Professor John FitzGerald:

The Climate Change Advisory Council has raised the issue of congestion charges and charging for urban road space but we have not made a precise recommendation as yet. It is all about making our cities work. The current way of dealing with excess cars in the city is to make life hell for drivers. There may be a more efficient way of charging. I am also interested in integrating active modes of transport. If one goes to Gent-Sint-Pieters station in Belgium, for example, Lund and Malmö stations in southern Sweden or the central station in Copenhagen, one will see massive bike parks nearby. The first thing I did with my free travel pass was take a train from the M3 Parkway station near Dunboyne. There was nobody on the train but I saw a vast number of cars in the car park. I did not see many bicycles parked there. Looking at ways of integrating the different modes of transport, which will be better for everybody, could be helpful. It was one of the things we researched and there is a chapter on it in the report we published last month.

One thing which I have not considered but which came up in the research we commissioned was the use of bikes to access public transport. We do not need to ban cars totally to make our cities work. This depends on personal choices. If people really need to bring their cars into the city, we must consider paid parking and finding a better way to ration road space. We need the space for public transport first. BusConnects is really important for Dublin.