I have been struck by two contradictory features of articles and letters in The Irish Times favouring an over-ground city-centre operation of the Luas light rail system.
First, my friend Frank MacDonald and his supporters consistently refuse to address the key issue of whether such a system would have the capacity to handle the volume of traffic it could, and should, divert from private cars to public transport.
Then, having themselves deliberately ignored the importance of choosing such a public transport system, they have the nerve to allege that those of us who favour an underground system capable of maximising the diversion from private cars to public transport are private car lobbyists!
This "car lobby" accusation could scarcely be less well founded. The other major supporters of an underground Luas operation in the city centre, the Unified Proposal group, are, of course, passionate advocates of public transport.
For my part, I have been arguing in favour of restraining the over-use of the private car in urban areas for over 30 years. Indeed I think I was the first person in Ireland to propose a system of urban road pricing for private cars, making this a key feature of my UCD lectures in the 1960s on the economics of transport.
By urban road pricing I do not mean the imposition of charges for city-centre parking. These have universally failed to control the flow of traffic into cities. This is partly because they have no impact on the significant proportion of cars that pass through the centre, and partly because of the perennial optimism of motorists with city-centre destinations leads them to drive there in the hope of finding a legal parking place, and then, when their hopes are disappointed, settling for an illegal one.
The case for control of urban car use by genuine road pricing, viz charging for entry to the city centre, has most recently been made in Chapter 2 of the excellent ESRI Review of the European Community's Structural Funds. There it is pointed out that sound investment decisions require that prices of inputs and outputs truly reflect the full social costs involved.
Unless "urban transport users are faced with the full social costs of their activities . . the apparent level of demand for trip-making may be spurious and a misleading guide to the volume and to the composition of the investment which should take place . . . The first-best solution to problems of this kind is to adjust the prices in question is such a way as to reflect the full social cost.
"The levels of demand, and of demand forecasts, would then become a reliable guide to the level of infrastructure provision which was appropriate". It identifies the external social costs of urban car use as pollution, noise and congestion costs.
The political objection to road-pricing has hitherto been crucial. Car-owners are a powerful lobby. There is also an extraordinarily deep-rooted conviction among even the most market-oriented of them that, while everything else may have its price, urban space dedicated to roads must remain free.
If you were to suggest that other urban spaces, e.g. sites for building, should be free, car-owners would rightly conclude that you were mad, or at best a communist or a crank. But road space is sacred, so sacred that even in the present market-dominated world, it would be sacrilegious to charge for it!
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that a proliferation of private vehicles causes noise and hydrocarbon fume pollution, with all the human and economic costs these impose; and that because of the concentration of vehicles and people in urban areas, these problems are much worse and costs much heavier than they are in rural areas.
What is less readily understood, however, is the idea of road congestion costs, referred to in the ESRI report. Of course, such costs do not arise in the case of many rural roads. But they do affect some main roads through rural areas, necessitating expensive road-widening or even the construction of parallel motorways.
Such road construction costs should logically be borne by the minority of car-drivers and heavy-vehicle owners who use these expensive roads rather than by the rest of the population. But, as in the case of urban roads, any proposal to charge these users rather than the overburdened taxpayer meets violent resistance.
In urban areas, especially at peak commuter hours, every extra vehicle adds to the delays that other vehicles experience, and thus to costs, in terms of fuel consumption, pollution, and time lost.
The latter is of crucial importance because, quite apart from the personal inconvenience, time is money for at least a proportion of those travelling. The prices of almost everything we buy are increased by this congestion cost factor.
The impact of road congestion on commuting is particularly perverse, for it affects most acutely those who use public transport, including the less well-off section of the community who either cannot afford to use a car or cannot afford to use it for commuting.
For cars are, of course, highly inefficient vehicles for commuting. Even when a car is full (which is rarely the case with commuter travel), the road space it takes up per passenger is totally disproportionate to that taken up by a bus with a load of passengers. As most commuters travel alone, the difference between the true cost of car and bus commuting, in terms of congestion and pollution, is almost astronomical.
Moreover, the congestion caused by private cars enormously increases the cost of bus travel, for it slows down buses, especially at peak hours. City bus companies like Dublin Bus are thus forced to employ a substantially larger fleet and more drivers than would be needed if the roads were reasonably clear.
Furthermore the scale of the hidden subsidy to car-owners, arising from the failure to charge them for the social costs of air pollution, noise and congestion, is such that even if bus travel were to be totally subsidised and made free, car traffic might still remain such as to impede the free flow of buses at peak periods.
In Dublin the compensating subsidy for bus transport is exceptionally low by international standards. As a result, bus fares are unusually high.
At the same time the unique constraints imposed upon its city-centre road network by the close juxtaposition of Trinity College, Temple Bar and Dublin Castle, slow down bus movements to an exceptional degree. That encourages even more people to commute by car, and the vicious circle continues.
What can be done about this? In the absence of road-pricing, crude quantitative controls are currently employed. Bus lanes are one such control mechanism. They help, but they are inherently inefficient because in the intervals between bus movements these lanes are, or at least are meant to be, empty. This artificially reduces still further the supply of valuable urban road space.
Another quantitative control mechanism, which for reasons already explained has proved a universal failure, is limitation of on-street parking. In Dublin this failure has been perversely aggravated by the fact that, as the ESRI report points out, "some tax incentives have implicitly, and inadvertently, subsidised urban car usage by promoting the provision of off-street car-parks".
The truth is that the only efficient solution to excess demand of the kind that afflicts our urban transport system is road-pricing.
Since the early 1960s two possible ways of operating road-pricing have been identified. Both would involve electronic controls at key entry points. In the case of Dublin the electronic system would work either by recording the licence numbers of cars crossing the canal bridges and then charging the registered owners by way of monthly bills, or by requiring car-owners to install meters which would be similarly activated at these bridges.
What government will have the political courage to cut the Gordian knot of urban traffic congestion by introducing road-pricing? I have to say that, when in government between 1981 and 1987, I was faced with the double priority of halting a slide to national bankruptcy and negotiating an Anglo-Irish Agreement. I left this, among other issues, on one side. Perhaps it could be tackled only with all-party agreement. But that could be hard to secure.
Meanwhile, as a veteran advocate of road-pricing, can I be exonerated from the accusation of being part of the "car lobby"? And can Frank MacDonald and his supporters be persuaded to address the problem of the inadequate capacity of an on-street Luas, and to accept that our capital needs a light rail system running underground in the city-centre area, and thus capable of carrying efficiently and speedily as much as possible of the huge volume of traffic now moving by car?