James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair. First, I welcome the witnesses who are before the committee. Although I am a Deputy from Cork East, I am also our party spokesperson on transport. The importance that Dublin and the region around Dublin has for our entire economy must be recognised.

In the Dublin area, the huge dependency on cars sticks out to me as someone who commutes in and out of Dublin twice a week. Somebody like me, for example, wants to get in and out of Dublin swiftly. That is also the case for anybody who has normal working hours. Unfortunately, for hundreds of thousands of people who are working in the greater Dublin area, a car is the only way to get in and out of work. There is no real alternative when it comes to time saving. That is predominantly to do with the fact that the inter-city speed on train lines is too slow. Another issue is the capacity of the rate system. There is much work ongoing on that at the moment.

When one looks at the road infrastructure around Dublin, such as at the M1, M2, the N7 and the arterial roads coming up from Wicklow, I want to make the point that we have to do a huge body of work to reduce the dependency and to create proper alternatives for people who do not want to drive into the city centre in their car. If I was using the N7, just like commuters coming in from the direction of Limerick, Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Waterford and Carlow, and felt I was able to park my car and get into Heuston Station in a relatively decent amount of time, I and many other people would do so. I would openly question whether there is enough joined-up thinking happening. This is the case in other parts of the country with metropolitan strategies that have been put in place. I promise that there is a question coming. Is enough being done to provide park-and-ride capacity to get cars off the motorway for those of us who are not going to be able to hop on a bus outside of our door, so that we can get to Dublin? Is enough being done to have that modal shift in journeys, so that people can park their car outside the city centres, effectively freeing up streets in places like Dublin for further work to be done on mobility, walking and cycling infrastructure? This is being done really successfully in some other European cities. Paris, for example, is fantastic in the work that it is continuing to do. Although it is quite painful for people who are driving cars and even buses now in the city, it is becoming a really friendly city for pedestrians and for cycling. I put that to the NTA.