The charade that is Car Free Day, scheduled for this Saturday, gives us yet another opportunity to parade our blatant hypocrisy, writes Mary Raftery.
For a few years, we had all but opted out of what is a Europe-wide piece of tokenism. Most people simply ignored it and drove their cars as usual.
Those few public-spirited individuals who gave up their vehicles for the single day in question subsequently crowded the airwaves and the letters pages of newspapers complaining bitterly about the woeful inadequacies of our public transport system.
All told, the only consequence of Car Free Day seemed to be grief for everyone. And now, it is back, although cleverly arranged for a Saturday, when commuting pressure on both the roads and on public transport is substantially less.
Apparently the reason for its revival here is that Minister for the Environment John Gormley likes the idea. You might think that having a Green in that post would result in a Car Free Day with teeth - cars banned completely across cities, public transport free for the day, incentives for taking out the bike.
But, sadly, lip-service remains pre-eminent.
While in opposition, however, Gormley did have one excellent idea for reducing our dependence on the motor car - with the resultant benefits of cutting our carbon emissions, improving our environment, and making us exercise more by walking or cycling.
He suggested that all those tens of thousands of people who enjoy the untaxed benefit of free car parking associated with their place of work should instead be made pay.
He pursued the then minister for finance Charlie McCreevy on the matter, and the latter eventually agreed that the idea had merit as a revenue-generating measure.
McCreevy announced in his 1998 budget speech that his department was investigating the introduction of a benefit-in-kind tax on hitherto free car parking spaces. He added, tongue-in-cheek, that this was "notwithstanding the very obvious delight of civil servants in all departments, including my own".
Most civil servants are, of course, beneficiaries of free car parking provided by the State, although the proposed tax was to apply equally to private sector employees.
The issue then vanished. I can find no record of it ever having been raised publicly again. Curious about this, I inquired of the Department of Finance what had happened to such an obviously excellent notion.
I was provided with a discussion document prepared from within the Civil Service. There appears to have been no independent appraisal of the proposal.
The document is a masterly piece of obfuscation, drawn up by a room-full of wily Sir Humphreys. They propose mechanisms to tax car parking as a benefit-in-kind, only to present innumerable practical obstacles to their own suggestions. Through raising every imaginable problem, some of questionable relevance, they manage to create a picture so complex that even the bravest government minister would quail at the thought. There is, however, one measure which they did not examine, and which could be introduced with relative ease.
It is that the State would simply cease to subsidise its own employees who drive their cars to work.
At present, tens of thousands of civil and public servants avail of free car parking provided for them by us, the taxpayers. Were we to remove this subsidy, making them pay for their car spaces, it would both produce revenue for the State and reduce traffic congestion. It is, in short, a no-brainer.
It is difficult to obtain a precise figure for what it costs us to provide so much free car parking to State employees. We do know that in Dublin, the Government uses our money to rent roughly 4,000 car parking spaces from private landlords every year at a cost of over €8.5 million. A further €3 million is spent renting car places elsewhere around the country.
In addition, the State provides many thousands more spaces on its own land, turning vast swathes of highly valuable real estate into car parks. When one includes all the locations where State employees work, be it schools, universities, hospitals, or even Leinster House (where all Oireachtas members, past and present, get free parking for life), a true picture emerges of the extent to which the taxpayer facilitates and subsidises such vast car usage.
Of course, the persistent argument against taking these kinds of severe measures is that public transport is not capable of catering for the increased numbers who would leave their cars at home if they had to pay the full rate for parking in town for up to nine hours a day.
However, introducing these charges would inevitably place such pressure on public transport that the resultant outcry would force Government to expedite the provision of decent cycle lanes and an enhanced bus, train and tram system. To quote Gormley himself, speaking in the Dáil in 1998: "We will not solve the environmental crisis by small measures. We have to make hard decisions which will be uncomfortable for people, but that is the situation." What about it, Minister?