The Dublin City Centre Transport Plan was meant to be a good thing — a future-focused, small piece of progress towards creating a capital city with less traffic and where walking, cycling and public transport are prioritised. This is so obvious that the idea of blocking, watering down, or delaying it could surely only come from the most regressive quarters. Enter Emer Higgins of Fine Gael.
Dublin City Council received 3,592 submissions as part of its public consultation process for this plan. The ambition of the plan was to reduce general traffic by 40 per cent. This is good for everyone. It makes for cleaner air, safer roads and streets, less hassle, and a small but hugely positive shift in the city’s overall direction.
There have been countless meetings and long hours put into it, along with the drawn-out processes that these sorts of things entail: a consultation report on the draft plan in 2023, a National Transport Authority (NTA) Transforming Dublin City Centre report, a 2023 draft transport plan, an equality impact assessment, and so on. Studies by the NTA showed that almost two out of three drivers in the city centre were driving through, not to, the city. None of these drivers are of any benefit to business in the city. How could they be? It’s not where they’re going to spend time when they turn on the engines of their cars.
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But now there will be delays and stoppages, dilutions and diversions. Higgins, a junior minister with responsibilities for business, employment and retail, met a group of business interests who didn’t want the plan to go ahead and decided to pull the needle off the record. This has rightly been characterised by some as overreach.
The plan attempts to address the elephant in the room when it comes to traffic in Dublin city centre — the north and south quays — and prioritise them for public transport, including taxis. The idea that cars are being banned is a myth perpetuated by those attempting to make the normal and practical appear sensational. Disability groups should of course have their voices heard and the needs of people with disabilities need to be prioritised in any plan related to mobility across the city centre.
But signalling that a plan be changed at the 11th hour based on a vested business interest (who are doing themselves a disservice, by the way) who want to intervene in the form of a huff rather than a solution, is not leadership. These kinds of interventions amount to the construction of artificial conflicts between people who drive cars and everyone else. The kinds of people who are still up in arms about pedestrianisation or cycling infrastructure need to calm down and have a conversation with themselves about what kind of odd fears and anti-progress sentiments they’re fostering, where making the city more liveable and with safer roads appears to trigger hysteria and rage.
Higgins has made a reactive punt based solely on vibes from a few disgruntled business owners; not research, not data, not the public, not the countless people who have worked on this plan, nor the councillors who have acted relatively rationally with the little power they have to get something positive over the line for the city.
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Not only does the outcome of this strengthen the case for a directly elected mayor who is accountable to Dubliners and the broader system of local government, but it is a depressing outcome at a time when we should be talking about the city’s future and making much more radical change than this relatively conservative plan. What will it take for Fine Gael to take the issues the city is facing seriously? How are we collectively meant to make things better when their politicians intervene on a whim?
Already this year, we had appalling populist nonsense from Regina Doherty in the form of her remarks on cycling infrastructure in Dublin. Now we have this guff from Higgins. The result is progressive plans being watered down. The best thing for Dublin city centre is for Fine Gael decision-makers in Government to abstain from any of the serious and mature decisions that need to be made so that the people who know what they’re talking about can get on with it.
Time and time again, they punt for short-term populism over the smart leadership necessary to make the city centre more liveable, more pleasant, safer for pedestrians, better for tourism, cyclists, families, children, and the elderly, a place where businesses thrive with increased footfall, where roads are not clogged with traffic, where there are safe public spaces for people in which to relax and where private car parks don’t take precedence over everyone else. A city centre devoid of their regressive interventions, where cynical populism and short-term thinking on these matters take a back seat, might be worth fighting for.