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

Again, I am in danger of agreeing with the Deputy. I will go back, if I can, to the Copenhagen example and how the Danes made it work. These are very expensive pieces of infrastructure. They are multibillion euro projects. In Copenhagen, outside the train station there is a very low-cost bicycle park which has thousands of bicycles. The surrounding community, through a ten or 15 minute cycle, has access to the train service which is easy, reliable, quick, clean and cheap. Such low-cost solutions deliver high-quality local communities and attractive places to live which are not dominated by cars and where everyone has good quality connectivity that is not expensive. That is the gain according to the cost-benefit analysis. To go back to what I said earlier, it is the wider planning gain we get from this type of public transport alongside connected, active travel through pedestrian, cycling and local bus service connections. It is that sort of vision and if one costs the benefits from all of that, it makes these projects stand up and make sense and that is why we need to build them now.

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