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

I agree. Part of the problem we have had over the past five decades is that we have been going in a certain direction and the only assessment that tended to be made was on the average journey-time savings for someone driving for a relatively short section of whatever project was being built - we might save ten minutes on every car journey and multiply that by whatever value was put on the cost of an hour – without any real consideration either of the induced traffic and resulting congestion, and therefore lost time savings, or some of the wider multi-criteria analysis. We have known this for four decades but have we been really good at applying that sort of multi-criteria analysis in project appraisals? It is improving but one of the cornerstones why we have got into a relative cul-de-sac is that we were very narrow in our assessment of what the benefits are.