James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

This is a bit wider than the Estimates and is more a policy decision but I am quite happy to engage on it. It is important. In the first instance, before I get into the fares piece, I have always had a very strong view that public transport should be the primary default choice of commuters or travellers for whatever reason. It should not be the car first and people saying "Oh maybe there is a bus I can get as a fallback". It should be the other way around - we should only use the private car if we cannot find an attractive public transport option. It is what I typically have done in my own private life for many years. I will always look at the train or bus timetable first and see if that is the way to go before taking the car on a journey. This is for many reasons. It is more pleasant. You can double job by working on the train and getting your laptop out. I have always said that public transport should be at multiple things. It services distributed communities, which is important at a time when we know we have a shortage of housing supply. People are living further away from home and work and the city is expanding right across constituencies including my own constituency of Kildare North and those in Meath, north Dublin etc. High-quality, frequent public transport actually enables distributed communities because people can live further out and get into work without too many hiccups. Indeed, it also supports distributed communities in terms of extending family and people visiting. For social capital, it is important that people are not becoming isolated while living out in the suburbs, and this will not happen if they are only a Luas or DART connection away from visiting friends and family elsewhere. It also provides equality of opportunity in terms of access to education and to work, and access to advance. All of those things are so critical. That is before we even get to the obvious environmental benefits such as the emissions reductions and reaching all the really important climate change targets we have. There are a number of reasons we should continue to promote public transport. To get there we need a number of things. We need it to be available in the first place. If there is no bus, you cannot get it. We have made great strides in rolling out the network further and further in recent years.

It must be frequent; that speaks for itself. It must be reliable; there is no point waiting for the bus if it does not turn up. That is a fairly fundamental issue. It must be affordable, and we will come back to that in a minute in terms of the fare reductions. There are big ticket items that I really hope will be taken and advanced by the next Government. I am sure, Chairman, that we all hope to be part of the team and returned here the next time around, but we will see - that is up to the people. However, there are a number of big ticket projects for whoever is here the next time around.

BusConnects has 12 spines right across the city. We need to get to the stage where we begin to see the benefits because, let us be honest, there have been some interruptions to communities and some disturbance to residents on different streets, etc. We understand that. Building is always tough, particularly when it takes up some land acquisitions. However, we must get to the stage where we are seeing the benefits and people are getting those services and using those buses to rapidly get to and from work and they begin to talk about how it is actually a great service. That is where we need to get to with the next phase of this.