Transport authorities in Dublin have effectively ruled out a car-sharing scheme as a means of cutting traffic congestion. As Britain announced that its first-ever car-sharing lane on a motorway will open next year, authorities here poured cold water on a proposal to pilot a similar system.
Britain's transport secretary Alistair Darling said on Monday that from 2007 one lane on a one-mile stretch of motorway between Bradford and Leeds in West Yorkshire will be dedicated to cars carrying more than one person.
The scheme is costing £2.5 million (€3.6m) and follows an earlier announcement of a car-sharing lane on Britain's oldest motorway, the M1. Some £289 million (€417m) is being spent on widening that road to accomodate the car-sharing lane which will be open to traffic at the end of 2008.
Motoring lobby group AA Ireland has long called for a trial of a similar scheme in Dublin using the capital's bus lanes, but the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) said it had no plans to do so. A spokeswoman for the DTO said it would instead be "looking at prioritising public transport and would want to stand over the integrity of the bus lanes."
She pointed out the fact that in the UK, major traffic congestion tends to be between cities, whereas in Ireland it tends to be into the city centre. "We have looked at HOV [high occupancy vehicle] lanes but it seems the most efficient way of using road space is with bus lanes.
"With the finite resource of a strip of road you have to look at how best to get people about the place and bus lanes seem to do that most effectively."
AA Ireland attempted to press authorities to pilot a car-sharing scheme in Dublin last year during a meeting of the Clare Street Initiative (CSI), organised by the then junior minister in the Department of Transport Ivor Callely.
The CSI was set up in October in an effort to find easy-to-implement schemes to ease traffic congestion in the capital. The AA Ireland suggestion was for a pilot project allowing a strictly controlled permit-based scheme where cars carrying three or more passengers could use certain sections of bus lanes in the capital. The proposal was voted down by CSI delegates.
Speaking after the UK decision this week AA Ireland's Conor Faughnan told The Irish Times he hoped the plan "will be revived at some stage" and the group would be "watching the UK experiment closely. We have some convincing to do but we'd eventually like to see the idea at least tried," he said. "I remain convinced that it can work well."
He agreed that bus services should be protected and park-and-ride facilities should be introduced in an effort to cut congestion. "There also has to be a role for car pooling in Dublin," he added. The UK car-sharing lane is expected to cut rush-hour journeys by an average of eight minutes.
