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

I agree, and we need to accelerate that process. I cannot resolve the matter by fiat. We need local authorities to improve their ability to accelerate it while we design new settlement guidelines for new developments.

Similarly, I may have given the wrong impression earlier, I do not believe we can deliver the BusConnects infrastructure by fiat or experimental traffic orders, but we can see if some elements of it can be delivered in a way that could be reversed easily if we ran into legal or planning difficulties. There are parts of Dublin city where no BusConnects corridors are planned, for example, the area of Gardiner Street, Beresford Place, Summerhill and the north quays. At the same time, there are areas that are dominated by large, gyratory, one-way traffic management systems. It would be appropriate for us to consider those and other areas, particularly across the city centre, where we might be able to reconfigure on an experimental basis how the city's transport system works. Coming out of Covid, the entire traffic system around the city has changed anyway. It will not work or be effective if we allow all of the traffic to return and retake all the road space.

I agree that we need to let the main bus corridors go through the planning process. The delay is a significant problem, but that should not stop us from enhancing some individual elements – a bus gate or a particular street – on an experimental basis or through the pathfinder process in which we are engaged. This, rather than replacing the BusConnects planning system, is where we will have an opportunity to manage demand, which we need to do.