£200 fine for yellow line parking urged

A government TD has called for £200 fines for parking on double yellow lines. Mr Ben Briscoe (FF, Dublin South Central) said the run-up to Christmas would create "selfish driving" and parking.

He was speaking during a private members' debate on Dublin's traffic conditions in which Mr Eamon Gilmore (DL, Dun Laoghaire) called for a "radical shift" to public transport as the only solution to Dublin's traffic problems. Mr Briscoe said people did not mind paying £20 or so for a parking problem, he said. "They usually hand it into the firm and the firm pays." If they were forced to pay £200 for such an offence they would be far less likely to park illegally.

His party colleague Mr Liam Lawlor (FF, Dublin West) believed that the greater the investment in infrastructural development, "the greater the gridlock".

He called on the Minister for the Enviroment, Mr Dempsey, to go back and look at the seven or eight capital projects in the city and to agree a means to "fast track" them. There had to be one person to take urgent action and deal with the problem.

He sharply criticised the Department of the Environment and its lack of planning. There were too many agencies involved in traffic problems - the Dublin Transport Initiative, Dublin Corporation and other county authorities as well as numerous agencies, he said. It was a "bureaucratic nightmare". Traffic on the West Link toll bridge had reached levels this year that the Department predicted it would only reach in 2002, he said.

Listing a series of structural developments, he said the paint on a number of roads was hardly dry when footpaths were cut back and bus lanes built that should have been in place when the developments were first constructed.

He also described the Garda's "Operation Freeflow" to relieve traffic at Christmas time as similar to "moving the chairs around on the Titanic. It is only fiddling with the problem."

Mr Gilmore criticised the Government's role in "torpedoing" the LUAS project by the decision of the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke to call in consultants to look again at the possibility of it going underground.

"The reality is that we now have some of the worst traffic situations of any European city of comparable size and week by week the situation is getting worse."

The only solution "is to get more people to leave their cars at home and use public transport. However, this will not happen until we have an acceptable public transport service but we are a long way off this objective."