Comment & Analysis: Former transport and climate minister Eamon Ryan claimed on the ‘Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan’ podcast that “we have broadly the right plans in place” — so, I feel that I have to make it clear: Our land transport plans are not compatible with the level of climate action we need. The problem is not just speed or political will.
Ryan was a guest on The Irish Times politics podcast while it was covering the news that we could face fines of up to €26 billion for not meeting EU reduction targets.
Presenter Hugh Linehan asked: “If an acceleration is required [in climate action], does that mean we were going too slow for the last five years?”
Ryan replied: “I say this as I’m biased, but I think we have broadly the right plans in place; what we don’t have is the speed and low cost of delivery and also I’d have to be honest, the political commitment when it comes down to delivery. Every political party says ‘oh, yeah, we’re all in favour of climate [action]’ until it hits the ground and there’s public opposition because it is disruptive… in terms of congestion or having our own power supply we can rely on.”
In this, he was talking about more than just transport, but he’s clearly including transport, and he goes on to talk more about transport in the interview. And, of course, this website is going to focus on the transport side of things.
I broadly agree with Ryan on transport and climate action, but in terms of climate action in transport, he’s too conservative. Some in the media and politics see him as the opposite — some kind of radical — but in reality, he makes conservative actions look radical.
Maybe mixed into this is that Ryan is a “big picture” person who sometimes misses the details which can be key to that wider view.
Anyway, there are two central problems with what he has said in the quote above.
The first thing wrong with what he said is that our transport plans are “broadly the right plans” because it is clear that many of our plans are not compatible with the level of climate action. This applies to both higher-level plans and project-level plans.
The infrastructure element of BusConnects is maybe the centrepiece of the government’s short/mid-term transport plans, but the projects clearly have not been climate-proofed.
Yes, the infrastructure part of BusConnects has been improved since first proposed, but the plans as last published still rely too much on road widening (including removing footpath space and cycle lanes in central areas), and do not follow basic rules on pedestrian and cycling prioritisation.
An Bord Pleanála planning inspectors are not known to be the most radical people, and even they have commented at the disconnect between the Climate Action Plan at a higher level and the BusConnects plans when it gets to building things on the ground.
In a planning report, one inspector said: “Had the proposed scheme [one of the BusConnects street redesign projects] been designed at the present time, when climate change is becoming increasingly apparent, rather than a number of years ago, it may have been more radical in tackling car dominance.”
To put it plainly: If a project includes significant sections of narrow cycle lanes and designs which hinder the uptake of cycling for all and sometimes even lack basic crossings for pedestrians (including bus passengers), then the ability of that project to help modal change from cars to sustainable transport and support more sustainable high-density living is reduced.
As this website has covered, these types of issues apply to more than just BusConnects projects. BusConnects just has planning inspectors saying there’s a disconnect between policy plans and road space allocation plans.
And it’s not just individual projects. The problems are at the higher policy and planning levels too. One example of this was highlighted when the NTA responded to criticism that the Limerick Shannon Metropolitan Area Transport Strategy was not climate-proofed.
While the NTA had a point that it would be unfair for only one city’s transport plan to be locked into the target of a 51% decrease in transport emissions by 2030, there was maybe some place they could have aimed for which was not “extremely punitive traffic management measures” but also was better than this vision for bus and cycling priority:
There was some more guarded language in the Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy about the realities of a transport strategy having to take account of many factors. It should be said that there are some valid points from the NTA in the documents for both the Limerick and Dublin strategies.
It could be viewed that some of the gap between Government climate policy (broadly accepted by most parties) and the reality of the processes of transport planning might be an issue for the Courts to look at, but I’m not sure how that comes about. Most environmental groups in a position to take court cases are not focused that much on transport.
It could even be argued that 20-year transport planning is somewhat incompatible with where we are in terms of the need for radical action to bridge the gap between where we are and our targets.
The slowness of getting the last government’s transport demand management strategy, called ‘Moving Together’, to Cabinet and then trying to present it to Cabinet weeks before an election lacked a sense of urgency in the first case and realpolitiks in the latter.
It means the document might as well be “filed, in a filing cabinet”, or put on a shelf to gather dust. It includes demand management options, not just congestion charges but also elements such as low emission zones and a wide range of things. It was a menu of options, and it did not say anything like congestion charges would just happen.
This is tragic as these measures not only relate to lowering climate-related emissions but also emissions related to human health. A study published this week found that London’s Low Emission Zone expansion is linked to a dramatic fall in deadly pollutants that are linked to a wide range of health problems – from cancer to impaired lung development, heart attacks to premature births.
The second core thing that is wrong with what Ryan said is that he failed to speed up delivery in the way he said he would while he was a minister. He did not deny this, but rather, he skirted around the issue.
When interviewing Ryan before Christmas, like Linehan, I also failed to pin Ryan down on this. However, while Ryan said he wanted to speed up the delivery of things like the bus gates elements of BusConnects and active travel projects.
Of course, a government minister can only do so much, but he has levers in terms of both funding and ministerial directions to agencies such as the National Transport Authority (NTA) and Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII).
Ryan should be a bit more open about the failure here. Otherwise, it avoids lessons being learned about the mistakes.
As he has pointed out himself, there was resistance to change at the councillor level and from his partners in government. However, a problem with how Ryan has approached his time within the last term of government is that he was not clear about the national level resistance until close to the end.
Ryan told the Business Post in December 2022 that he had asked officials in the NTA to look at ways of speeding up the introduction of bus gates, such as the one planned for the Rathmines Road as part of BusConnects.
Nothing came of this.
Many things may have happened. For example, the NTA very likely would have viewed the legal risk as being too great while the BusConnects corridors bounced their way through the planning process.
However, the same happened with active travel and other projects under Ryan’s Pathfinder programme to speed up delivery. While the Pathfinder programme includes some successes, it was a case of too little too late.
For Pathfinder to have the impact it needed to have, it should have been developed straight after Covid. But some of the projects chosen were also never going to deliver on the promise of the programme.
Without turning this article into a long essay, the Active Travel funding was spread too far, and there was not enough focus on quick network building.
Dublin City Council, for example, found that their quick-build projects were apparently taking as long as “permanent” projects, so they have abandoned the quick-build projects. I’m not sure how this approach could ever be viewed as in line with the Climate Action Plan.
The below map showing significant sections of protected cycle routes in Dublin City Centre tells me two things: (1) after four years of more ramped up funding for active travel, there has been a failure to build a single cross city centre route (never mind any kind of network), and (2) despite speed of delivery being an issue, quicker build projects are over represented here.
Only the canals, the Clontarf to City Centre route, parts of the quays in the Docklands and the east-west Grangegorman route were provided as “permanent” projects — all the rest are quick-build to some degree.
Quick-build does not need to mean bollards — it can be done in a tasteful way ahead of a more polished redesign of streets and roads, and in many cases, quick-build methods can be fairly permanent (as much as anything in a city is permanent).
Councillors have the green light for a significant reduction in car use in the city centre area first in the Development Plan process and then in their direct support for the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan — despite that high level of support, rollout of parts of the plan has been delayed. This is not just down to political will — even with strong political support, there are delays around the delivery of projects because of the approaches taken.
This issue of slow delivery not being fully tackled is — like many things in this article — a problem of joint responsibility. But at least a fair share of responsibility goes to the Minister for Transport, especially so in Ireland where our systems of funding, processes and law are centralised.
Regardless of who is the minister, having the ministries of ‘Climate, Environment and Energy’ (which is some bundle on their own) combined with transport is likely too much for any one minister without having a junior minister looking after the details and delivery of how transport can reach the lower-carbon future.
Ryan says he wants to campaign on climate issues; as part of that, what’s the harm in admitting that while he got a lot done, there are shortcomings that are outstanding and need to be dealt with?