23 November 2016
Statement on the subject of ‘A vision for transport for the Greater Dublin Area’ by Conor Faughnan, Director of Consumer Affairs for AA Ireland, to the OireachtasJoint Committee on Transport, Tourism & Sport
Dear Members,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you here today. The AA is Ireland’s motoring organisation. It has acted as a lobbyist for motoring interests and in a leadership role supporting road safety and progressive transport policies for over 100 years.
The AA provides roadside breakdown cover for over 300,000 Irish motorists and attends well in excess of 100,000 roadside breakdowns every year. It has also grown to becomea major provider of insurance; it is the largest intermediary in Ireland providing Motor, Home, Travel and recently Life insurance. The AA has over 120,000 motor insurance, 60,000 Home insurance and 65,000 travel insurance customers.It employs about 450 people in Ireland, 350 of them in Dublin city centre. It is also well known for providing traffic information via AA Roadwatch.
AA is well placed to see how Dublin has been affected by its traffic and transport challenges over the years. While we are a lobbying organisation the AA does not represent the cars themselves but the people in them. AA Members are not just motorists, they are also citizens. They use public transport, they commute and they work. 10% of them identify as regular cyclists. I regularly say that I don’t like the false position of thinking of car users versus bus users versus cyclists as if they were sworn enemies. Everyone has an interest in getting transport right.
Dublin is my city and I’m very proud of it. It is a fantastic place to live and work and to raise a family, and our quality of life is excellent. But on transport we have made a number of strategic mistakes before and we are making them again.
Dublin suffers more from congestion than it should do for a city of its size. Compared to places like Munich, Amsterdam or Copenhagen it has a transport system that is inefficient, unpredictable and frustrating.
The lazy diagnosis is that we have too many cars or that we have a population that is unwilling to use trains or buses. Not true. Our problems stem from the fact that we have inadequate public transport that is under-funded and poorly planned.
This is not meant to be disrespectful to Dublin Bus; quite the reverse as we would be lost without them. But in peak periods every public transport asset that we possess is stuffed full and yet it still cannot cater for half of the commuters on the move. The rest have to manage come other way, which is a recipe for traffic jams.
On any given working morning in Dublin city centre there are just less than 200,000 who travel into the city centre during rush hour. Of that number, just less than 50% take public transport. 32% travel by car which is actually down quite a bit in the last ten years. One bright sign is that cycling is up; it has more than doubled in a decade but still only accounts for 5% of commuters into the city centre.
In the greater Dublin area the numbers are even worse in terms of car dependency. Public transport is designed radially so is even harder to use in the suburbs. The M50 finds itself carrying massive volumes that in most European cities would be travelling by train or bus. Daily traffic is now over 140,000 vehicles and the motorway is shockingly vulnerable to congestion.
Dublin has made things worse through poor choices. The most obvious of these is the fact that we have allowed the city to spread out horizontally rather than making best use of space. Back in the boom if you were a developer with money to spend you got a better return building on a green field site in Carlow than by filling in a messy site somewhere close to town. Those estates in the new commuter belt are inherently difficult to serve with public transport and so people take to their cars.
This was not the only Tiger Era mistake. The AA took a lot of criticism at the time for being trenchant supporters of both the Port Tunnel and Luas. The cost at the time was €750 million each. In the context of bills that we had to pay later this is cheap. What a pity we didn’t build a dozen Luas lines when we had the chance, and 6 in Cork and 3 in Galway and plenty more besides.
We have also been painfully slow building infrastructure because of delays in the planning process. The M50 took some 30 years to build; that’s about 1 kilometre per year. The first Luas line opened eleven years after the intention to build the system was announced. This is ludicrous; an international embarrassment. We did not hear enough about how and when the government is going to address planning reform.
Having said all of that, Dublin remains a great place and there are plenty of positives. The Port Tunnel, Luas & rail upgrades and the increase in cycling have all helped. In the city centre traffic congestion is not as bad now as it was 10 years ago.
As you know it is proposed to turn College Green into a traffic-free urban space. Personally I think that it potentially a very good idea once it is nicely designed, and I am inclined to favour it. I would warn though that there can be too much a tendency to assume that if you are blocking or frustrating car use that is an objective in itself. As I mindset I think that is wrong and I would rather that we focussed on the positive measures that offer choice.
For example we have suggested before that the city should try to encourage multi-occupancy cars Ten years ago we proposed that a scheme should be trialled, subject to tight controls, to allow people to apply for permits for cars with three or more occupants to use certain bus corridors. This has to be done with care but has potential and should certainly be tried.
The Dublin Bike scheme has been highly successful. AA supported it from the start and supports its extension now.
Dublin is still a city with no Metro and a chronic public transport deficit. Realistically the motor car, much cleaner & greener in the 21st century, will continue to be a very important part of our transport mix. Its role should be prominent but not dominant in a vibrant, busy, active and pleasant urban environment.
ENDS