Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Dáil Éireann shall take note of the Report of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action entitled "Report on Reducing Emissions in the Transport Sector by 51% by 2030", copies of which were laid before Dáil Éireann on 11th June, 2021.

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Heydon, for joining us here today for this very important debate. The report we are discussing in the House today was published a year ago. I had a query from a journalist as to why it is being debated in the Dáil now and what is new with the report. While I do not claim to understand the dark arts of Dáil scheduling and what gets selected for debate and what does not, I can say that this report is more relevant now than it was a year ago and that it is likely to be more relevant still in a year's time because, until such time as we cut emissions in the transport sector by a full 50% or more, this report will have immense value and can be our guiding light on that journey.

At the beginning of last year, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, which had just finished pre-legislative scrutiny of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 and proposed that a target of a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030 be knitted into the new law, decided to undertake a methodical examination of the big emitting sectors in the Irish economy, those being transport, agriculture, energy generation and heat. We are here today to discuss the result of one segment of that portfolio of work, that on emissions in the transport sector.

Before I begin to lay out what is in this report and why it is important, I will thank the members of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action for their hard work and for their efforts in putting together the report. In time, it will be seen as a landmark report that helped our State to undertake the systemic change in transport that was required to meet our climate targets and to meaningfully contribute to the immense global effort to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, in doing so saving this precious ecosystem called earth for our children and their children and making it a better and fairer place to live.

I also thank the expert witnesses and guests who appeared before our committee: Dr Tadhg O’Mahony, Finland Futures Research Centre; Mr. Niall Cussen, the Planning Regulator; Mr. Andrew Murphy of Transport and Environment; Ms Anne Graham, the chief executive of the National Transport Authority; Mr. Hugh Creegan, also of the National Transport Authority; Dr. Brian Caulfield of Trinity College; Dr. Diarmuid Torney of Dublin City University; Dr. Lynn Sloam of Transport for Quality of Life in Wales; Dr. Elisabeth Windisch of the International Transport Forum at the OECD; and Professor Alan McKinnon of Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg. We held one of those sessions in this Chamber during the Covid lockdown and I had a chance to sit in the Acting Chair's seat and play at being Ceann Comhairle for a few hours. That was certainly one of the highlights of my political career to date.

The committee's report makes 47 recommendations and points the way towards achieving the necessary reduction in transport emissions through a fundamental change in how we plan and manage the transport system in Ireland. Over the course of the engagements, it was made abundantly clear that to do this the "avoid, shift, improve" approach must be embedded in our transport and mobility infrastructure planning. Reducing transport demand must be the first and key priority, followed by shifting carbon-intensive journeys to zero-carbon modes such as walking and cycling and providing sustainable public transport in both rural and urban areas. The electrification of our public transport and freight fleet is the necessary third step, followed by the electrification of private vehicles. This report challenges the conventional "predict and provide" approach and the legacy of poor planning that has induced traffic and car dependency and driven road construction and high greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in adverse consequences for our economy, our health, our society and our environment.

In the following few minutes, I will address some of the key findings and recommendations of our report. We heard that we have enough road space in all of our urban areas but that we use it very poorly, which has had a disastrous effect on many of our towns, particularly those in rural Ireland. It has also led to a society that is car-dependent, which results in high levels of carbon emissions. While it is tempting to give space to private cars for access to shops and for parking and while it is counterintuitive to do otherwise, this tends to be a very inefficient way of enabling the movement of a lot of people. In other words, a small number of cars carrying a small number of people will clog up a street, having the effect of putting a low limit on the number of people who can and will use it. For social, health and economic reasons, road space should be prioritised for modes of transport that are cleaner and that more people use such as public transport, walking and cycling. If we design our streets for cars, we will get cars. This is what has been happening for the past 60 or 70 years. However, if we design our streets for people and for more efficient and cleaner modes of transport, this is what we will get.

What flows from road space reallocation, as challenging and unpopular as it might be, is an effective reduction in the capacity of our roads to carry private cars. We need to do this if we are to achieve the necessary cut in emissions, while also availing of a plethora of co-benefits. The approach of the past that economic growth, population growth and traffic congestion demand the development of more roads was mistaken and must be thrown out. In this regard, the committee recommends a review of current and planned road projects.

At this point, I will make a personal observation. This is not something the committee has said. We seem to have an absurd system whereby State transport agencies have tens, if not hundreds, of road projects in the early stages of planning at any one time. Hundreds of millions are spent every year to keep this project pipeline ticking over. Many of them will ultimately fall at the planning stage, will not be prioritised for further funding at a later stage in the process or will be required to be scrapped by our climate obligations. The bill for this pipeline of fantasy roads will come to many billions of euros. It is my view that we should stop now, as our near neighbour Wales has done. We should stand up to the highway industrial complex, save ourselves vast amounts of resources and redirect those resources and our energies towards more meaningful and beneficial infrastructural projects and services.

If we agree that we must reallocate road space and, in so doing, reduce the car-carrying capacity of our roads, a good way to get the ball rolling would be to introduce a car mileage reduction target. Such a target is proposed in last October's climate action plan but it is a low target of just 10% and only applies to fossil fuel-powered cars. Not applying the target to all cars means that we are implicitly accepting that we could end up with more cars on our roads driving more kilometres in 2030 than is currently the case. If we are to be consistent with an approach of avoid, shift and improve and with the policies of modal shifting, reallocating road space and reducing the car-carrying capacity of the network, we should apply this target to the total number of vehicles, including electric vehicles, as Scotland has done in the last 18 months or so.

The approach of avoid, shift and improve, which transport policy should follow, does not present electric vehicles as a panacea to the issue of emissions in the transport sector. There are still a lot of emissions associated with electric vehicles, including greenhouse gas emissions, very harmful particulates and other pollutants.

EV supports should primarily help those caught in forced car dependency. Accordingly, the committee recommends that a car mileage reduction target be introduced. We have intentionally not been prescriptive in saying that it should just apply to fossil fuels. Additionally, the committee recommends that incentives and supports for EV uptake should be reviewed and targeted, with a particular focus on forced car usage.

We need to look at how we make investment cases for infrastructure. We need to tackle three flaws in the public investment process as it relates to climate change, namely, how we calculate benefits, the data we collect to demonstrate potential benefits, and our post-approval assessment procedures. On the benefits, for too long we have relied on easy-to-calculate benefits such as travel time for roads projects, yet we have ignored the social cost of dispersed housing, polluted air and greenhouse gas emissions. We have been making investment cases based on flawed assumptions from the 1970s that ignore climate change, combat growth and the potential for transit-oriented development, and ignore everything that we have learned in the past 50 years. The data we collect and model when we propose new infrastructure is also flawed, in my opinion. For the past 30 years we have proposed motorway projects that have consistently underestimated the volume of traffic that will be removed from bypass roads and the induced demand of new traffic that occurs when a new road is built. We could fix some of this relatively easily by adopting a practice from the UK of post-approval assessments examining its impact after infrastructure has been built and how the impact compares to projections. This is done routinely in the UK. A witness who appeared before the committee, Dr. Lynn Sloman, was able to use the data to prove a significant carbon impact from greenhouse gas emissions is caused by the UK's road-building programme. Another witness, Dr. Tadhg O'Mahony, sent some follow-up information to the committee after appearing before it. He stated

For projects with long-term environmental effects, such as those related to air pollution, climate change and ecosystem damages, it is recommended to use timescales of 100+ years for economic evaluation of the impact. Failing to fully capture these long-term welfare gains and losses will distort analysis with a bias towards those projects that are more carbon-intensive, or environmentally damaging. Such a bias would undermine not only the evaluation, but welfare and sustainable development in general.

The committee has set out strong recommendations in respect of how infrastructure projects are appraised.

We need to give our rural communities a transport guarantee. The essence of the "every village, every hour" approach is that every community has a bus service that operates every hour, from early morning until late at night, connecting in with services on the rail network where they exist. This level of service has been proven to work in rural Switzerland, in parts of Germany and in the UK. If rural communities are provided with good services, they will make the switch. In small rural towns such as Schaffhausen in Switzerland, more than 40% of journeys are taken by public transport. That compares with just 5% in my home city of Limerick, despite the fact that Schaffhausen is smaller and has a lower population density than Limerick. It is not just a climate issue, but a social justice issue. A significant number of people in rural Ireland do not own a car. Many more experience what research from Dr. Páraic Carroll of University College Dublin and Dr. Brian Caulfield and Dr. Rodolfo Benevenuto of Trinity College Dublin call forced car dependency, where people in rural areas are forced to own a car, even though they cannot afford one. Research done in my own office indicates that serving all 850 settlements in Ireland seven days a week, 16 times a day would cost approximately €500 million a year without taking into account fare revenue. In Schaffhausen in Switzerland, fare revenue contributes to half the cost of providing the service.

Private cars in Ireland drove a total of 35 billion km in 2019. If we levied a small charge of just 1.5 cent per kilometre on both fossil fuel and electric private cars, it would fund the every village, every hour service in its entirety. Even if all these new buses were diesel buses, the greenhouse gas emissions would still be very small. We could offer rural communities a real alternative to the car and give people a real opportunity to reduce their transport emissions, no matter where they live. A recent study from University College Cork, UCC, showed that 37% of all our transport emissions are caused by private cars that are undertaking short journeys within the 0 km to 8 km range. There is no doubt that many, or even most, of those car journeys can be displaced by the use of bikes, particularly electric bikes. However, it cannot, and will not, happen until we have full connected, cohesive and safe cycling networks in and between all our urban areas. If we are serious about tackling the 37% of emissions caused by private cars, we will quickly roll out such networks. We can do this at very low cost as we have seen with successful projects in Dublin along the quays and in Dún Laoghaire on the coastal mobility route. The report strongly recommended that the NTA's regional transport strategies align with the national ambition to cut emissions by 50% within a decade. It is with regret that a year after the report's publication, we see that the draft strategies for Dublin, Limerick and Waterford fall well short of this ambition. The potential for electric bikes to fulfil our mobility needs has not been adequately modelled in the development of these strategies. If it was done, the shortfall in emissions reductions could be made up.

Lastly, on climate action, the members of the joint committee have noticed that we are very good at talking about climate action among ourselves, and the necessary policies, regulations and legislation that are required. We are good at talking about it as politicians, as sectoral interests and as academics. However, we still need to bring the people with us on this hugely challenging that journey that we are on. The committee has worked very collaboratively and I pay tribute to all members for their work. We have set very high and ambitious targets. However, it is increasingly clear that even modest climate action measures such as the development of cycle lanes, the removal of electricity pylons or the improvement of waste policy, let alone any of the recommendations of the report, are easily politicised and exploited. In this regard, the committee recommends that a concerted public awareness campaign is undertaken to inform the public on climate action and address concerns. We feel that this would neutralise the opportunity of some individuals to play politics.

I could go on and I could talk at length about the contents of the committee's report. I encourage all Members of the Houses to read it. It contains some very interesting testimony from the witnesses who appeared before the committee on how we can reduce our transport emissions in Ireland by 51% by 2030, and how we can do it in way that is fair, that fulfils the needs of everybody to get around in a timely fashion and in a healthy and a safe way. I am just about out of time, so I will leave it at that. I look forward to the debate and listening to the views of colleagues across the House.

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