School Streets
Creating positive relationships with younger generations plays a pivotal role in ensuring long term social commitment to low carbon travel practices like walking and cycling. The “school streets” programme is an essential mechanism to do so, and this needs to be highlighted and expanded more explicitly in the final draft of the GDA Transport Strategy.
Engagement with Local Authorities
The success of the Transport Strategy relies not just on the actions of the National Transport Authority but on the steps and engagement of the Greater Dublin local authorities. Further, direct meeting with Local Authorities and their elected members.
Fingal County Council has established an Active Travel department that has direct oversight on promoting, planning, and expanding active travel across the county. More engagement with similar departments across the region to ensure the implementation of the strategy would be welcomed.
Electric bikes and scooters
The innovation of electric bikes and electric scooters provides a relatively new opportunity to encourage people to switch to low carbon modes of transport, particularly commuting to and from public transport or covering small distances. The swift uptake in electric scooters and electric bikes over the last few years feels out of touch with the modelling put forward in the plan. Revising the model to account for a greater increase in these electric vehicles, especially with the expected regulations for electric scooter rental to be published soon, is recommended.
Expansion of Light Rail in Dublin and its suburbs
Whist Dublin Bus does a fantastic job at providing most of the city’s public transport. Light rail has been proven to have a greater uptake from the public than busses and provides a far more reliable, more consistent service. To significantly increase passenger updates, there must be the necessary expansion of Luas lines into the suburbs of Dublin City.
The current plan proposed a disappointing four new Luas lines in the draft Transport Plan. This is frankly underwhelming and risks failing to meet the emission reduction targets outlined in the Carbon Budgets that run in parallel over the plan’s lifetime.
The solution to this issue is mentioned in the current draft plan under Measure LRT6 – Post-2042 Luas Lines). It outlines additional Luas lines post 2042, five new lines and the reconfiguration of the current Red and Green lines. Bringing forward the timeline of these proposals into the draft plan and looking to finish construction of as many of these lines by the draft plans lifetime would guarantee that carbon emission would drop to the necessary levels to meet carbon emission levels.
Tyrrlestown, a suburb of Dublin City located in Dublin West, currently will not be well serviced by the current BusConnects proposal but would significantly benefit from expediting one of the proposed Post 2042 Luas lines (Green Line Extension to Tyrrelstown). Failing to deliver such a crucial connection to Dublin City and communities located along the green line would guarantee a very heavy reliance on private cars.
Our submission above can also be viewed in a Word document, as attached below.