Call for authority to manage Dublin traffic

This sounds like a landmark publication in the history of transport in Ireland.

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http://www.tascnet.ie/showPage.php?ID=153

GRIDLOCK
Dublin's transport crisis and the future of the city

Gridlock argues that proper public transport is essential for Dublin. Traffic jams are a nuisance and impose costs on business; the city's car addiction makes the city environmentally unsustainable. Yet ultimately far more is involved. Public transport is necessary if the people who live in Dublin are to fully become citizens of Dublin, and it is not too exaggerated to say that proper public transport is necessary if Dublin is to be a real capital city for the people of Ireland.

For Gridlock author James Wickham has drawn on his research project comparing transport in Dublin with three other European cities (Athens, Bologna and Helsinki); he also uses material on European transport policy. The book combines a social and political history of transport in Dublin with close up analysis of living and travelling in three areas of the city (Clonskeagh, Jobstown, North Docklands). The particular problems of Dublin are highlighted by comparisons between these areas and similar areas of the other three cities.

Dublin's rising car usage is not an inevitable consequence of rising affluence or economic growth - it is the result of a series of social and above all political choices. The book shows how in the second half of the 20th century, Dublin's public transport system was destroyed. Even before the boom of the 1990s, the city was becoming more and more suburbanised, and in a way that exacerbated its inhabitants' dependency on the car. By 1990 nearly 60%of all journeys to work in Dublin were by private car - a level exceeded by Bangkok or Athens, but far above some richer European cities such as Bologna or Helsinki.

With a weak city government, no metropolitan government whatsoever and a central government totally disinterested in urban life, the city has been shaped largely by the uncoordinated interests of property developers. Bizarrely given the growing rhetoric of market choice, Dublin has increasingly become a city in which people have no choice but to use a car to participate in normal life, whether this means going to work, shopping, maintaining social links, or just entertainment. In this sense Dublin has become a car dependent city.

The Celtic Tiger boom has involved two contradictory trends. On the one hand, this developer-led development has accelerated, with Greater Dublin splurging into much of Leinster, as the city becomes an American edge city of car-based suburbs and shopping malls. On the other hand, various interest groups, city officials and intellectuals have begun to formulate and implement an alternative vision of Dublin as a relatively compact and environmentally sustainable European city.

Today transport is one of the battlegrounds of these two visions. Gridlock assesses the current state of public transport in Dublin today. It shows how, despite the real improvement delivered by Luas, Quality Bus Corridors (QBCs) and strict parking controls, most of the city remains car dependent because of the low quality of public transport, whether measured in terms of users' satisfaction, the ability to innovate or the integration of the network.

Car dependency has negative consequences for the city as a whole. Some of the environmental damage can reduced or even eliminated by new technologies (e.g. alternative fuels), other environmental issues - from noise to land usage - seem more intractable. Indeed, Gridlock argues that Dublin's car dependency is inherently resource intensive and generates a lifestyle with negative impacts on public health.

While most people would probably agree that car dependency is in some vague sense 'bad for the environment', there is much less discussion of its social policy aspects. Gridlock argues that Dublin's car dependency exacerbates poverty and social exclusion. The city is designed for people with cars, which makes the car a necessity not a luxury. And as with other necessities, those who do not have a car - whether they are too young, too old or quite simply too poor - run the risk of being excluded from what is now defined as normal life. In particular Gridlock compares a working class area of Dublin with an equally deprived area in Helsinki. This shows that for those people in Dublin without a car their access to jobs is restricted, they find it difficult to move around the city, they are not full citizens. In Helsinki by contrast, better public transport ensures that doing without a car may mean missing out on excursions to the countryside, but has little impact on job prospects or social life.

Gridlock also shows how Dublin's car dependency undermines the quality of life of all citizens. It creates private spaces and destroys public space, while public transport potentially creates a collective good and a public resource, an area of shared public life that is shaped by public rather than private values. Dublin's poor public transport means that even in the new affluent apartment areas of the inner city, where the city planners are encouraging higher density housing, the private car remains essential. Part of the problem is that public transport is still understood as about moving large numbers of people from suburb to city centre. By contrast, public transport can also expand the pavement city, the area of the city in which people move around on foot and short-haul public transport. And as the population of Greater Dublin passes the one and a half million mark, the city potentially becomes a polycentric city with several centres linked by fast intra-urban public transport. Public transport literally ties the city together and increases the chances that all citizens can have access to the same spaces. Part of being a citizen of a city is the right to move around the city and to share this right with other citizens. Yet Gridlock also shows how such public spaces can be destroyed by the citizens themselves by vandalism and offensive behaviour. Public spaces require that the safety of the public is protected.

Today it is frequently assumed that the problem with public transport is state ownership. Who wants to defend CIE? Yet Gridlock is sceptical of private enterprise fanatics who claim that the public sector is inherently inefficient and unable to innovate. Comparative evidence shows that the debate over privatisation is a red herring: where public transport is provided by private companies it is not inevitably better than publicly owned enterprises. Indeed, there is now much evidence the other way round: privatising public transport and expanding competition can often undermine public services.

Achieving proper public transport in Dublin will certainly require institutional change. The real issue, so Gridlock shows, is the need for a powerful city government and on some form of transit authority. Until the city is responsible for its own transport decisions, transport will remain a mess. Rather than asking what the minister is going to do next, we should be asking when he is going to allow Dubliners to decide on Dublin's transport.

Gridlock ends with a scenario for a different Dublin: a multi-modal city in which citizens have genuine choices as to how they move around, and indeed, as to how they will live. At the centre of this scenario is an expanded pavement city - a central area in which people move around by walking and short range public transport (above all the tram); it includes world class public spaces, such as a pedestrianised plaza between College Green and the National Gallery. This different Dublin is also a polycentric city, in which the city centre is the largest of a series of urban cores in which short trips without a car have again become feasible. Suburban centres are town centres, not just shopping malls.

Of course this requires accelerated investment in public transport, and here the proposed rail interconnector turns out to be crucial, but it also requires institutional change. All too often in Ireland the growing number of institutions simply mirrors the growing number of cars - and like the cars they just get in each other's way. Effective institutional change must not mean just another public body, but rather giving the new Dublin Transport Authority real transport and land use planning powers. Even more crucially, the DTA needs to be accountable to the citizens of Dublin. Dublin needs a real metropolitan government. In Ireland today politicians start their career in local politics, but local government is powerless, so no politician can build their career on changing the city. It is time to change that. A powerful and democratic Dublin metropolitan city government could attract politicians with vision and verve who could build their carer by transforming the city - and become identified with the city's success. Such success would transform Dublin from a gridlocked mess into a capital city of which its citizens and the entire country could be proud.

About the Author- Professor James Wickham
JAMES WICKHAM studied sociology at the London School of Economics and the University of Frankfurt; he took his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex. He has been awarded a Jean Monnet Professorship in European Employment Studies at Trinity College Dublin where he is a Fellow and directs the Employment Research Centre in the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy. He has published in journals such as Social History, Work Employment and Society, Gender Work & Society, Journal of Education and Work, Innovation, European Journal of Education and European Societies.

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