Mary O'Rourke's recent statement about a review of public transport policy that could introduce competition is most welcome. There will be considerable interest in the approach she may decide to take to this issue.
The responsibility for the present unsatisfactory situation in relation to public transport must be shared by successive governments, and it is, of course, true that prior to the 1990s lack of resources inhibited the kind of investment required to provide us with the quality and quantity of public transport services needed.
Moreover, in earlier decades there was a climate of opinion deeply resistant to reform in many aspects of our society, including the introduction of competition into the public transport sector. The first attempt to tackle this was Jim Mitchell's licensing of Ryanair in 1986. The source of many of our present transport problems is to be found back in the early 1930s, when the inroads made by road transport undermined the viability of our extensive railway system - which, when the State was founded, comprised no fewer than 46 railway companies.
The State's reaction to this new competitive threat to the railways was, first, to create a private rail monopoly, and, second, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to hand over public road transport to this rail monopoly, which was later nationalised with a view to preventing its financial collapse.
While our very numerous branch lines ceased to have any useful role after motor vehicles came into general use, our main railway lines have continued to provide a potentially attractive and more comfortable alternative to passenger road transport.
However, the cost of providing this service is much more than the marginal cost incurred by a carowner choosing to travel by road. In order to encourage people to use the railways, the rail user is asked to pay only about half the full cost of the rail system, the rest being provided by the taxpayers. If there is to be a publicly subsidised rail system, it is important that it offers a service that will attract a substantial volume of traffic away from motor transport. That means that as well as being more comfortable and less stressful, it must also compete on speed.
In this connection, allowance must be made for the fact that trains bring people much nearer to city centres than do motorways, and that traffic congestion on the intervening urban road space can add a lot of time to car journeys between city centres. Nevertheless, it is broadly necessary that rail speeds should at least match the kind of average speeds achievable in inter-city roads.
Current Government plans envisage improvements in our road network in the years immediately ahead that will enable average speeds of 65 m.p.h. to be achieved on long stretches of inter-city routes to be built or rebuilt as motorways - with an average of 58 m.p.h. on dual-carriageway stretches of these routes.
The existing highest speeds achieved on our mainline rail services need to be improved in order to match planned road vehicle average speeds on the main routes. The investments currently planned for Iarnrod Eireann look like achieving this objective on a number of key routes, with "best times" involving average speeds of over 70 m.p.h. to Cork (2 hours 20 minutes), 65 m.p.h. to Belfast (1 hour 45 minutes), 62 m.p.h. to Limerick (2 hours) and 57 m.p.h. to Galway (2 hours 15 minutes). To attract a high volume of traffic, these times would need to be achieved on each route by quite a number of trains each day - which would require more nonstop, or at most one-stop, services between the cities in question, paralleled by stopping trains. It remains to be seen whether the planned investment will match this requirement.
On most of the other main routes - to Sligo, Westport, and Waterford - proposed "best times" involve speeds of 5054 m.p.h., which are less impressive and will not match city-edge to city-edge times by car.
How, if at all, can competition be introduced into rail transport? In the distant past a lot of competition existed in the Irish railway system: there were as many as 16 pairs of points in Ireland between which rail services were provided by competing companies using different routes. That kind of inter-rail competition is no longer possible, and thus if the Minister intends to introduce an element of competition into Irish rail transport, she will scarcely wish to emulate the disastrous British privatisation model.
It seems to me that a possible way to proceed would involve leaving CIE/Iarnrod Eireann as a State monopoly providing track and vehicles but allowing different interests, whether public or private, to bid for the right to operate routes or groups of routes for periods of years.
A similar system should be introduced for road passenger services, although in this instance the private operators might be permitted to purchase and own the bus fleets.
Great damage was done to public transport here by the suppression of bus competition 65 years ago, when the merged rail companies, GSR and GNR, as well as the Dublin United Tramways Company, were authorised to buy up, and subsequently to limit the operations of, competing companies.
Bus transport was thus drastically curtailed less than a decade after it had begun to develop following the Civil War period. The public transport needs of our population have never since been adequately met in terms of lowcost scheduled service provision. Moreover, the absence of adequate scheduled bus services encouraged a greater investment in and use of private cars than has been desirable in terms of road congestion.
A consequence has been that in recent times suppressed public transport needs have begun to be met by private operators providing "charter" services, especially to bring people back to their homes at weekends at highly competitive rates.
However, a simple decision to abolish restrictions on bus service competition will not provide a solution to the problem, because private operators would then simply cream off the busy routes and leave the remainder unserviced - or, perhaps, to be serviced at a loss by publicly owned companies.
If we are to have both competition and also the kind of public passenger transport needed to enable people without cars to move around and to cater also for commuter needs that will reduce urban road congestion to a manageable level, we will need to create a bus regulation body. That body would have two functions: first, to determine what bus services are socially required both in urban and rural areas and, second, to put up batches of routes and frequencies to be bid for by bus operators - who could include Bus Atha Cliath and Bus Eireann, as well as private companies.
It should, perhaps, be said that these two publicly owned concerns have been doing a good job recently in terms of both developing and providing new services, but it is impossible to justify their monopoly position. It is in principle unsatisfactory that as operators of services they should also have the determining voice in deciding what services should be operated.
The bus regulation body would award batches of routes to whichever bidder offered the highest bid - or if a batch of routes were to be a loss-making one, to whichever bidder sought the lowest subsidy.
An added advantage of the introduction of such a system would be that it would make it possible for the State to provide an adequate subsidy to commuter bus services. The existing subsidy is very low by international standards.
The inadequacy of the Dublin Bus subsidy adds gratuitously to the commuter congestion problem. But, of course, so long as bus services are provided by a monopoly, the primary concern of the State has to be with controlling costs rather than promoting public transport as against the private car, which, perhaps, explains why the urban bus subsidy is so inadequate.
I presume that so far as bus services are concerned, the Minister must be thinking of something along the above lines. As in all such cases where the public interest clashes with private interests, there will, of course, be resistance to change. But the tough stance the Government has belatedly taken with the taxi cartel suggests that there is now political recognition that the public is no longer willing to put up with being exploited by monopoly or cartel providers of services, whether in the private or public sector.