John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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Question 103: To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the international models he studied when devising the smarter travel initiative; if they have been successful; and if he will give details of the scale of the models that were analysed. [10079/11]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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As the Deputy will be aware, the Smarter Travel Areas initiative predates my time as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport. None the less, I support the initiative strongly. I am advised that in drawing up the scheme originally, that it draws from similar experience in the UK where the Sustainable Travel Towns Programme was launched by the Department for Transport and ran from April 2004 to April 2009. Following a competition, the programme was implemented in three towns: Darlington, Peterborough and Worcester. The primary objective in all three areas was to encourage more use of non-car options- in particular bus use, cycling and walking- and less single-occupancy car use. At the start of the Sustainable Travel Towns Programme, Darlington and Worcester had populations of roughly 100,000 people, while Peterborough had a population of about 137,000.

An independent evaluation commissioned by the UK Department for Transport indicated that the programme was successful in reducing travel by car and went some way towards reducing congestion, and increasing the use of other modes of travel. Overall, the results have been very positive, and show that across the three towns there has been:

A reduction in car trips of 9% (in comparison to a 1% reduction in other similar sized towns over the same period)

An increase in bus trips per person by 10-22% (in comparison to an estimated national fall of 0.5% in similar sized towns)

An increase in cycle trips by 26-30% (against other comparable towns experiencing an estimated fall in cycling trips of 9%)

An increase in walking trips by 10-13% (against an estimated national fall of 9% in comparable towns)

The full report is available on:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/sustainable/smarterchoices/programmes/