Dr. Brian Caulfield:

That is a great question from Deputy Leddin. It is a no-brainer in that we need to reduce the vehicle kilometres travelled. My colleague spoke quite eloquently about how we can do that. That should be a national goal of trying to cap the number of vehicle kilometres travelled. We also maybe need to start capping the number of cars we have on this little island to get us all to move around. With regard to the behaviour piece, there are many examples whereby EVs can be encouraged through behavioural use. I will give the Deputy an analogy. I spoke about the shared piece quite a bit but when we brought schemes like Dublinbikes into Dublin and all the other regional cities, we found there was an uptake in people buying their own bike. They no longer saw the need to use or rent a bike. If there was a shared EV scheme in which people got the experience of an EV, get to know the ranges and all that kind of stuff, that is perhaps the enabler to get them to purchase their own electric vehicle. The parking is a no-brainer. We model it. When the National Transport Authority, NTA, models this, you see that having a free car parking space at the end of your trip is the biggest enabler to get people to travel to work. I used an analogy earlier comparing UCC to Trinity. While they are two very different cities in terms of density, the parking is not provided in Trinity and 99% of our staff and students get there by non-car modes. You take away parking and you take away many of the options people have.