Ms Deirdre Hanlon:

The Senator asked about public transport, walking and cycling. For the purpose of showing the cohesiveness between the policy and the fact that all of these issues have certain benefits that are analogous to one another, we have joined them together for some of the public discourse on them but we tackle and engage on each of them separately and are happy to do so.

The national cycling policy framework was introduced in 2009, as was our Smarter Travel policy document. Those are ten years old at this stage. They had a horizon out to 2020. In the course of preparing for the public consultation we are doing now, which is part of a review of policy across this area, we specifically took each of those two documents and reviewed our progress on implementation of them. That was very much informed by the fact that 2009 is not a year we remember for cycling policy documents. We remember it for the economic, fiscal and banking crises that were occurring at that time. As a result of the fiscal crisis, we did not get the money we had hoped to get so implementation was at a lesser level.

The Senator asked if we will renew it. We will have something fresh in the future. That will be the far side of the process we are doing at the moment, which is questioning what is needed and asking the public, and public representatives such as the members, to engage with us on it.

The Senator highlighted the number of women cycling. That is something we, too, have seen in our evidence and it is an issue we want to examine to see if there are barriers to what we are doing. We are providing funding to the NTA. The provision of that is gender neutral but if we look internationally, for example, in the UK, Canada, America and Australia, the number of women cycling is far below the proportion of men cycling. There must be something in that that we want to explore because it seems to be an international phenomenon among one group of countries but not others.

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