Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. I wish to make a few points. I remember being on holidays in Hungary some years ago and you could bring your bike into train carriages. There were seats at either end of the carriage, and you could hang your bike up on a rack in the middle, in the same way as a coat, but it was for bikes. I am not sure such a facility is on Irish trains at all. There seems to be limited capacity for bikes. People must be able to use public transport, cycle to the station and put the bike on the train without necessarily having to pay a fee for it, and be able to get off the other end and use the bike. I am not sure we are anywhere near being able to provide that.

To come back to what we were discussing previously about the Luas, what timeline, if any, is there for the potential for the Luas and MetroLink to Cherrywood in terms of visibility? I would like to hear a little bit more about how fast BusConnects will roll out. I would also like to hear the Department’s view on public consultation versus engagement.

The public sometimes feels that some consultation is not very well listened to, while at other times, there is more meaningful engagement. We need to try to bring people with us. I refer to projects such as those in Strand Road and Deansgrange. There are many other examples and there will be more. BusConnects was quite controversial in advance of the latest local elections. I am absolutely not against it. I have been around long enough to recall the Stillorgan quality bus corridor, which I mentioned earlier. Owen Keegan, who has been quite topical in recent days, was a director of traffic in the city in the late 1990s when no one was in favour of the bus corridor yet nobody would give it up now. There are quite a number of such interventions where people instinctively were not in favour of change, but when it happened they would not go back to the old regime. I was a member of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in 2008 when a councillor said we should rip up all the cycling lanes because they were taking up valuable space that could be used by cars, but nobody would say that now. That is not so long ago.

I would like to hear from the Department the status of both the green line upgrade and BusConnects in terms of timelines. I wish it all the best with everything it is doing. As for green schools, there are many schools that were not included in that survey and that have never been targeted to participate in the green school project. There is great potential, particularly in urban areas, for a modal shift away from cars to bikes and, to a certain extent, walking. When I was going to school, an awful lot of people cycled but a tiny percentage in comparison do that now. That is probably because the roads are full of huge cars that people are terrified of, but if we could get more bikes on the road, many cars would be taken off the road and replaced with bikes and possibly e-scooters.