Public transport in a jam

The Republic is in the ha'penny place when it comes to public transport. Though hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested in motorways and other roads over the past 10 years, public transport remains a relative Cinderella, regarded by the Mandarins as little more than a costly drain on the public purse.

It was only last year, for example, that Iarnrod Eireann was allowed to order 10 more carriages for the overcrowded DART line in Dublin - the first addition to its rolling stock since it came into service in 1984. Does none of the Mandarins in our permanent government have to stand all the way in from Dalkey, like so many other commuters?

CIE's chief executive, Michael McDonnell, frankly admitted in July 1996 that the level of service provided to most rail passengers was "absolutely appalling". And even Michael Lowry, then Minister for Transport, was prepared to concede that the railway network had suffered from "gross under-investment" over the years.

They made these remarks in the opulent boardroom of Great Northern Railways in Amiens Street, itself a symbol of the triumphant era of rail travel, at a press conference to announce that £73 million had been allocated under the EU-funded National development Plan for major works to improve many of the mainline rail services.

This came on top of the £90 million spent on the new Enterprise service between Dublin and Belfast, and the £220 million earmarked for the Luas light rail system in Dublin. All seemed set for a renaissance of Irish railways, more than three decades after the once-extensive network was flailed to a virtual skeleton by Todd Andrews.

However, although work is proceeding on improvements to mainline routes serving Galway, Sligo, Tralee and Waterford, the Luas project is stalled by the present Government's dithering over whether it should be put underground in the city centre - even though many other European cities confidently see on-street light rail as the way to go.

And it is only in recent months that plans have been hatched to provide a rail link between Dublin Airport and the city centre - if only to mop up the EU funds for Luas should it fall at the last fence. Here again, the fact that Dublin is the only EU capital without such a link was ignored for years, even as passenger numbers soared to 10 million a year.

It also bears repeating that Dublin Bus is required to cover its entire operating costs from fares in 1998. By comparison, other European cities subsidise their transport systems by between a third and four-fifths of their operating costs - because they see public transport as vital to the well-being of any self-respecting city.

The absence of a subsidy here is shrouded in a conspiracy of silence. On a recent RTE Prime Time special on Dublin's traffic crisis, the new manager of Dublin Bus, Alan Westwell, persistently avoided answering a direct question about whether he was satisfied with the zero level of subsidy which the company now receives.

Westwell was under instructions from CIE bosses not to deal with the issue because they feared that any reference to it might annoy Mary O'Rourke, the Minister for Public Enterprise. Even consultants looking into ways of promoting the use of public transport are reluctant to mention it because the Department of Finance doesn't want to know.

Yet the lack of any State support represents a serious constraint on the operations of Dublin Bus. Services are severely curtailed in off-peak periods or eliminated altogether while integrated ticketing is impossible because of its revenue implications. And commuters still can't write off the cost of their monthly tickets as a tax-deductible expense.

Meanwhile, the Department apparently sees nothing wrong with giving out liberal tax incentives for the construction of multi-storey car parks, right in the heart of urban areas, which are then used quite flagrantly for commuter car parking. And it has yet to get around to treating parking places as a "benefit-in-kind", like company cars.

Like other cities and towns, Dublin is now choked by its own traffic. Small wonder when the economy is booming, new car sales have reached record levels public transport remains so poor and - - outside the relatively privileged DART corridor - we now have so many motorways, or virtual motorways pointing towards the city centre.

The notorious imbalance in our EU-aided investment in transport infrastructure was graphically illustrated in 1992 when 78 per cent of the £230 million budget was spent on roads and just 4 per cent on public transport. This year, even under a somewhat more balanced programme, the National Roads Authority will spend £291 million.

However, the NRA is unable to say what categories of traffic will benefit from this investment because - incredibly - it has never carried out any origin or destination surveys. All it knows is that commercial traffic, including Euro-juggernauts, accounts for a ballpark figure of 20 per cent of the total volume of traffic on the national routes.

The NRA seems quite disinterested in the downside of motorway development - that the inevitable result of massive and unconditional investment in roads has been "the proliferation of American-style suburban sprawl", as Earthwatch noted last November. Everywhere motorways are built, new housing estates spring up around them.

What all of this has to do with achieving "sustainable development" is anybody's guess.