In The Irish Times last week, the president of Dublin's Chamber of Commerce, Mr Hugh Governey, made the case for a concerted plan for Dublin traffic - to be put together and managed by the Taoiseach of the day.
I agree that the traffic problem can be tackled only by political action, led from the top. "Freeflow" was put in place by such means when I was Taoiseach. Having said that, I believe the objective set by Hugh Governey is too narrow.
It focuses only on traffic, and only on Dublin. Traffic jams are a symptom of a disease. They are not the disease itself. If a Taoiseach were to take responsibility for Dublin traffic only, he would be open to just criticism from other cities where there are acute traffic problems, such as Cork, Waterford, Galway and Limerick, and also from towns like Dunshaughlin and Ashbourne which suffer Dublin's traffic overflow but are in a different municipal jurisdiction.
I believe that the source of the traffic problem is the housing shortage. The housing shortage, not traffic, is the underlying structural problem of our economy. People are spending longer and longer in their cars because the only place they can afford to buy a house is very far away from their place of work, and is not served by sufficient public transport.
Meanwhile, inner city and inner suburban residents are having their lives blighted by extra traffic taking short cuts along roads that were never intended for through traffic.
Travel times to work are getting longer and longer because Dublin has been designed by choice to have a low-density suburbia, with plenty of green space and few multi-storey buildings. There are understandable objections to any change in this situation, although these objections are not always accompanied by an understanding of the inevitable traffic consequences of this choice.
I believe the traffic problem can be solved only as a sub-problem of Ireland's overall infrastructure problem, including the problems of housing itself, outer suburban schools, outer suburban bus and train services, and waste disposal.
If you build houses far away from bus and train services, you will have traffic problems. If you try to build more houses in outer suburbia, without tackling the resultant waste disposal, schooling, road and footpath infrastructure problems in advance, you will have virulent local objection from existing residents.
The roads, footpaths, buses, trains, schools etc., must be provided for in advance of the houses if the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) factor is not to choke our economy.
Only elected politicians, with a clear and explicit mandate, have the democratic authority to overcome the BANANA factor, and thus simultaneously solve the traffic, public transport, refuse and schooling problems that will flow from our housing shortage. The demand for extra housing to accommodate the inexorably growing demands of newly created family units and households must be met.
Our existing buses, trains and roads will be used inefficiently if all the new houses continue to be concentrated on the outer edge of our cities, and much of the commercial development concentrated in the city centre. To ease traffic flows in both directions, we need more housing in our centre cities and more employment in suburbia.
Centre city developments should all contain a proportion of affordable housing. Big suburban developments should all contain office space. In a sense, we must begin to turn our cities inside out, so that we use them properly.
It is for these reasons that I believe that Hugh Governey's proposal for a Dublin Traffic Plan, led by the Taoiseach, goes in the right direction, but is too narrow. I believe we should have a National Infrastructure and Settlement Plan, put in place and
?????invigilated on a weekly basis by the Taoiseach, to ensure that all our people are housed in places that are accessible to where they work, but without causing the lives of other people to be blighted.
This means more than just building satellite towns. It will also mean planning for entirely new cities built around towns that already have third-level institutions, that will be alternative poles of development to the existing cities. Dundalk, Athlone, Carlow and Thurles are possibilities. This generation has, in effect, to redesign the physical shape of the country if our infrastructural problems are to be overcome in an environmentally aware way.
John Bruton is leader of Fine Gael
