I move:
Whilst welcoming the recently announced investment in public transport for Dublin, Seanad Éireann deplores the slowness with which the non Luas recommendations of the Dublin Transportation Initiative are being implemented; and urges the present Minister to accelerate the process so that Dubliners do not greet the Millennium with gridlock.
I welcome the Minister and the opportunity to debate this motion. We have approximately 422 days before the new millennium. In recommending this motion to the House I do not want to mislead anyone, but it is vital to accelerate the introduction of the measures recommended by the Dublin Transportation Initiative. If we do not go on thinking like dinosaurs and behaving like snails, we can avoid gridlock taking over Dublin streets. Permanent gridlock is inevitable unless we raise the game we are playing. I hope this debate will mark a first step in realising that and doing something about it.
Even before we raise our game we must play the hand we have as well as we can. It is obvious that we are not doing so at the moment. Except for Luas little attention has been given to the overall recommendations of the DTI which were presented to us in a balanced package. The non Luas recommendations are worthwhile and deserve to be implemented with energy and enthusiasm. The large, expensive and glamorous has grabbed all the attention and the less glamorous and certainly less expensive projects have become orphans as a result.
If anybody doubts that there has been a neglect of the non Luas ideas, let me mention quality bus corridors. After all these years we have only one quality bus corridor in operation. That hardly reflects a great deal of energy or enthusiasm. I do not want to be seen as bashing the DTI but the initiative in this area was developed for a Dublin of a different era. When the DTI report came out about four or five years ago the Celtic tiger was already stalking the streets but few of us realised it then. Nobody realised the far ranging impact the Celtic tiger would have on the single most critical factor to traffic congestion — the level of car ownership.
The explosion in car ownership together with the massive growth in our exports of manufactured goods rapidly created this situation. It would be ungrateful to bash the DTI for not foreseeing this because we were all blind to it. In fact, I compliment the DTI in that most of its strategy would still do more good than harm. For the most part, it put forward good, sensible ideas which we should implement as an immediate stopgap; hence this motion calling to accelerate their implementation. As I hinted, I see it as a launch pad only. We will not solve the congestion we face by implementing the DTI proposals alone. These proposals were geared to deal with a situation which is now history.
To deal properly with today's problems and with tomorrow's, which will be much worse, we need a new approach — radical thinking firmly based on a farseeing strategy. Let me briefly explore what that strategy might be. If we stand back far enough, Dublin's congestion has two main elements — traffic and the road network to carry that traffic. Congestion happens when traffic is more than the road network can take. The growth in traffic has swamped the capacity of our network and in the future further growth in car numbers will increase that city traffic in step unless we change the name of the game in a radical way.
Let us consider how flexible is each of these two key factors. In one sense, the network is relatively inflexible. We cannot address this problem with more roads. The mantra of the 1960s and 1970s was build more roads but we have been there, done that and the scope for building more roads is very slight indeed. Flexibility in the roads system will come from using the existing network more efficiently — for example, by using more space for vehicles and less space for stopped cars.
Much of the present congestion arises because moving cars cannot use the roads properly so it is in our interest to force parked cars off the streets. The more off-street parking the better. I do not subscribe to the crazy notion that off-street parking adds to the problem. Off-street parking is part of the solution provided we use that parking to clear the streets and not only to offer more parking spaces. By far the best way to use the existing network more efficiently is by increasing the density of people moving along the streets — in other words, more people per vehicle, and I have seen efforts made to get more people into each vehicle elsewhere. At one end of the spectrum we have a private vehicle with one person in it while at the other end, a public transport vehicle with 200 people. Even allowing for the different sized vehicles, the increase in passenger density is enormous. It is obvious that switching people to public transport is the primary way available to increase the efficiency of the road network. Making that happen is the key to this problem and that is where we have gone wrong.
Before I go into that, I would like to look at the other major factor in congestion — the number of vehicles using the streets. What determines how many vehicles are in the city is how many private cars people own. The more cars, the more traffic. As the number of cars has exploded so too has the traffic and this trend will continue. Unless we change the equation, traffic will increase — although we are still below European levels of car ownership. Putting these two elements together, we get a dilemma. The main opportunity to increase capacity in the road system is by shifting people from private to public transport.
The growth in car ownership has the effect of shifting people in the other direction, that is, using their own cars instead of public transport. The more people use their own cars, the worse the congestion becomes and the less attractive public transport is as an alternative. If we are honest, we must admit that so far we have failed totally to move people from private to public transport, that nothing on the drawing board so far, including Luas, is remotely likely to cause a major shift in public transport and that our present central strategy of forcing people on to public transport by making their life as motorist hell is doomed to failure. The psychology of this is simple — if traffic is hell, people would rather endure it in their own cars than on public transport. At present, travelling by bus is as slow as by car. It is also less reliable because one does not know when the next bus will arrive. One quality bus corridor or even a cluster of corridors will not change that. If one travels by DART at busy times, there is a different type of congestion in the carriage.
The psychology is simple but it has been completely ignored in traffic planning. When people own cars, they choose to use them even if it is unpleasant. We have only to look around to see the immensity of this reality and vision is needed to find a solution to the problem. This has been lacking up to now. While our goal of moving people from private to public transport is correct, the ways we have chosen to do it will never produce the desired result. I ask the nation, the Government, the House and the city to accept my message that we cannot reach that result from this point.
However, I suggest something can be done. The problem can be solved but the medicine will be hard to take and the only question is whether we are prepared to take it. The medicine has two forms. The first is that public transport is provided which offers a radically better way of getting from A to B to a motoring public that loves its cars. The second is that it is made significantly more expensive for motorists to use their cars by making them pay for the use of city streets on a pay as you go basis. I am very brave and courageous to make that suggestion in the city of Dublin.
The two elements interact and are inseparable. The main precondition for attractive public transport is that it is fast and reliable. This can only happen if a significant amount of traffic is removed from the streets. Quality bus corridors will bring us only a tiny part of the way. A mechanism which would cut the amount of traffic overnight is essential to get public transport to a point where it is an attractive alternative. The only mechanism that will be effective is road pricing. The technology now exists to charge people for using particular streets or parts of a city. I was in Singapore in June and I saw this system for the first time. I understand it is also in operation in Hong Kong and it works. It is not an untried idea. However, until now in Ireland it has been politically taboo.
