Dr. Lynn Sloman:

There may be some questions for which I can send some information to the committee after the meeting. On the question of what was the imperative to introduce free public transport, in some places such as Dunkirk that was about restoring people's belief in their town. It was about creating a sense of pride in the place where they live and regenerating the town in order that the young people will want to stay there. It is absolutely the case that Dunkirk has been the focus of great national and international interest, and it has been a massive success, not only from an environmental point of view but from the point of view of people just believing in their city again.

We have free parks, free public libraries and sometimes free museums. We have all sorts of wonderful cultural assets in our towns and cities, but if someone lives in a city where he or she cannot afford to travel to those places, that is not so great. There is a growing awareness that perhaps free local public transport should be part of that universal basic right to a good quality of life. Although free public transport can be beneficial by getting more people to use public transport and being a help in terms of achieving our carbon objectives, the driving force behind it is about cities wanting their residents to believe in the place where they live and to feel proud of it.

To respond to Deputy O'Sullivan's point about what we should do in rural places where cycle superhighways do not seem to be a serious option, other European countries have had the exact same struggles. Take the example of the cycle superhighway programme in the capital region of Denmark. Copenhagen has been building cycleways for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years, but the surrounding rural area around the city has not been doing that and it has been a complex, tortuous process to get all those surrounding rural areas to agree it makes sense to invest the money and buy land to provide those cycleways. We see these things in other countries and think it must always have been like that, but it was not. It is worth being ambitious, and if it is impossible to imagine doing it nationally at the start, perhaps it should be about trial projects and asking what we can do for rural cycling and making it an attractive option. If that is done in terms of cycleways parallel to national roads, perhaps that will be easier than dealing with roads controlled by local authorities.

I will send some information to the committee regarding cycleways in Denmark and on the cantons of Zurich and Bern and the fantastic work that has been done in those places to make rural public transport an attractive option for people whereby they know and trust that it will always be there for them, so they can plan their lives around it.