Jennifer O’Connell: Ryan’s utopian vision carries assumption everyone lives just like him

Eamon Ryan's utopian vision of Ireland as a place where people can get everywhere they need to go by public transport shows the fatal flaw in so much Green thinking – the assumption that everyone lives just like you.

Announcing – or re-announcing – the National Development Plan last week, the Minister for Transport said he wasn’t guaranteeing that every road in the plan would go ahead, but he wasn’t ruling it out either. Taoiseach Micheál Martin later added that the plan was not an exhaustive list of projects. “The significance of this is that there was a sense that if something is not listed, the TII [Transport Infrastructure Ireland] won’t go about working on a project,” he added, piling obfuscation onto total confusion. To recap: not every road that’s in the plan will go ahead and some roads that are not in the plan might still go ahead while others that are in the plan may go ahead, but there are no guarantees.

This is the same Eamon Ryan who two years ago suggested that a village of 300 people in rural Ireland could get around by car pooling

What we do know is that under the plan, €35 billion is being spent on transport, weighted 2:1 in favour of public transport, cycling and walking over new roads. This is great news for anyone who lives in Dublin and rarely needs to leave it. If you are based in a place that already has two light rail systems, an extensive bus network, plans for an underground (inexplicably, nobody seems to be worried about rising sea levels), and a decent-ish network of spacious bike lanes, good lighting and footpaths that don’t just vanish without warning, it’s possible to see why you might think roads are basically obsolete.

Of course, Ryan would probably make the argument that more of us should be living in Dublin and Ireland's other cities. "We need to invest in our cities and bring life back to our towns. Sustainable transport is the key to high-quality, low-carbon communities that are a joy to live in," he said this week. This is the same Eamon Ryan who two years ago suggested that a village of 300 people in rural Ireland could get around by car pooling.

Vicious tweets exist on same continuum as protesting at politicians’ homes

---

The notion of an ‘Irish Thanksgiving’ to commemorate Covid is crass and vulgar

---

Jennifer O’Connell: Michael D Higgins would do well to follow his own advice

---

Jennifer O’Connell: Taoiseach’s ‘careful now’ politics is not enough

---

Bad blueprint

In theory, of course, he's absolutely right this time. City living is more sustainable. "If we were to design a green settlement-pattern from scratch, it would not be suburbia, or urban villages, or Greek fishing towns, or even, say, Barcelona. It would be Manhattan. Manhattan – or something like it – is the greenest city on earth," critic Elizabeth Farrelly wrote 13 years ago in Blubberland.

Unfortunately, Dublin’s advance towards Manhattan-style sustainability is stymied by the fact that so many Dubliners insist on pretending they live in the country – fretfully holding on to their suburban semi-d’s, their private green spaces, their two family cars with car parking spots to match, while violently opposing any high-rise development or any new housing at all anywhere near them. If the key to a city’s sustainability is its density, sprawling, unaffordable, under-serviced Dublin is not a great blueprint for the rest of the country.

Imagine trying to get your best work of the day done as your bus careens along the N24 outside Cahir or grinds to a halt in Castlemartyr

Ryan was on radio this week making promises to bring all manner of metropolitan rail system to Cork, Limerick and Galway and move the train station in Waterford (which, as any local will tell you, has more to do with avoiding landslides and track subsidence than offering more routes.) "This is happening now. This is starting already," he said breathlessly about all of the rail projects to Mary Wilson on RTÉ radio. Once the conversation turned to various road projects, however, he was suddenly paralysed by a fear of pre-empting something that's in the planning process.

Ryan should spend a few days in the country and see how far he gets using only sustainable transport. He’ll find that rail is an efficient and pleasant way to travel, so long as your journey begins or ends in Dublin. And even at that, don’t plan on leaving Dublin any later than 6.35pm on a weekday if you’re trying to get home to Waterford. Still, Waterford people have little to complain about; Donegal doesn’t have any railway at all. In the parts of rural Ireland where footpaths are still regarded as a bit of a gimmick and there are more Healy-Raes per head of population than bike lanes, there’s only one kind of sustainable transport option and that’s the bus.

Vague promises

The National Development plan talks about expanding BusConnects – which is currently largely focused on Dublin – and makes vague promises about local bus services. The 30 new buses recently launched by Expressway, which offer 4G wifi, charging ports and tray tables, show what could be possible with a bit of imagination. But they’re only on three routes.

I saw how buses can work in car-loving California, where tech company employees happily commute 60 minutes by bus south from San Francisco into Silicon Valley on luxury shuttles. For many, those 120 minutes are the part of their working day when they get their focused work done. But it’s only possible because they have decent roads. Imagine trying to get your best work of the day done as your bus careens along the N24 outside Cahir or grinds to a halt in Castlemartyr.

For now the National Development Plan is kind of, sort of, probably hanging on to all the big road projects from the previous plan, adding a damning “subject to future approvals” to 30 projects. This is the Government’s equivalent of “ask your father” – not a direct no, but less promising than a “we’ll see”.

It’s not just buses that need better, safer roads – so do the one million electric cars that the Government plans to get on our roads by 2030. So do bikes. When Ryan appears to be ideologically ambivalent about roads, there’s a problem. Roads are not, as Ryan appears to see them, the antithesis of sustainable transport. They’re an essential step towards it.