Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister very much for his service. We have known each other for a long time in different ways. He was the TD for my area for a long time and when I was a councillor in the same area, we would go to the same residents' meetings. Indeed back in the 1980s, he was the person opening the bike shop in Belfield, when bikes were hardly being talked about at all. He does not just talk the talk; he has walked the walk in that regard. I am going to touch on the public service performance report based on his program A, B, C, D, E and so on. On active travel, while we will talk about public transport in a minute, it would be beneficial if we could get people out of public transport and on to their bikes, as I travelled today and as I do on as many days as I can. The Cathaoirleach will be glad to know I cycled to the Grand Hotel in Malahide last week, which took an hour and ten minutes from the city centre. As the DART would have taken about an hour because of the connections, I decided to try it. It can be done although I am not saying I would do it every day. Those shorter journeys; certainly anything inside the canal or as far out as Goatstown, where I am based, are very doable. It is faster than the bus and the Luas. We have reduced fares considerably but it is not so much about the money. It is good for our health also. Everybody on a bike is taking a car off the road or creating another space on the Luas, which at certain times of the day, as the Minister well knows, is quite full. This is particularly the case on the green line on the south side in the area where I am from. If we can provide quality wide bike lanes where people can overtake one another, it will make cycling more viable. I am not sure about the concrete strips. I was listening to the Minister earlier and while the diverting might be okay, I note the number of times when there was a concrete strip on the gutter and where people were tripping over them and banging into them. If they are wide enough and people know they are there that is one thing, but I am not so sure the big blocky ones that were there at one stage are the right way to go. Once you are inside them you are inside them and if you are stuck behind somebody it gets very frustrating. The wider the lane the better. Where there is space to do it and it can be done it is very positive. It is about delivery, as the Minister said. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown certainly has been one of the better councils in terms of delivering cycling infrastructure. It pays off. I was cyclist number 810 this morning on the cycle counter outside Belfield. I will not give the figure but at this stage, the counter is in the hundreds of thousands this year. I remember in the 1980s, when Clonskeagh had two lanes of cars. They converged further down and that also caused problems. There is an appetite for it and the more of it we can do, the better we can maintain the bike lanes. We were talking about the capital spending on active travel earlier but I note the wands get knocked over and broken. They are at an angle or are sticking out in the wrong way. There is a maintenance issue there and while I do not know whose budget it is or whether there is a budget for it, it needs to be maintained.

The level of broken glass is something that frustrates me as I have had more punctures than I would like because of it. It happens. It could have been swept yesterday and it would happen today. There is nothing we can do about that. The more we maintain those lanes, however, the more people get out of their cars. That leaves road space for people who do need cars.

Touching on that, I will bring in road safety as part of it. We know that average-speed cameras on the N7 work. The RSA appeared before us and told us the compliance rate went from 67% to 98% in that stretch. There is much more scope in terms of technology inside people's cars. There are people who, when their children start driving, put a box in the car that monitors them and gives a report if anything goes wrong. Nothing goes wrong as they know they are being watched. We all behave better when we are being watched. There is an incentive there for the insurance industry, together with the Department. We are never going to have enough average speed cameras. By and large, as we have said before, the four risk factors for road deaths are generally young people at night on rural roads at weekends. We are never going to have average speed cameras in those areas. The Minister might reflect on the active travel end of it and on road safety. I might come back to some of the other things.