There is no evidence that any form of planning policy can prevent the growth of car ownership in a developed economy, a businessman has said.
Speaking at yesterday's conference on Transport Corridor Management, Mr Vincent O'Doherty, chairman of Superquinn, said that while planners had the aspiration to take people out of their cars, there was no evidence anywhere that it could be done.
Mr O'Doherty said that while he was hopeful about transport options like Luas, the DART and the Quality Bus Corridors, one or two years' growth in car ownership was likely to negate their impact.
He said Ireland's very low-density housing created problems in providing an adequate public transport system and reducing the number of cars on the road.
Mr O'Doherty said "the prototype of the Celtic Tiger" was a cul-de-sac of townhouses with two to three people living in each house and two cars in the drive. Schoolchildren had been "getting off their bicycles and into their mother's cars". This was a very significant modal shift that was extremely unlikely to change because of parents' concerns about their children's safety.
Mr O'Doherty said his supermarkets' customers were having severe difficulty in finding parking spaces to visit their town-centre stores. Increased car ownership was reflected in the fact that up to 90 per cent of Superquinn's customers were arriving at their stores by car. As a result, he said, there was a need to think much more flexibly about where retail outlets were located and to be less reluctant to allow developments on the edge of town.
Mr Eoin McGettigan, the chief executive officer of SuperValu Centra Distribution, said planners should not allow the development of superstores in the hope of keeping traffic away from the city centre. Instead of permitting bigger retail developments, planning authorities should consider a greater number of smaller outlets.
Superstores of 80,000 square feet or more tended to pull trade from a 20-mile radius. If such developments were allowed, small independent stores would lose so much business that they would have to close. The old, the disabled, the unemployed' and anyone who did not own a car would suffer most from such a change.
Superstores also usually included a petrol outlet because "they need to sell the petrol cheaply so you'll bring your car to the beauty of their shopping experience". For that reason, superstores were harmful to the environment and could not be judged to meet the goal of sustainability, Mr McGettigan concluded.
