Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I can and will do that. As I said, I have visited Cork County Council and I gave that message to them. In the end, we cannot run the active travel programme completely centrally because there is local knowledge of where the routes are, where the demand is and where the safe routes to school need to go, etc. It has to come from both management and councillors. The funding is there, but it is not beyond the limit. We put in an additional 250 staff. It took two years for it to scale up and to be able to get all the engineers, planners and so on, but they are now starting to be put in place. This Government was really radical in setting that 10% of the capital budget had to go towards active travel.

In the first year it took a while to ramp up. We were not spending the money. However, we spent it last year, and this year many more projects are looking for money than there is money available. That will be even more the case next year. We have to use it wisely and well. These section 38 experimental traffic orders offer a way to overcome many of the concerns that exist in councils throughout the country. To be able to put in a measure, to say it is temporary and review it two or three years later, or whatever period of time was agreed, has the benefit that it can overcome concerns in that people can see the change in reality. The fear of change is often worse than the change itself. They are able to see that it is not as restrictive as some might have thought and that there are real benefits. You start to notice who benefits. At the moment if you try to take some space to create safe space for cycling, you will hear from everyone that they do not want to lose that space, but they do not know who are the people who will benefit. When you put in the scheme on an experimental basis then everyone who uses it says “I can see that I benefit, and you are not going to take it away”. It is a way for the council to articulate where the actual need is.

The other benefit from it, in a budget-constrained world in which we always are, many of those experimental traffic management systems can be done at relatively low cost. It requires the reallocation of space and that requires courage. In changing space, anything to do with taking space from anyone means that someone will be inconvenienced. However, I believe that is the way to do it. The route to Inchydoney that Deputy O'Sullivan mentioned is a perfect example. As I understand there are only one or two pinch-points on it which are problems. It can be done at relatively low cost. It is using existing infrastructure in many ways. That would not be an expensive provision. It could be done fairly quickly. The advantage of this is, it is quick, not that expensive, and the benefit in doing that in Inchydoney would transform both Clonakilty and Inchydoney.