Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am glad that the Minister is here to hear my support. Unfortunately, he had to run out the door at the last minute when I was speaking on the climate Bill last night, so it is great to have a chance to impart some of my views to him in his full presence.

Much as I have listened to the arguments made by Deputy Healy-Rae and others, I support the Minister on this initiative. Sometimes people ask me why I am in politics, whether it ever does any good and whether I have ever achieved anything. Often I give one particular example of how politics can change things and that is in the area of road deaths. The Minister's speech refers back to 1997, when approximately 430 people were dying each year.

As I recall, the number of road deaths each year in the late 1970s was around 600. Like many other Deputies and citizens, I had friends who were killed on the roads and I have also seen at first hand people being killed in traffic accidents. It is a source of great pride that we have managed to reduce the number of road deaths from 600 to 160 per annum in the past 30 years. However, the deaths of 133 people on the roads so far this year is an absolute tragedy for their families and, please God, I hope we will not see a spike in road deaths over the Christmas period.

The reduction in the number of road deaths occurred for a variety of reasons. Improvements in car safety and standards and the use of safety belts were significant factors, as were drink driving legislation and measures in the area of speeding such as ramps. No single measure is responsible for the reduction in the number of road traffic fatalities, which is the result of cumulative political effort by all parties. Road safety is an issue that affects all of us and on which there is no political divide.

I campaigned on cycling safety for many years - I still do I suppose - and I was involved in the Dublin Transportation Authority. I have, therefore, a particular and direct experience of the need to make continuous changes to deliver further reductions in the number of road traffic fatalities. The Minister should go much further than the measure in the Bill. Some years ago, I did some research on the Swedish approach to road safety. I know we always hold up Sweden as a model for everything. Approximately 15 years ago, Sweden adopted a strategy of achieving zero deaths from road traffic accidents. It decided it would no longer refer to road traffic fatalities as accidents on the basis that they occur continually and that it would do everything possible to try to reduce the number of fatalities to zero. We should adopt this approach.

Strengthening restrictions on drink driving is one important measure and the Green Party supports the Bill for this reason. If people are honest, they will admit that even one drink impairs a person's judgment. We support the Minister's proposal to impose a more severe penalty, namely, disqualification, for drink driving. However, we must go much further. If the Minister is serious about road safety and wants to plant a flag to indicate it is the area of greatest achievement in his time as Minister, he must go further on the issue of speed because it is a factor in a large percentage of road fatalities. No one is innocent in this regard. As a cyclist, people often point out to me erratic behaviour among cyclists and they are right. However, they tend to overlook a statistic from the Road Safety Authority showing that the majority of motorists drive over the speed limit for the majority of time when on urban, residential and secondary roads. If we are serious about reducing road deaths, we must enforce the rules on speeding. I understand the Garda has reported that the 30 km/h speed limits in Dublin have been widely ignored since their introduction. The Minister states he intends to be strict on enforcing the law on drink driving. He must also take action to uphold the laws on speed limits.

The Minister will recall in a previous debate that I listed off parts of his constituency in a manner similar to the way in which Deputy Danny Healy-Rae has just referred to every village in County Kerry. I could start with St. Columbanus Road and proceed to Frankfort Park, Meadow Grove and every street and residential estate in his constituency and then argue that we should seek to create conditions in these suburbs to allow children to play freely on the street.

We should be reducing the speed limits. I grew up on those streets and know that this can be done. That is what we grew up with, in a sense, playing on the street. I would like to see that being part of the road safety strategy. By introducing and policing such a culture, in urban estates and on city centre roads where there are pedestrians, and, indeed, in rural Ireland, we will address road safety and encourage motorists to reduce speed.

If we are serious about road safety, we have to go further. It is not only about speed limits. It is about road design. I will use the usual examples. I have visited Holland on a number of occasions to see what the authorities there do in road design. One of the reasons the Dutch have been so successful in promoting cycling, pedestrians and public transport is they get the design of the street right. They start thinking about it as a street rather than a road and they begin designing. They put in trees, pinch points, chicanes or other mechanisms to calm traffic on a particular street. They create a much greener urban environment that starts the process of creating living streets. That designing of streets is what we need to do.

The position regarding distributor roads is similar. In the main street of the suburb of Ranelagh in my area, there is a very high volume of traffic, a huge volume of pedestrians and an even bigger volume of cyclists. Buses use the road as well. We were obliged to take a political decision regarding what we would do. We put in a cycle lane, which was great, but, because we are also concerned about other interests, it does not operate at night. This happens all over the city. There are cycle lanes in operation during the day but they no longer operate once it gets dark. This is to facilitate parking on particular parts of streets or roads at night or, I presume, to allow people to go to pubs and restaurants to drink or whatever.. It is a political decision. At that pinch point in Ranelagh, the tightest point is 10 m wide. One is looking at perhaps 2.8 m or 3 m of a road margin, and a 1.5 m cycle lane on either side. It is down to political decision-making as to how one allocates that space. One can be creative. There is a need to provide loading bays for retailers, etc., because we want thriving shops, pubs and restaurants along the busy streets of our urban and rural village. We need to start designing differently.

More than anything else, we need to start designing for cycling. If we really want to take road safety seriously and protect cyclists - there have been 16 cycling fatalities this year - we should really start prioritising and creating - in our cities and towns and in the areas around schools - an environment to allow people to cycle safely. Citizens do not have the ability to cycle safely at present. In fact, there is wide consensus in the cycling community that matters are actually getting worse. The way the city centre Luas cross-city line has been introduced is an utter abomination in terms of the way cyclists were willfully ignored. It was not as if the cycling community did not state at every step of the way, "Hold on a second here. At this section of road, you should be thinking about it differently. You have got to design it differently." Those in the community were ignored. They also have been ignored in terms of the lack of investment in cycling infrastructure in the Minister's budget. They are being ignored when it comes to difficult political decisions relating to the allocation of the space, be it on the Liffey quays or on the Sandycove cycle route. If we are serious about road safety and if we are to start with cyclists, then we have to execute a complete change in current policy and approach.

It is not only those cycling fatalities that one wants to prevent. One wants to be able to get other people out of their cars and onto bikes so that one reduces the threat of accidents and fatalities all round. There is nothing happening. It is going backwards.

I listened during Question Time recently when the Minister, Deputy Ross, was asked whether he could invest in this and he replied that he does not have the money. It is always the case that the Minister does not have the funding. All our funding is going on inter-urban motorways, which are massively scaled up above any potential future capacity use. This is being done because the motorways are a nice PPP model that IBEC likes because its members get a really nice pay-off for the construction work they do and they know how to do it.

That is where all the money goes, in billions, yet we have only €110 million over five years for cycling initiatives. The Minister cannot wear the badge of Minister with responsibility for road safety as long as that policy continues. It has to change.

Investment in public transport is the other way we can get to a point where there are zero fatalities. The Luas is a fantastic service and it is both safe and quick. It does not block other traffic because 200 passengers fit into one Luas tram compared to the number of cars needed to carry the same number of people. It is safer and more efficient, but we do not have it at the required scale. Why do we not have plans to provide a light rail system in Cork and Galway? Why are we not looking to join all of the railway lines in Limerick and use the stations along them, which would avoid the need for people to drive and get them out of their cars? It would also be a quicker system. Every time we have introduced a new public transport system, people have flocked to it, but for some reason, officialdom and the political system, particularly Fine Gael, have no interest in public transport.

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