Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the speakers for their presentations. Like Deputy Farrell, many of the questions I had have been answered at this stage, but I might expand on them. There has been much talk about moving away from a cost-benefit analysis and striking a balance right between what the cost, social benefit and emissions will be. Is a set of criteria or best practice used for those transport projects, or is that already being used by the NTA? Have we established a set of criteria that helps us to come to those decisions? For example, building on the figure of €10 billion, what would we do with it and how would we make those decisions?

With respect to getting people out of their cars, BusConnects has done a great deal of work in Dublin on that. It is not only about connecting bus routes, it involves multimodal connections and getting people to different modes. Is any work being done on the gendered aspect of shifting people out of cars, particularly on trip chaining, given that women tend to take on more care-giving roles and have to make short trips to school and to care for relatives? Is the NTA examining that gendered perspective?

On the issue of councillors and their closeness to the public, that is a double-edged sword. Without a head person driving the strategy, we can have a push and pull in two different areas of the city with one councillor saying his or her constituents do not want it and another saying his or her constituents want it, and we see that repeatedly. Given we are talking of having directly elected majors, that could be one of the powers that would fall into that role. It would be a role for a person who has a strategic vision for an urban centre who could bring stakeholders around the table to co-ordinate those decisions. We have seen the difficulty involved with the pedestrianisation of the College Green area in Dublin due to different stakeholders pulling in different directions.