Who delivers the best national transport options for citizens?
COLM McCARTHY’S ARTICLE ON TRANSPORT LED TO A REMARKABLE RESPONSE FROM THE BOSS OF IRISH RAIL It’s lazy to insist public transport is an either/or choice between road and rail-based options, writes
COLM McCarthy’s lazy and perennial insistence that public transport and transport infrastructure provision and development is somehow an either/or choice between road and rail-based options has again been trotted out (Sunday Independent, May 24).
However, his utterly superficial analysis can be summarised thus: we have not planned our city and country and its supporting transport infrastructure properly in the past, so we’d better not start now.
His comical hand-wringing around past planning shortcomings ignores the fact that he has a decades-long record of flawed and failed opposition to rail developments such as DART, Commuter Rail and Luas.
Had this been followed, it would have condemned an entire region to a strangling level of congestion, and mitigated against the concentrated development along rail lines we are now seeing.
He ignores the fact that where rail systems are available on commuter corridors, the numbers using public transport are at their highest.
The usage of public transport among commuters, for example, peaks along the Northern Commuter rail corridor, with towns such as Skerries and Donabate being majority public transport users for commuting purposes. This is a rail alignment adjacent to excellent and necessary motorway infrastructure, demonstrating that the average commuter recognises the nonsense in McCarthy’s false binary narrative.
The current development plans of all major local authorities in the Greater Dublin area will see major and higher-density housing and employment development along our rail corridors, and Transport Oriented Development (TOD) in our urban centre, including on sites owned by the CIE Group adjacent to rail hubs.
This will be facilitated by the doubling in rail capacity which will be delivered under the DART Expansion Programme, which will see more trains, upgraded to DART standard on all corridors into the capital — Drogheda, Maynooth/M3 Parkway and Hazelhatch. The DART Expansion Programme alone will allow more people to switch to rail than currently cross the M50 daily by car.
The State’s development plan, Project Ireland 2040, also serves to deliver the counterbalance he appears to champion. Yet he fails to recognise that higher densities can also be developed in our regional cities under this plan, supporting an enhanced role for rail to address congestion and sustainability, in partnership with other public transport modes.
The Cork Metropolitan Area Transportation Strategy, double-tracking Athenry to Galway, and developments in Limerick and Waterford, can all yield a more sustainable future for those cities set for prioritised developments, again with TOD at their core.
Electrification of our rail network, set to be delivered across the Greater Dublin area under DART Expansion, can decarbonise public transport for 80pc of rail journeys and can, over an extended period, be developed on an inter-urban basis, delivering faster, more efficient and cleaner public transport options.
Has Colm McCarthy even heard of the climate crisis?
Any fully functioning transport system in the modern Ireland will have a role for:
• High capacity rail modes, facilitating better planning, and moving more people than any other mode can.
• A strong bus network in tandem, built around core corridors, and serving more dispersed development.
• A far greater role for cycling, walking and micro-mobility modes resulting in a cohesive and sustainable transport infrastructure for our economy, environment and society.
In the congestion before the Covid-19 crisis and amidst the tragedy and tribulations during this time, we glimpse the more sustainable future which could be delivered.
Then we can ensure that, as our economy recovers, we can — at last — be ready to deliver urban and national transport options based on improving citizens’ quality of life, not on outdated ideological biases.