UrbanTransport: European driving policy The EU is banking on ever more drastic measures to take the gridlock off its city streets, writes Tim O'Brien
According to a new EU Green Paper on transport policy, measures once seen as radical - such as congestion charging and fewer, more expensive parking spaces - are now commonplace across Europe and have even been superseded by more severe measures.
The Green Paper, an interim step towards a Europe-wide policy on urban transport, cites an Austrian example, where children have been used to catch drivers breaking speed limits.
In a section entitled Achieving excellence: EU Success Stories the Green Paper refers to a system in Graz, Austria's second largest city, with 240,000 inhabitants.
Graz, we are told, became the first city in Europe to implement a speed limit of 30 km/h across 80 per cent of roads in the city centre.
Roadside indicators telling drivers what speed they were doing were employed to remind drivers to slow down, as were children who used radar pistols provided by the police to measure the speed of passing cars. Fortunately, errant motorists do not seem to have been consigned to prisons as a result of the tip-offs from radar-wielding children, but were subjected to the humiliating award, in public, of a lemon.
It must be said, however, that the scheme was significantly successful with a sizable fall in collisions and lower noise levels in the city. And it appears the powers that be are prepared not to just stop at chasing motorists off the road with slower speeds, abandoning the long-held principle that it is alright to have a car as long as you don't drive it in the city, but other methods to discourage car ownership in Graz included a campaign against the use of front gardens as parking spaces.
Ireland gets a reference in the list of countries where incentives to leave the car at home have been implemented, although no incentives relating to Dublin are mentioned.
The case history for Ireland details measures in Cork, such as the promotion of car-sharing, and the use of mobile phones to pay for parking.
A second case history refers to the Government's Rural Transport Programme, which provides mini-buses for community-based organisations. Hardly draconian.
But a list of measures in other countries recommended by the Green Paper includes access restrictions across Europe in cities from London to the Black Sea resorts of Bulgaria.
In Cyprus, a scheme will hit motorists with "the real cost of travel" while in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Restrictions include a ban on lorries above 3.5 tonnes in the centre of the city.
Car-free zones in city centres are already in place in many cities including Pecs, in Hungary, while in Denmark, a car-sharing scheme allows people to pick up cars for rent for a few hours at a time, in much the same way as bicycles are proposed for Dublin.
In other cities, including Turku, in Finland, and parts of Paris, Rome and Berlin, the mobile-phone activated car parking systems have proven successful.
This technology provides the potential to charge less for parking for vehicles with more environmentally-friendly fuel systems.
In Winchester, in England, a variable parking pricing scheme in its main city centre car parks is already in place.
The main objective was to promote and support the use of energy efficient vehicles by providing car park season ticket holder discounts of 75 per cent or 50 per cent for vehicles with the lowest CO2 emissions and free parking altogether for electric or hybrid vehicles.
While the Green Paper is ostensibly a consultation document, there is no doubt the "villian of the piece" is deemed to be the private car. According to EU Commission vice president Jacques Barrot, who holds the transport portfolio, the problems shared by European cities are "congestion, climate change, pollution [ and] safety".
The initiatives of many cities in tackling this by putting restrictions on private car use as a matter of policy are well documented in the Green Paper and vice president Barrot concluded his "purpose is to find out what Europe can do to support those policies".
The Green Paper has already been adopted by the EU Commission, which means that it - and its case histories - will now be debated by local and national authorities across Europe.
Institutions and members of the public may make submissions up to March 15th next year, resulting in an EU Action Plan on Urban Mobility in the autumn of 2008.
While the EU insists the actions taken at national level will be a matter for national governments under the principle of subsidiarity, the action plan will also indicate a timeline for the implementation of its final recommendations. Aspects of the plan could come into force in Ireland by the end of 2008. Somewhat before the Dublin Metro.