Dublin deserves its transport plan — not journalists advocating for climate action delay

Comment & Analysis: Business journalist Ian Guider’s column in this week’s Business Post newspaper is yet another example of journalists willing to cover the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan without carrying out basic research and flinging around reductive arguments.

The Business Posts’ coverage of the traffic plan under its new editor, Daniel McConnell, has been a little too quick to favour the retailers (mainly those with car park interests) who are complaining. But Guider’s article on Sunday may be the worst coverage of the plan across all media, and there’s been quite a lot of dreadful coverage.

There has been much misreporting about the transport plan amounting to a city centre “car ban” when it’s not— it’s not even a ban on through traffic across the core city centre, never mind the wider city centre, which is defined as within the canals.

At most, the first phase of the plan this year “bans” cars from a few metres on one street. Cars transport around 2% of the people around O’Connell Bridge, and in that context, there will still be a high level of access for car users.

Guider claims: “Brown Thomas on Grafton Street in central Dublin surely makes for the most unusual location for a protest about climate change.” But he doesn’t really explain why he thinks that’s the case. The company — even before it was one company — has a long history of objecting to the smallest of sustainable transport measures.

Right now, Brown Thomas-Arnotts (directly or via the Dublin City Centre Traders Alliance) opposes the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan, a Pathfinder project that aims to accelerate climate action by prioritising sustainable transport and reducing emissions.

If a company opposes a plan to accelerate climate action, it is basically opposing climate action. If a journalist is calling for a delay to such a plan, they are looking to delay climate action at a time when climate experts are (again) calling for that action to start to materialise.

Guider said: “It [Brown Thomas-Arnotts] is within its rights, alongside others affected, to highlight the potential for the proposal to remove private vehicles from stretches of the quays during the daytime for the inconvenience it will cause on its deliveries and from getting people into its store on Grafton Street, where it operates a car park, and on Arnotts across on Henry Street, which also has parking facilities.”

There’s so much wrong here.

The restrictions to enable bus priority on the quays will not stop access to the Arnotts car park or loading areas. Looking at Google Maps, I also cannot find any route where the bus gates along the quays at O’Connell Bridge will affect travel to any car park or on-street parking near Brown Thomas on Grafton Street. Maybe there are some fringe examples, but there are plenty of different options.

Dublin City Council has said that 60% of traffic in the core city centre is through traffic that does not stop to spend money at shops, etc. The plan is targeting that traffic. There will still be access to car parks.

As a side note: Brown Thomas has been at pains for years to highlight that it does not operate the Grafton Car Park, which formally used its name.

Guider then said that the economic arguments in a report for traders by economist Pat McCloughan [not McLoughlin as Guider wrote] were “widely dismissed by those who are in favour of the ban”. He said “I suspect the consequences may not be as severe as traders fear”, but later in his article, he wrote: “The fallacy of the protestors outside Brown Thomas and the councillors who so blithely dismiss the economic concerns is believing that the transport plan in isolation is all that matters.”

However, Guider does not attempt to deal with McCloughan’s now well-trashed report and its economic concerns. Every journalist worth their salt who has written about it seems to have seen a copy of it. Did Guider not read it? Could he not form his own view of it? Could he not see how flawed it is?

Or is he even talking about the outlandish economic concerns highlighted in the report? Maybe he’s referring to whispers of economic concerns from unnamed retailers? Maybe the same retailers who have always said transport changes will kill Dublin.

The idea that anybody supporting the plan thinks the “transport plan in isolation is all that matters”, as Guider put it, is just not based on any facts. It’s just another reductive argument that doesn’t stack up.

Guider adds: “…however, they clearly will have some negative impact from those who won’t or can’t abandon their cars and will decide to go to suburban shopping centres.” If there is a huge decrease in car-based shoppers accessing city-centre car parks, it will be more likely a classic case of retailers and journalists over-egging traffic restrictions and scaring those car-based customers away.

As said, access to car parks will be maintained. The vast majority of car parks will see little or no change in their access arrangements.

Guider said that his “conversations with many [unnamed] retailers and hospitality venue operators indicate there’s been a slowdown in trading in the city centre in recent months.” The good news is that not only is access to car parks being maintained and improved for the majority of retail customers coming by bus, but international evidence shows that improving sustainable transport and the public realm is good for business.

Guider said he thinks the traffic plan should still go ahead, just not the “immediate implementation of the plan,” and then goes on to explain why he thinks the city should first wait for a national government task force headed by An Post chief executive David McRedmond, which was set up in the aftermath of the riot last year.

I mean, he spends a number of paragraphs outlining this but somehow does not deal with the fact that city councillors have twice, at council meetings, heavily debated delaying the rollout of the plan and rebuffed two attempts by a minority of councillors to delay the project.

When Dublin City Council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, was weighing up the pros and cons of going ahead with the plan or delaying it, an apparent even larger majority of councillors were represented in a letter to him which said that the plan should not be delayed. The business lobby group, Dublin Chamber, as well as groups advocating for public transport users, active travel users and a climate campaign group, also said that the plan should not be delayed.

Instead of dealing with the reality of the plan, Guider dives into a raft of truisms and more reductive arguments.

He wrote: “There’s little to be gained – and we’re not going to solve Ireland’s climate commitments with a traffic ban on quays alone – by not holding off for a few months.”

This is the problem with climate action and journalists who claim to be supportive but are acting clueless — climate action is needed now; it was really needed decades ago, and no one action is going to solve Ireland’s climate commitments. If you want a truism: We know delay often is followed by further delay or another reason for delay.

Dismissing or calling for a delay in climate action is “the new climate denial”. This is well documented by Irish and international experts.

The reality is Dublin needs buses and active travel to function well in the city centre, and making the networks of both functions better in key locations such as on the quays has a wider network effect.

Guider asks: “Where are the extra buses and the increased Luas and Dart frequencies?” Well, we could have focused more on the practical details, such as this, if retailers had not gone nuclear, putting across blanket opposition and threatening court action (and, of course, painting a more reasonable picture for sympathetic journalists).

The first phase of the traffic plan is the bus gate at O’Connell Bridge, which prevents cars from going straight on Bachelors Walk to Eden Quay (~200 private vehicles per hour) or from Burgh Quay to Aston Quay (~390 private vehicles per hour).

The passenger carrying capacity of a single green line tram is 408 people or 80-100 people on most Dublin Bus vehicles. Combine the number of car users split across public transport across the day (trains, for example, are still not all full at peak times), the expanded BusConnects services coming within a month or two, the extra intercity and long-ranger commuter train capacity coming on stream, the fact some motorists will divert rather than switch modes and the ability of some to switch to cycling, we’re not talking about huge numbers across an hour.

The fact is that in addition to the above-mentioned contained BusConnects rollout and extra train capacity, extra priority is needed now for existing buses. Buses are unduly being held up in the city centre, especially in core areas on the main bus routes.

“As usual, we’re speeding along with no clear destination in mind,” Guider said, but this is also total nonsense. The Dublin City Transport Plan is derived from targets in the wide-ranging Dublin City Development Plan, which was debated and voted on by councillors. It is needed to support BusConnects and the active travel network and to allow the city to grow sustainably.

For good measure, he adds in a few reductive arguments, such as asking if buses being 10 minutes quicker will see people flock into the city centre (also kind of as to imply it’s empty now when it’s not) and saying we need much more to “rebuild the capital.”

Guider ends his article by saying a delay is “what the people of Dublin deserve.” But Dublin deserves no more delay in the transport plan because of journalists or others who cannot or refuse to do even a basic level of research on the plan, how it was formed, and why councillors have said no three times to delaying it.