Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I commend the committee and the members of it who are in the Chamber on another excellent report. The output from the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, chaired by Deputy Leddin, is exceptional. We each have ten minutes to talk about transport and planning but we would need hours. In fact, Deputy Leddin and I have spent hours talking about transport planning. We have often ruined a good social occasion for many people by spending hours talking about how we are going to fix the transport problems in this country.

We cannot talk about transport without talking about the planning system. We have had decades of urban sprawl and it is really difficult to retrofit our transport system to meet decades of sprawling development which has locked people into car dependency. In the early days of the BusConnects programme, councillors, roads engineers, local authority staff, community groups and others were invited by the NTA to an information session in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire.

We were broken into break-out groups and provided with maps of a sprawling urban district. We were given a limited number of buses and a limited number of drivers, and we were told to design a public transport system for that city with its sprawl. It could not be done. No matter what way one tried to jig it, some people were going to be left unserved by public transport. That is the real challenge we have. How do we provide public transport that is viable and competitive, and especially when we have spent 40 or 50 years just providing for cars? Planning policy has created that.

Page 8 of the report refers to the Office of the Planning Regulator: "...the OPR does not currently have adequate tools to monitor and assess the progress of developments on brownfield and infill sites and urged the Committee to recommend the establishment of a Brownfield Register in order to address this issue." I will take this recommendation back to the housing committee because I believe this is something we need to look at under the planning system. How do we know that the objectives of our national planning framework are being met if we cannot really measure and monitor properly? This then feeds into how we provide transport systems.

With regard to vacancy and dereliction, while we sprawled in how we built, we took our eye off the towns. We have let the towns die a little bit and become hollowed out. We need to refocus that. I believe there is general consensus that we need to look at those vacant and derelict buildings. By revitalising the towns and bringing buildings back to residential use, it allows us to provide those public transport systems. It is not only about public transport systems to the towns, but it is also about how people circulate and get around the towns. These are the active travel measures that Deputy O'Rourke referred to.

We still design in a way that puts priority on the car. This creates hostile streets. Even in the way we design housing estates now, one must get into a car to get out of the estate. There are really easy ways to knock a hole through a wall and put in a pedestrian linkage through with safe routes to schools where people can cycle and walk and meet their friends from the other has estates quite easily. There are, however, massive objections from people when one tries to go back and retrofit this measure. I was dealing with one such situation in my constituency recently where people on one side of the wall wanted it and those on the other side of the wall did not. It is always contentious. We must start building this type of measure into how we design.

We have a load of roads in this country. One could build a really good political career just on a love of roads. We have often seen political careers built on this, where one could spend five years lobbying for a road, another five to ten years funding it and getting it built. Then one would get another five years out of widening it, and in the intervening 20 years it would also need to be fixed multiple times. We must get away from that. Building a big, brand-new shiny road is not development. It is 1990s transport planning thinking and it shows that we do not understand the climate emergency and how much of the emissions are due to transport because of the way that we designed and built our developments. It can definitely be done, but we must develop a different love for the road and embrace a design that is safer for children and pedestrians, where our towns and villages welcome people walking or cycling to school and where parents and guardians can bring children to school in a safe manner and not have to make the decision as to whether they should load the kids into the car because there is no other safe way to get there. It is fine for urban areas, and I realise that there are problems in rural areas, but we can manage that as well. The school bus system really needs to be revamped and built up. There are so many more children. One can see how the roads are empty in the summer months during the school holidays. This is because we are not all dropping our kids to school. There are solutions to it.

If we build the public transport, it will work. There are examples of that. There was a link put in between Heuston Station and Connolly Station which brought that Newbridge train up into Grand Canal Dock. That track lay idle for years. The track was there and there was connectivity but there were no passenger services on it. They built it. Irish Rail did it in-house and it is now full and being used the whole time. We have all of this rail network system there which is underutilised. In my constituency, in south Greystones, which is also in Deputy Whitmore's constituency, we have a perfectly good rail line but we just do not have trains on it. We have a perfectly good signalling system on it but we do not need it because there are no trains on it. There are only two or three trains a day. This is to be addressed. Electrification can do that. The Minister of State referred to electrification. We can do a hell of a lot more on electrification in the State. Ireland has probably some of the lowest penetration of electric rail services in Europe. It does not all have to be continuous overhead systems. In Germany they use the discontinuous conveyor overhead systems. A train is in contact with the overhead for 60 km where it charges up, and then it can go the next 60 km without being in contact. A line built from Dublin to Cork does not have to be a continuous overhead system. It could be three discontinuous systems. That is the level of thinking we need to be at.

When I heard about battery-powered DART I had my doubts about it and I looked into it, but they work and they will work. We will see them coming into service within the next 18 months to two years, including the Drogheda line. We are hoping to get one also down to Wicklow town. I believe it is possible. The population and the service demand would support such a measure. It is not just about the electrification of the service. It also provides a much better service for people, we can move quicker, there are lighter trains, there is better acceleration, there is better braking, and they are cleaner, quieter, and easier to service. They just make a whole lot of sense.

Rail freight is an area we rarely look at in the State. The western rail corridor is ideal for electrification. The West=On=Track group will be coming into the Oireachtas next week to state its case for the western rail corridor extension, ultimately up to Sligo. Western rail would bring all of the offshore energy in. Given the development and industry out there, it will bring it all the way to Rosslare Port also, which makes perfect sense. It would take the pressure off the east coast. Our national development plan is also looking at this to relieve all of the concentration on the east coast and spread it in the regions. To do that, we need a spine of rail network through it. The track is there. Consider the 1907 map of the railways in Ireland. It was a huge number of railways. I do not believe we would ever need to go back to that level - we have our cars and good roads - but we could do a lot of work in that regard with small amounts of investment. Consider the investment going into Cork now with the Cork rail system. This will transform Cork with electrified rail systems. Limerick is also perfectly designed to have a really good urban electrified system. We cannot call it the DART when it goes to Limerick or Cork. We will have to come up with a different acronym for it.

Electric buses have also been launched, which is another innovation. Many of these things are happening, but it is slow. Investment in transport is expensive but if one invests in a railway, it is investment in a 100-year asset that would never need to be widened. Yes, it would need constant maintenance and bits of upgrades now and again but when more frequency is needed on it, we would just do a signalling upgrade. It is not like a road where one must keep widening it. Then there may be reduced demand and the road is useless for everybody. If there are three lanes on a road, instead of being in traffic in two lanes, one is stuck in the middle lane with a traffic jam on both sides. It does not make sense and I am glad we are getting away from it. Building big wide roads is not progress.

My last point is on SUVs. Deputy O'Rourke referred to the low penetration of electric vehicles, EVs. Why is there such a large uptake of SUVs? Last year 55% of car sales were SUVs. What is it about SUVs? It is the slick marketing and slick advertising that makes people think that they want to go out and drive an SUV. They are just stuck in traffic like everybody else. I have spoken to some people, not judgmentally, about why they bought an SUV. They say they like the seat position in it as they are a little bit higher in it. I ask them if they could not have bought a cushion and saved themselves about €25,000. Anyway, we must look at that. They are getting disproportionately large. There are the crossover models, which I understand are used by families who need that kind of bigger vehicle, but those massive big urban utility vehicles are too wide for parking spaces, are too wide for lanes, are too heavy and visually one cannot see out the front of them. If you are hit by an SUV at 30 km, 40 km, or 60 km, you are dead. That is the end of the story. The bottom line is that we need to cut emissions. Transport is one of those tough ones to crack, but I believe we have the solutions and the will of this Government to do it.

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