Dr. Maria Chiara Leva:

There were many aspects to the questions. One of the first points the Senator made was about going back to basics, so the first needs to be addressed are safety and security, which are key, but prior to these is the connectivity to the point of interest. The connectivity to the point of interest as pointed out is the mobility of care for many women and the time poverty experience. Trip chaining is another aspect of time poverty for many women as users and it means they have no influence. We are often talking about the same people in two different roles.

In regard to the first aspect of connectivity, connectivity in terms of public transport is urban and rural. The urban is being addressed. We have seen many good things happening in Ireland, especially in Dublin in that respect in terms of the initiative on which we commented, which is the orbital route being created. That will address some of the issues. For the rural areas I am not aware of any submission or any study deployed in that sense.

Going to the other aspect of cycling, as I said in our study cycling, especially bike sharing, was not effectively used in the mobility of care. That is an issue that depends on the infrastructure but also depends on the need. This is something that we need to know and face. The use of cycling for going to work is being addressed in Ireland. I can see there are changes being made. Should they change the level of uptake in the levels we currently see? I know this is something that needs to be studied. The disaggregation of car use is key. We have a very efficient and very good Central Statistics Office in this country and produces a report every quarter that is very informative. The question is potentially the data are there and whether they are being used to identify a particular group of users. The other aspect is, we need to investigate the non-users as well as the users to identify what the needs and barriers are. This is what we tried to do in our study of three cities, with good results. I suggest the same, if I were the Minister for Transport. One of the things I would do is try to understand better the different profiles. As I said there are often undercurrents. We have ethnic minorities which are hit harder by problems related to monetary accessibility of the service and experience of discrimination on the public services.