Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)

I thank the witnesses for coming here today. I effectively have two big questions. I want to give our witnesses a bit of an introduction to me. I am not a permanent member of the committee, so they would not have my bio. Before I got elected last year, I was a councillor in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, but I was also a lecturer in TUD, and my area of focus was governance and sustainability. Over the ten years that I was teaching, we introduced new ESG reporting requirement for companies, which I am very encouraged by because hopefully that will introduce a level of transparency and eliminate and reduce somewhat the level of greenwashing that was common in industry, among some players out there. For me, one of the key things around all of that is that if we are requiring that of businesses, surely we should be requiring the same of ourselves. We should have that level of transparency and accountability in order that we can say the measures we are introducing are delivering the results we want. As we all know, what gets measured gets done.

I was a councillor with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown and it was very much one of the pioneers in rolling out a lot of the active travel schemes, the safe way to school schemes and greenways. The council piloted many different schemes and learned a lot from that. Nationally, more than €1 billion has been invested in all of these various active travel schemes over the past five years. We now have a huge amount of data, or so I would have thought.

Again, I agree with former speakers that the single biggest difference we can make is making that transition from cars to sustainable forms of transportation. However, my challenge has been trying to find any real data in terms of whether this is making a difference around the emissions. The one study that was actually done in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown to see the outcomes of some of these changes, which included new lanes, road closures and safe streets - pretty much the full panoply in this particular area - did not measure emissions, which was a shame. I do not know whether that made a difference, but one of the outcomes was there was actually less walking and cycling in the area. My question is: what is going on there? I do not have the answer to that. We have spent over €1 billion and we have been doing this for five years. Are we getting a return on that? Are we spending it in the right way?

We do need to get that modal shift, but are we doing it in the right way, because if we are not getting the emissions reductions from spending €1 billion on these schemes, then maybe we need to start examining how we are doing it. We only get what we measure, and I do not know if we are measuring that.

The number of passengers on bus journeys has increased. That is really positive as a form of sustainable travel. I have not been able to get any data on this. Our witnesses may have that. Regarding those new passengers, is that the modal shift we want? Have they gotten out of cars to take bus journeys or have they gotten out of trams and DARTs or off bikes or stopped walking to take those bus journeys, in which case we have not actually gained anything? Are we getting the return on investment? Are emissions coming down from these investments? How can we tell? If they are not, we need to redirect.