I referred to social justice at the outset. We are paying for this. Someone has to foot the bill. I am getting passionate because it is difficult to get these things off the ground. I have spent 20 years trying to build stuff and facing every kind of opposition possible. We seem to be at some kind of tipping point now. The evidence that has built up is overwhelming. I thank the people around me for it. There is no way of avoiding the need to do something for pedestrians and cyclists. Maybe we should give it a try. That is certainly the case in Manchester, where we have gone as far with automobility as most places. My challenge to the committee is to exercise tools like legislation, encouragement and enforcement that are at its disposal. They need to be exercised now, because the planet is not waiting. The approach to network planning that was taken in Manchester represents a kind of first step to be acknowledged. I know that this country has had issues with top-down planning, particularly in the case of the Dublin cycling network. Perhaps all relevant parties could be invited to come together to come up with a plan. It is only by working together and collaborating that we can plan to get out of this mess.