Mr. Tom O'Mahony:

There are technical reasons for that happening and, quite often, it relates to traffic or whatever. I use public transport and I am one of the people that I talked about who use the train and bus to complete a journey. Therefore, I can vouch that it is useful to be able to read realtime information on a smartphone. Let me give a practical example. There are a number of different bus stops located on the streets of the city centre. With realtime information one can check which bus will come first and therefore locate oneself at the right bus stop. It is a small thing but it might persuade somebody to use public transport. Also, the availability of Wi-Fi on buses and trains has proved a significant advantage.

Since the start of this year the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport and his Minister of State, the latter of which has responsibility for public transport, have met the chief executives of all of the public transport companies for a monthly meeting. This year there is a target to increase the usership of public transport by 2% which equates to 5 million visits. The monthly meeting with the chief executives are used to outline how the figures are going and what other initiatives are being put in place. The National Transport Authority, which is responsible for the Leap card and provides oversight, is also in attendance. There is a lot happening.

As somebody who has used public transport for a long time, the current offering is better now than it was a number of years ago but it is not the only means by which we are trying to get people out of their cars. I am certain that the committee is aware of the huge amount of initiatives that have happened in Dublin, and in other cities, for the past number of years in terms of cycling. The Dublin bike scheme is probably the most successful scheme around. There are similar schemes all over the world but the Dublin bike scheme has been recognised as one of the most successful. Yesterday, a major expansion of the scheme was announced and the scheme has also been rolled out in some other cities.