Mr. Conn Donovan:

There may be a misconception in Ireland that people in the Netherlands cycle because it is flat or the weather is conducive to cycling. The reality is that much money and much time was spent promoting cycling and active travel. Meanwhile, perhaps the opposite happened in Ireland. For every car that was on the road in Ireland in 1990, there are now three. Nobody asked us about that. There was not any policy position taken, but that has happened. We need to play catch-up very quickly. In our cities and in some of our towns, we need to get the modal share targets that our European colleagues have now in about eight to ten years if we are going to hit any of our climate change targets. Big projects are slow and take a lot of time. They can get stuck in planning and there can be planning paralysis. We need to look at many pieces of the puzzle and see what places we can slot in more quickly.

Dr. D'Arcy mentioned things such as permeable streets and filtered permeability. Things like that can be done very quickly. We saw for Covid how quickly things can be deployed. Low-hanging fruit such as 30 km/h zones are very quick interventions that do not take much time or millions of euros of investment or long planning yet can produce results.

We need to look at perhaps 15 solutions and categories in terms of how long they will take, and do the quickest ones today. There is no reason there is not a 30 km/h zone in the vast majority of Irish urban areas. The way we are doing it at the moment seems to be street by street. If we continue that way, it will take decades. The vast majority of people in Europe who live in towns and cities live in 30 km/h zones. It is frightening to cycle on a road where there is no cycle provision when a car passes you doing double or sometimes even triple your speed.

There are many solutions. We need to look at the ones that will bring results quickly, but we also need to look at ones that will take longer.