Ms Anne Graham:

To explain how road congestion can impact on capacity, where a bus is travelling with general car traffic, the speed of the car traffic impacts the speed of the bus. The impact is that it slows down the bus, which means there is a need to introduce additional time into the journey and this, in turn, means introducing additional fleet and drivers. You are not actually increasing overall capacity in that case; you are just providing the capacity because the journeys are longer. This is why we are finding we are pumping in many resources into dealing with road congestion rather than building capacity. Unfortunately, this is the position we are in.

This is why we need the reallocation of road space. It will not be needed everywhere. There will be pinch points, especially in towns and villages around the country, that may only need a short bit of bus priority to get the buses through. In the cities, however, we definitely need end-to-end bus priority just to make the services much more efficient. It will mean we will not be spending money to deal with increased journey times but putting it into providing actual capacity. We are at the point where bus priority really is a priority for us now. I hand over to Mr. Creegan to give an update on where the major projects stand.