Try the zero cost way to tackle traffic

Two years ago a large part of the lawn of Leinster House was dug up and plastered over with tarmacadam. The purpose of that vandalism was to facilitate the parking of cars. The Kildare Street plaza of Leinster House is taken over entirely by cars, apart from the plinth.

Nearby there is a large, ugly, multi-storey car-park reserved for other public servants who work in the ESB. Down the road several acres of the grounds of Trinity College are given over to car-parks for academics and others working at the college. Over at the Four Courts a large yard is given over to cars owned by judges, barristers and court officials. Across the river there is an underground car-park for corporation officials.

All over Dublin city tens or thousands of cars are parked throughout each working day, over half of them owned by public servants. It is one of the perks of working in the public service. Out at RTE there must be over a thousand cars parked throughout the day. Another thousand must be parked on the Belfield campus. Cars clog the lower yard of Dublin Castle each day, a scandal worthy of a tribunal in itself.

In one fell swoop Dublin's traffic congestion would be greatly eased if 80 per cent of these cars were excluded from the city centre each working day. And they could be excluded simply by closing down these car-parking facilities, starting with Leinster House.

Of course, other means of getting these people to and from work would have to emerge. But does anyone really believe that if suddenly there was a huge surge in the demand for public or shared transport in a deregulated environment private taxi-owners and bus operators would not emerge to provide it? Several more quality bus corridors would have to be provided to speed the progress of buses and taxis, and this in itself would further encourage people out of their cars and on to the buses because there would be less space on the roads for cars.

How is it that this obvious initiative - the zero-cost initiative - is not the first resort of the Cabinet when contemplating the resolution of the Dublin traffic problem? How could they opt, in advance of such an obvious strategy, to commit billions of pounds to an eastern bypass, a metro line and a Luas line?

The Luas project entirely mystifies me. How could it be that a Luas tram would carry more people than a bus, especially the elongated bus that has begun to appear on the streets? Luas will involve digging up the streets over several years, causing havoc. A crane in Dawson Street last week caused massive disruption throughout a large area of the south city; just think of the disruption that several similar obstructions all over the place will cause for several years. (And, by the way, what justification could there have been on the part of Dublin Corporation for allowing so many days for the renovation of a posh restaurant?)

Buses would cost far less than Luas (hundreds of millions less) and perhaps nothing at all to the Exchequer if private bus operators were given free rein. How could buses be any less effective in transporting people from one place to another? Also, if the open market system was permitted to operate, there would be a huge variety of bus services offered, in terms of routes, quality of buses and operating times. Just look at what has happened since the partial deregulation of the airline business.

It might be that in addition to deregulated bus and taxi services and the closing off of large parts of public roadways to their exclusive use, some further provision would have to be made, such as a metro line or the eastern bypass. But why should such vast resources be expended on these mega-projects until the zero-cost strategy is tried? This is especially so when this could be put in place in a few months and be fully operational in, say, two years.

The only plausible explanation for avoiding the zero-cost initiative is that the Government is unwilling and/or unable to confront the car lobby, or rather the car-parking lobby. The public servants who believe they have a constitutional right to drive their cars into the centre of the city each morning, park them free all day, and then drive them home during rush-hour. The journalists who have parking rights in Leinster House. The academics, the judges, the barristers, the corpo officials, the broadcasters and even a few Irish Times employees, some of whom are rumoured to have company-funded car-parking facilities.

Apart from that, the ease with which the Cabinet committed itself last week to the expenditure of billions of pounds to meet the traffic problem is breathtaking. Apart from the flimsy basis on which each of the initiatives has been approved (no firm costings of the eastern bypass or the metro), the daft features (the metro and the Luas being on different rail gauges) and the implausibility of any political decision that is likely to run into local opposition sticking for 16 years, there is another disquieting dimension. It appears that the commitment of such vast resources was made without any evaluation of what projects will have to be forgone as a consequence.

How could the commitment of such vast resources to cater for a problem with cars (for that is the problem) take priority over a host of other pressing demands? To list just a few: the millions required for the health services to cope with the waiting lists; the hundreds of millions required for the regeneration of the poverty ghettoes in our cities; the millions required for drug rehabilitation; the millions required to provide decent accommodation for mental hospital patients; the millions required for the provision of proper facilities for the physically and mentally disadvantaged; the millions required for the provision of proper halting facilities for Travellers, the few millions required to treat asylum-seekers decently . . .

Or does the tyranny of the car prevail over all?