Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will see if I can squeeze in Senator Dolan for about a minute in about two minutes' time. I am conscious that the Minister needs to be gone by 3.30 p.m.

As regards the examples all around where I live, Minister, and not too far from where you live, if you build it, they will come. If you put in the services, it will work. The figures for the 46A, I think, and now, by extension, the 145 and 155, which have gone to that route, massively exceeded any level of expectation.

As regards the DART or the Luas, people are willing to walk 15 or 20 minutes to get to a Luas, knowing that it is a reliable service that will be there frequently, efficiently and time after time and will get them to their destination with a journey time that is accurate and reliable.

A lot of the cycle lanes that have been put in have meant that people who would feel more vulnerable feel less vulnerable. All of that is very positive, but we also need a mindset shift whereby people do not automatically walk out the front door, jump into the car and go wherever they are going, only to get to the end of the road and discover that everyone else has done the same and that, actually, they could make a lot of their journey times quicker. I know that as somebody who did not always cycle but has cycled probably for the past ten or 15 years. Your journey time, end to end, on a bike is far shorter because you are not trying to get out of traffic or negotiating endless traffic jams and junctions and congestion. You try to park the car and you are not sure where you will park it, and then you have to walk back from wherever you have parked it. A bike you can pretty much cycle - I will not say into the building but as close to the building as makes no difference in many cases. That is the mind shift we need. We have to get people thinking that the journey to the bank, to the post office, to the pharmacist or to school is as quick, if not quicker, in an urban setting.

The planning part of this is really important. The Minister mentioned, the 11-storey block, which I managed to see from Nutley last Thursday. I said, "Oh!" I had never seen it before because it was not there before from a particular angle. It is certainly a landmark building. Many people will be living there, and many of them genuinely will not need a car. They are on the best bus route in the country and in an area where they could cycle within ten or 12 minutes into the city centre or to lots of other places, such as Sandyford, UCD, St. Vincent's hospital and RTÉ. There are lots of trip generators very close by.

It is not about being anti-car. We all know that if you live in rural Connemara, rural Ballinasloe or various other places, a car is pretty much a necessity. A great many people, however, do not live in those areas, and there will be a great many more people not living in those areas. We were talking about sites that were waiting to be unlocked in places such as RTÉ and Donnybrook bus garage, very close to where the Minister and I live. We have seen the Blake's site and the bowling alley site in Stillorgan village. All of a sudden, they are being transformed. The bowling alley site has I do not know how many apartments but it is a lot. I was on the council when we voted to allow residential units into Sandyford. It was a concept that was unheard of. There are now thousands of people living and working there with no journey times to go into work.

Our planning system, therefore, has a big part to play in helping us reduce emissions as well. I am not sure if you need to say anything to that, Minister, but it is important that all of us, at local authority level and national level, appreciate that planning and building communities that are sustainable without having to use the car for every journey is better. I remember canvassing in by-elections in Meath. There was one house to the acre and enormous distances from one house to the other. There were housing estates of 11 houses on an acre each. Then they wonder why there is no bus service. There is no bus service because there are no people, or not enough people to justify any kind of a bus service or a health system or anything else because the density is so low.

There is a trade-off. It is nice to be in a remote area sometimes but it does not make delivery of services any more efficient. Does the Minister have any thoughts on that?