Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

In the first year, we saw active travel budgets.

In the second year, we saw the recruitment of staff by local authorities to design and implement those projects. It did not really bed in until the third year of this Government, when everything started to work well together. What is the process when a local authority district engineer and members identify potential active travel projects within their districts? They then feed that into the active travel teams within the local authorities. It then goes up to the NTA to decide which projects should be prioritised and which are deliverable.

There are small projects within areas, however. I reference in particular those relating to the tightening of the radius on some roads, where the radius is quite wide and encourages cars to sweep around at quite some speed. In every town and village in Ireland, there are areas where the radius of the curve could be tightened. This does not prevent cars going through. It does not stop cars at all; rather, it slows down cars as they approach a junction and makes it safer for people cycling and walking, and for all road users. Those projects tend to be small. My concern is that because there are many small projects like that, they do not make it through the filter system. I do not know how local authority district engineers can then do that tightening of the radius of curves out of the budgets they have. Can they approach with, say, ten or 15 projects and bundle those together?