When will the penny drop that we cannot keep building large roads?

We need huge investment in urban transit systems. If you take just out two largest cities, Dublin has two tramlines and a Victorian electrified railway that has level crossings in the city inner suburbs, because somehow finding that was an insurmountable task discussed for 40 years. Any other commuter rail is using diesel, something I’ve never seen anywhere other than American commuter rail, which is not an example to follow. Other than that it’s diesel buses.

Cork has suburbs with way over 90% car dependency and relies primarily on a notoriously unpredictable bus network that’s been so underdeveloped it has become self defeating as hardly anyone can rely on it, so they drive instead and has one diesel commuter rail line built during the 19th century. Somehow investing in public transport systems in cities outside Dublin is still unimaginable, because we still have the “Dublin” vs “down the country” mentality that results in public policy that equates cities like Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford to small towns, so you’ve a long distance bus company running Cork City busses for example as if they’re express way.

If you solved the cities transit needs with more trams, electric railways, metro in Dublin and serious and sustained investment you would take millions off journeys of the roads and probably end most traffic jams.

Ireland’s low density population and scatter in rural area doesn’t lend itself to much rail, but we should at least invest in a high speed Y shaped network that could link Cork, Limerick, Dublin and Belfast. We’ve basically got up to European 1960s speeds on our existing services and we’ve very much just applied “go faster stripes” by putting more modern looking trains which still just run at maximum 160km/h and burn diesel. In terms of services it’s still doing exactly the same as it did in the mid 20th century.

On the roads side of it, we’ve a need for motorway and I don’t think you can realistically call Irish long distance stuff “big” - they’re narrow 2-lane motorways and are more than adequate for traffic. We were decades behind on road infrastructure until recently.

I think we could also use them better - electric cars are one thing but also by putting good public transport on them - use the infrastructure more greenly. Invest in hybrid and electric express busses, maybe look at electric freight - It’s a technology that being trialled in Scandinavia that we could be looking at too.

However I think we’re always going to have roads as a big part of the mix here, so we need to use them better and more ecologically.

Whether it’s on iron or tyres I don’t think your really going to see much benefit by refusing to invest in roads in a country that has major legacy issues with lack of road infrastructure.

The key issue though is urban transit systems and we are not doing anything even remotely like enough to solve that in any of our lifetimes never mind the next couple of decades. The plans are always extremely unambitious.

I think one of the key problems is Ireland hasn’t been good at cities or urban development. Great cities don’t happen by accident.

Our cities have very limited self governance compared to almost any other examples I can think of. It would be normal for Dublin or Cork to be driving and managing their own public transit networks, raising financing and everything else if this were in continental Europe or even the US.

We over centralise everything into a big, amorphous mess that constantly conflates urban and rural policies and plays the two off each other. The fact that the government is in Dublin, for example, does not mean Dublin has a competent and capable local government.

If we started by seriously reforming local government, reorganising it into sanely sized units and giving cities and towns similar powers to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, it might be a start.

How exactly can Dublin or Cork, Limerick, Galway or Waterford hope to compete or adapt when they’ve local government systems at a city level that would be outclassed in terms of autonomy of decision making by a small French or German village?

When it came to towns, we went head first into abolishing town councils rather than reforming them and we’ve tried to force the merger of cities and county councils. Merging Cork County Council with Cork City Council, which was stopped thankfully, would have been like merging Dublin City Council with Tipperary. The two had very little in common other than the word Cork. One is a rural are the size of almost half of Northern Ireland and the other is a significant city.

I actually don’t trust think we don’t do a very good job of urban. Rather, I think Ireland has a massive psychological issue with the very concept of urban. We have policies that seem to aim to destroy cities and undermine towns. Perhaps it’s the idealised notions we have of rural life but, we need to urgently get over it or we will be left behind.

Also sprawling development into rural areas isn’t good for them to either.

If you take many Irish small towns, they’re dead because all the development has occurred in their hinterland in terms of housing and the focus has ended up on driving to the local Lidl, Aldi or Tesco. So the town is left with derelict houses and empty shops. You see that repeated all over the midlands and so on.

I remember being in north Leitrim and some of the development attempts in small towns would just leave you scratching your head. Villages that seemed to be trying to implement policies suitable for cities - like building strips of duplex apartments with no gardens, that nobody wanted, with nobody living in their basement flats because some planning department hadn’t a clue what a village was and apartment buildings for demand that never existed.

We haven’t a clue when it comes to this stuff. It’s actually frightening to see how badly wrong we got it.

In terms of the cities, if we don’t get them right it will also undermine our ability to continue to attract and keep FDI and domestic investment. Cities have to be capable of sustaining a lifestyle and that’s not just about money. It’s about things like facilities, green space, urban environments, cultural life, air quality (a massive issue in Cork now due to solid fuel burning in a city?!!) housing quality, affordability etc etc etc.

All of the above spills into transport systems and commuting.

The reason for that though is the city councils have no role in most people’s lives and aren’t seen to have any involvement in things like transit systems.

I would suspect most people don’t even know or care who their local councillors are because they don’t have any role in anything meaningful.

It also results in the likes of DCC being a talking shop for protest candidates wanting a platform as the council itself has no real role in anything particular and authority is wielded largely by the executive. So the result is you get people in there on student politics like rants, as that’s the level of power the chamber wields and the city’s residents are barely even aware of what it does as it has no relevance to them.

Cork City Council found itself against a local media campaign claiming the city centre was impassable due to a few hours of pedestrian only access on a busy shopping street with 180+ stores that was orchestrated by a few loud voices. The net result of that was people assumed the city centre was disrupted and didn’t come in, when the reality was the opposite.

But also on things like enforcement of bus lanes - even that isn’t a council issue and depends on the Gardai as, unlike almost everywhere else in the world there’s no local police. If you’re in a city on the continent or in the USA, the local police (answerable to city hall) enforce traffic rules. Here for some reason that’s a matter for the national parliament.

We haven’t quite moved beyond the days when there used to be Dail Questions to the Minister for Posts & Telegraphs about the dial on the phone-box in Westmorland Street or the light bulb in the one on the South Mall.