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

I appreciate the chance to give these statements on our national sustainable mobility policy and to listen to Deputies. I will not be here for the entire debate. There is a Cabinet meeting at the same time, which is unfortunate, but I look forward to reading the record and hearing what Members have to say on how we use this moment in time to deliver a seismic change in the nature, characteristics and environmental aspects of our transport system. The switch to this new sustainable mobility mode will be key to this. The national sustainable mobility policy, published last month, sets out the approach we need to take. I will give some examples of what is happening and talk about some of the structures we need to put in place.

I will start with the imperative for doing this. It is an imperative driven first and foremost by our climate targets. We have to halve our emissions in this decade and we expect transport to have to provide a reduction close to the average we want to see across the economy. That will not be easy. It will be incredibly challenging because many of the patterns that have been put in place are there because for five decades or more, we followed a transport policy that was about promoting private car use, which saw ever-longer commuting distances and ever-longer amounts of time spent commuting. The last census showed approximately 200,000 of our citizens commute for more than an hour each way every day. Of those, approximately 80,000 have children under 15 and about 45,000 of them have children who are in their preschool years. This means there are millions of hours when people are not spending time with their families, and when there is major frustration with the traffic gridlock caused by this system that has been created, not to mention the emissions that come from it.

This system has also promoted an ever-lengthening sprawl, especially from our cities. If we look at the census populations for distance travelled for work, we see this doughnut pattern around each of our five cities, in particular, where people moved out and commuted ever-longer distances. As I said, it did not work in climate terms and it did not work in the time wasted by people they could have otherwise spent in a range of other much more preferable activities. It was also very expensive in resource terms and having to provide the infrastructure for it.

We now need to change and change everything. There are four legs to the stool on which we will build a new transport system. These relate to switching, including switching away from the use of fossil fuels, which we know we have to do, towards using electricity, biofuels, hydrogen and other transport fuels that will meet our needs. We need to make a modal shift away from overdependence on the private car. We need to start with our younger people, where there has been a remarkable change in the past 30 to 40 years. We have gone from a country where the vast majority of young children took the bus, walked or cycled to school, to the current environment where the vast majority are driven to school. Indeed, one of the statistics that jumps out, for example, is more secondary school girls drive themselves to school than cycle to school. How did we create such an environment? We need to change it. We need that modal shift back to active travel, walking, cycling and taking the bus and train.

We need to shorten the overall amount of travel. We need to implement the national planning framework, which references not just decarbonising but supporting more compact development and better balanced regional development so everything is not built on the east coast and there is not ever-increasing growth in the numbers travelling in Dublin. That is not just bad for the rest of the country. In the end, it is bad for Dublin because it will not be able to cope with the volume of traffic coming in and out of it.

The fourth S in this switch, shift and shorten approach to sustainable mobility has to be towards sharing. There is a significant opportunity for us to develop sharing transport modes, recognising that most cars spend almost 92% of the day parked and not being used. A sharing mode, in this time of a cost-of-living crisis, is an obvious way we can reduce the economic burden on our householders, while still providing the mobility they need without them necessarily being obliged to own every car, in addition to being flexible in how they share services to deliver that mobility.

I will give some examples of what is happening in government and what we are delivering on in four key aspects, in particular, active travel because promoting it is the most important strategic development we seek to achieve. I will outline what is happening in bus transport, how we do demand management to help us make this more sustainable shift, and some of the governance structures we are setting up in the Government to achieve this leap to halving our climate emissions, reducing the amount of travel we have to do and seeing a shift and a switch in the fuels we use.

Recent developments in active travel are significant. A walking and cycling index was published two weeks ago, for which a very detailed survey was done of Irish householders, some 71% of whom, as citizens, said they wanted to see more investment in cycling and walking infrastructure, such as greenways, cycle tracks and better footpaths. That is one of the reasons the Government has committed to provide more than €360 million a year for them in its programme for Government, as well as in reality.

We followed the OECD recommendation of spending 20% of the transport capital budget on active travel, so we are following best international advice. We are starting to see it pay dividends. The Clontarf cycleway, which is being built at the moment, shows a new level of priority for cyclists and pedestrians as well as buses. This is what we need to do. MacCurtain Street in Cork is an example of how a busy city centre street can be changed. That will happen this year. We need to do the same for O'Connell Street in Limerick city. These are just examples of projects that are starting to be delivered. The Leas-Cheann Comhairle will know that the incredibly narrow Salmon Weir Bridge is a pinch point between the city, the university and the hospital. We are starting to provide new facilities there. This is only the start of what we need to do. Another example of what is happening on the ground is the extension of the greenway in Waterford from Bilberry into the city.

Projects are not just happening in our cities. Some 1,200 walking and cycling projects are being undertaken by local authorities across the country. One I am looking forward to is the new bridge across the Shannon in Athlone as part of the greenway from Dublin to Galway. The bridge will transform the stunning and beautiful urban space on the western side of the Shannon in Athlone town. It will open that area up, provide for significant rejuvenation and create a public place, while also providing active travel infrastructure. Other projects include the Hanover residential and cycling scheme in Carlow and the N63 cycling and pedestrian scheme in Longford. I could go on. People around the country know that we are only starting – we still have a great deal to learn – to roll out these projects, which will be critical in transforming how we view walking and cycling in our cities and will reverse the pattern that has developed over the past 40 years. When I went to school, the majority of people walked, cycled or took the bus. Today, the vast majority are driven there. We can turn that around. There are 170 schools involved in the first green school projects to improve facilities and infrastructure.

I will speak to governance later, but at this critical point, as we come out of Covid and when patterns are still flexible and changing, we need to go further and provide spaces across the country that make our villages, towns, countryside and cities safe, accessible and pleasant places to walk and cycle. The benefits of this lie not just in the climate, but in a much more efficient transport system and a healthier population. The health benefits of active travel are beyond compare.

This is also a social justice project. When I was a councillor in Dublin city, almost half of all households did not own a car - many of them could not afford one - but they suffered the worst noise and air pollution and congestion problems because of a traffic system that did not serve them. We were not providing for households that did not have a car. What were we doing? We are now providing for them. It is a more economical, healthier, cleaner, safer and much better system.

We need to do the same for bus infrastructure as we are for active travel projects. We are doing so. Last week, the third of the BusConnects routes in Dublin was launched. It is going before An Bord Pleanála. Routes are starting to be put in on the Howth, Lucan and other corridors. We are starting to reform the whole route network as well as street formation to give further priority to buses.

This is not just happening in Dublin. Last month, the sustainable transport corridors report on Cork was published by the National Transport Authority, NTA, and Cork city and county councils. It will go back for public consultation in the coming months. I believe 12 corridors are being planned there. There will be a combination of cycling and walking in Cork, with 54 km more of walking and cycling routes as well as 75 km in new bus routes. The same is happening in Galway. It is critical that we develop high-quality bus corridors there, with the prospect of shaping the city around public transport rather than around roads, which I am sure the Leas-Cheann Comhairle will welcome. We could then examine the retrofitting of those bus corridors with light rail.

This is the step change that we can make, but it starts with giving priority to bus services in Galway, Limerick, Waterford, Cork and Dublin. It is happening, but it needs to be accelerated, which I will address in my closing comments regarding the governance system.

The BusConnects networks in our cities are important, but the most important bus project is probably Connecting Ireland, through which we are trying to establish new rural bus transport routes. If we deliver on this scheme, approximately 100 towns and villages will see frequent and proper public bus services for the first time. We started last year with some experimental schemes in Dingle and Leitrim. Now, we are starting to expand it. We will expand it first to the Ukrainian people who have come to our country in order to give them access to public transport services, for example, in north Clare. However, this is a five-year project. Each year, new and clever loop services will be rolled out that connect to train stations and other transport infrastructure, so that synergy is created and every part of the country can start to see public transport as part of its transport system.

This project will be key and we will have to deliver it in a time of change when the patterns that were in place before Covid are unlikely to return. This will require us to consider whether all of our buses are in the right locations, whether we need the level of commuting services that were provided previously, whether we need to match the new transport patterns that will develop with people working remotely and whether we need new town services, for example, those that we introduced recently in Kilkenny, Athlone and elsewhere. This is the type of review of our public transport system that needs to be done to help adjust to the changing patterns as we come out of Covid.

Something else that the Government has done as regards our bus system is provide a 20% reduction in all public transport fares to the end of the year as a way of encouraging people back onto public transport as we come out of Covid. For under-24s, we have provided a 50% reduction in fares to ensure that the pattern is set early in life. We will have to continue reviewing, monitoring and measuring how the public transport system is being used in this new post-Covid, heading-towards-decarbonised world to ensure that it fits patterns of transport that are changing radically from what they were previously.

Besides active travel and bus travel, a third aspect is demand management. Public transport fare changes will help us to switch away from private car ownership. It is not that private car owners are wrong or bad people. Rather, it does not work mathematically. It is expensive and creates congestion, which ends up costing everyone and creating high emissions.

As well as lower fares, we are examining the five cities demand management study, which was published this year and will play a critical part in the changes we need to make. We need to reallocate space to support more sustainable transport solutions. We need to examine our car parking patterns to see whether they are promoting sustainable urban and rural design systems or whether we need to regulate some car parking systems so that the space can be used to create better local environments and streetscapes and support retailers without having everyone drive to every shopfront before driving off and leaving our streets less attractive, less safe, less efficient and less effective as an urban public realm.

Turning to governance, we have the right plans in place to deliver this switch. We have the national development plan, which commits €35 billion to transport over the next eight years. We have the climate action plan, which is strong and legally effective in steering in the direction of a more sustainable low-carbon system.

We have the national planning framework and the national sustainable mobility policy. In its remaining two and three quarter years in office, this Government is committed to focusing on delivery and making sure we bring real, efficient, effective and quick change about because we have to be fast before transport patterns are set again as we come out of the Covid period.

It is also critical that in the next three years we meet our carbon budget for 2025, which will probably be one of the most difficult things to do in transport. We have established a leadership group within the Government and a delivery team beneath it that involves various Departments and Government agencies like the NTA and Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, bringing in outside expertise and new thinking and sharing it through our national climate dialogue so that stakeholders across the country can recommend ideas, see what is happening and understand what is in the programme. Those leadership groups also include the regional authorities and the County and City Managers Association. Critically, we will go to each local authority and ask it to put forward some pathfinder projects, as we are calling them, that can be delivered in the next three years and that might be done super-fast. I will use the example of Robert Burns in Dún Laoghaire and some of the coastal cycle routes that were developed using low-cost solutions and by working with communities to get agreement on what is difficult. As we all know, space reallocation to support cycling, walking or bus transport is not easy but that is what we have to do. We must use this opportunity with the space that was previously used for mass commuting, which will not return. If we do not do so, we will fail both to meet our climate targets for the next three years and to move the entire country in a more sustainable direction.

I hope that in each city and county, local authority managers will join in this process, which has to be from the bottom up. It cannot be directed from the top down because it has to be wanted. The type of project we might look at in, for example, Limerick would involve the three universities joining together in the context of the development of a bus, cycle and walking network that would transform the city centre, bring life back into it and connect those universities. This could be done at a relatively low cost. We could also reopen the Foynes train line. One of the Deputies suggested to the Tánaiste last week that the latter could be done quickly as a way to encourage people to move away from driving to industrial estates and getting stuck. We could go from a system that is not working to fast-tracking the rail solution there to serve our industrial sites better and to provide access to Adare in time for the Ryder Cup. We want to deliver those sort of accelerated projects.

I mention Galway city and what we should do there to turn matters around. I hate to say this, and I have discussed it with the Leas-Cheann Comhairle before, but Galway probably has the least effective transport system of our five major cities. What could we do in three years or what targets could we set ourselves? I visited Galway the week before last and asked the local authority and the local chamber of commerce to come back with proposals for BusConnects, cycling and greenway projects that we could deliver in the next three years.

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