Good transport requires fresh thinking

The Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) has recently estimated the cost of traffic congestion in the Greater Dublin Area at close to £1 billion per year. This does not include other costs to the community such as air pollution and accidents.

How big is the congestion problem? We now expect almost 500,000 person trips in the morning peak-hour by 2016. That compares to about 300,000 today - or an increase of more than 70 per cent. And the current pressure on our roads and public transport resources is almost intolerable.

So what's being done? Towards the end of last year, the DTO submitted a £15 billion plan to Government that promises the most comprehensive and significant investment yet undertaken in transport infrastructure in this State.

The Government embraced the plan and the DTO and other relevant agencies are translating the document, Platform for Change, into a detailed proposal that will spell out in precise terms what, where and when things are going to happen.

The plan aims to create a system capable of transporting more than half a million commuters in the morning peak. We expect to cut car journey times by nearly half; rail journeys by more than half and bus journeys by more than a third.

On average our proposals will more than half commuters' journey time from 76 minutes to 34 minutes. It will also mean less energy consumed, fewer emissions and fewer accidents.

A properly designed rail network can carry the number of passenger which will be required in the coming years. Our ambition for the rail network is to develop it from a system which today caters for 21,000 trips during the morning peak to one which can cater for 239,000 trips by 2016 - at the latest. That's an eleven-fold increase.

The new rail network will have different elements - including an extended DART, the LUAS and a metro system.

Current mainline systems in the region will be overhauled and connections constructed to ensure that we get the maximum return from the network.

The new system will be part of an integrated public transport network which will be no further than 10 minutes walk away from any potential journey origin or destination and which will be capable of bringing people from any one part of the region to another - generally with no more than one interchange.

But if this revolutionary transport system is 16 years away, what are hard pressed commuters - and businesses - to do in the meantime?

Well the reality is that quite a lot is happening at present - and more is coming on stream all the time.

For example, 10 new DART carriages - the first to be ordered for the DART since its creation - came into operation late last year. A further 16 are coming on line in May. The long-awaited extensions of the service to Greystones and Malahide have now also taken place and the new station at Grand Canal Dock became operational last month.

During the last two years more than 275 new buses have been added to the Dublin Bus fleet. This has brought significant improvements in bus services across the region - particularly through the introduction of Quality Bus Corridors (QBCs).

Last week details were announced of five new QBCs which will begin operating over the next eight weeks. This will bring the number in the region to nine. Each QBC has proved its merit: on the Lucan route customer numbers in the peak hour have increased by 40 per cent; from Malahide they have risen 44 per cent; and on the Stillorgan Route they have risen a massive 196 per cent.

Bus journey times are now up to 50 per cent faster than car journey times on the relevant routes and two-thirds of new customers on the buses were previously car commuters.

We are now only about two years away from seeing the welcome sight of passengers taking to the first of the Luas lines.

There are lots of other things happening; detailed planning for a metro system is under way; design work has begun on the widening of the Kildare rail line to four tracks; work has begun on the Dublin Port Tunnel and much more.

This shouldn't imply that everything is fine. Clearly it is not. But there's nothing to be gained by ignoring the small but significant successes being made. Through the implementation of the National Development Plan very significant improvements in infrastructure will be made by 2006.

In the coming years there will be a much larger onus on employers to contribute to transportation management by assessing how their own workplaces are affecting the situation.

Until we have created a public transport system which provides a viable alternative to commuting by car, we've taken the view that taking steps to try to dissuade people from commuting by car should only be done on a very moderate scale.

But as infrastructure expands this will become more neccessary. Businesses would be well advised to plan ahead. Where transport is concerned, attitudes can be as slow to change as infrastructure is to build.

John Henry is director of the Dublin Transportation Office