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

First, the Connecting Ireland rural mobility plan is a game-changer for rural public transport. It was phased out at the start of the last year when we introduced 38 new and enhanced services. This year, it is pretty much running along the lines of introducing a new service a week. I want to see that continuing and expanding. The response from the public has been phenomenal. The patronage has gone up by 112% in 2022 compared to the last pre-Covid-19 year. Last year, 110,000 vehicle kilometres were added. It is quite dramatic, particularly for a lot of younger people who are using the services and are availing of the lower costs for those under 26. We will extend that.

I agree with the Deputy and a certain frustration I have is that we have not yet put in the standardised signage, route information, web services, etc. There is a variety of ways of delivering these, most of them with Local Link, which provides a really good service, with Bus Éireann, with Go Ahead Ireland and a commercial operator. We need a synchronised, common standard, particularly for the bus stops. Sometimes with these new routes, people do not know where the bus is going to stop and that needs to improve. The success we have had will be all the more amplified when there is a wider understanding of the scale and range of new services. I agree with the Deputy and I will say this to the NTA and the local authorities. Without it becoming an incredibly expensive thing and turning bus stops into big planning applications and huge civil engineering works, it should not be beyond the bounds of possibility for us to look at an engineered solution to a standardised bus shelter system that can be put in quickly and at a relatively low cost. That is something I want to see being developed as well. In other locations, it might not be a stop, but there could be a plaque on the wall, or clear signage systems so that people know where the designated stopping points are. That is one of the most important next further developments.

Second, on the issue of the roadside, I again agree with the Deputy. The increase in the number of fatalities we have seen this year requires a response. That will be a variety of lowering average speed limits, better enforcement, using average-over-distance cameras, cameras in bus lanes and other mechanisms.

I have been speaking to TII about local roads, so that we look at the most difficult junctions or pinch-point areas to address black spots and provide additional funding for that in our roads programme. I had a meeting with the board of TII recently and I asked it to come back with mechanisms for us to address some of the safety issues in a more targeted way or with an engineered solution at a very local junction level. Junctions are where most accidents happen, so they are areas we need to target in particular.