Dr. Brian Caulfield:

I share the concern about school transport. More needs to be done on it. An Taisce has done amazing work with the green routes to school. Imagine what could be achieved if the incentives for electric vehicles were proportioned out to the incentives to walk and cycle to school. There has been great community engagement across Ireland on how to make that better.

On the shared mobility side, it works for some people and it does not work for others. There is no silver bullet in any of this or for how we make this work.

On the Senator's final point about road building, it does not sit well with me talking about the need to electrify all our vehicles. However, we have to in eight and a half years because there are no other alternatives. The alternatives, the bank of transport projects, will not be on line in time to meet the 51% reduction. I agree with regard to new road projects. While they have a cost-benefit analysis associated with them, there also must be a certain penetration of EVs in order for them to be built. We will not build new roads until we get to a certain level of EVs. There has not been a road built on the planet that does not result in extra traffic and extra vehicle kilometres driven. That is something we need to build into our road development schemes.