Mr. Hugh Creegan:

I am happy to share. There has been a big investment in active travel and sometimes it is difficult to measure. We can do simple things like measure the number of cyclists using the route and the Deputy will have seen automatic cycle counters in various places, but getting an overall feel for what is happening is not that easy. One of the things we are very aware of is that when it comes to cycling in particular, you need a network there to make it useful to a lot of people. One road or one street on its own is only part of a person's journey, and it is not enough to say to a parent it is safe enough for their kid to use to go to school. We are very conscious that there is a point at which we need to do more measuring, which is when we have a decent network developed. We are not there yet. We do annual national travel surveys where we try to get a feel for the modal change. Each year we do a national household travel survey. I am sure the Deputy is familiar with it. To be honest, it is not showing a big shift at all. There are marginal changes at most.

On the bus passenger side, we are seeing a big increase in bus passengers. We do passenger surveys to identify various things. However, one of the things we do not ask is whether the passenger transitioned from something else. I am not sure how we identify the new passengers. That is the difficulty. We are surveying all of the passengers on the buses. Identifying new passengers is not easy. In terms of gathering metrics, we can get simple metrics about usage relatively easily. It is much harder to get mode share changes. The way we are doing it at the moment is on a national basis.

On the cycling side, until we get that network, we have not reached a tipping point where we can see a big update. Our view is it will come, but we need to build more of the network first.