Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

If I heard Ms Donnelly correctly on the tax approach for heavier vehicles, including electric vehicles, she would favour a regime that reflected the true energy efficiency. That would incentivise lighter and smaller vehicles, which would be welcome.

To return to the scrappage issue, I was not so much getting at the physical challenge of scrapping a lot of fossil fuel vehicles. Rather, it was about our 2030 emissions challenge if we do not displace fossil fuel vehicles but simply add electric vehicles to the car fleet. Notwithstanding that we might not have the highest rate of car ownership in Europe, our emissions profile is closely linked to the number of fossil fuel vehicles on our roads at the moment. If the policy is not to scrap them, for want of a better word, but to displace them, I do not see how we are going to meet the carbon budgets or the 2030 challenge, and that is true of the tax question as well. Unless we have a focused, meaningful tax regime with respect to the weight and possibly even the size of vehicles, given there is an aerodynamic impact from larger vehicles, which makes them less energy efficient, I do not see how we are going to get to that 50% cut by 2030.

On the park-and-ride issue, it was interesting to see in the Netherlands at the weekend that the planners there said it had a place, but a much smaller place than many people might think. If anything, the reason to provide it is almost political, whereby it is provided in order that people can use it and the service can be said to be available. That was the experience in the Netherlands. Utrecht provided a number of the facilities around the suburbs. In terms of capacity, cars are big, so not many can fit into a lot of these park-and-ride facilities. They are essentially multi-storey car parks. One of them, which has 2,000 spaces, cost €85 million to build. The planners said it had been the right thing to do, but it had been dwarfed in capacity by the city's rail and bike systems. I tend to agree. I think there is a place for them, but not perhaps in as significant a way as others do.

I am also interested in the policy on parking. Generally, the more we provide parking, the more we induce driving, so we have to be very careful that we have good policies around parking such that we are not getting that lock-in or that reinforcing of the car-orientated system that the OECD spoke about.