You can shape the answer by the Question you ask ......In April of this year researchers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) held a series of workshops in Dublin looking at car and public transport use in Cork, Dublin, Sligo and Kildare. As part of those workshops invited guests from NGOs, universities, local and national government were given a task to imagine how streets in their areas would be used in 2050.
But here’s the kicker: they were told that “private car ownership had become culturally unpopular or even unacceptable.” With that in mind, the assembled groups had to discuss the following thought experiment:
Imagine a typical street or road in your area in 2050. What does the street look like? Who do you see and what are they doing?
Imagine a broader picture, a “helicopter view” of the area in 2050. Where are homes and destinations located? What connects them? What is there more or less of?
Think about who (e.g. children going to school, the elderly, delivery workers) could already be using each transport mode more often by 2025 and what would need to happen (e.g. easy to implement changes in infrastructure, increases in public transport services) to enable this.
It’s a worthy exercise, and I imagine it probably took a while for some people to get their head around the starting point, that “private car ownership had become culturally unpopular or even unacceptable.”
There was a reason for this, as the report’s authors outline: “Mental models or visions relative to car use can often prevent policy makers from imagining and implementing transformative policies, to move the country away from car dependency.”
Taking cars out of the equation gave people the freedom to think about how space is used, but also how transport happens. It’s unrelated, but reading this part of the report made me think about how Douglas Street was transformed for the Autumn Fest a few weeks back when cars were removed from the street for just one day.
The thought experiment is just one part of the OECD report entitled Redesigning Ireland’s Transport for Net Zero Towards Systems that Work for People and the Planet which was officially launched this week in Dublin.
It’s a wordy and worthwhile report and the top line is that Ireland has a car dependency problem, with three out of four adults opting to travel by car on a daily basis. What they found is that infrastructure spending here has, up until quite recently, centred around the car: we build more and better roads with cars in mind which in turn has driven up private car ownership. More cars results in more traffic and so we spend more to accommodate cars. The result, as you’ve likely noticed driving in the city or in many town centres, is near constant traffic jams. And journey times are taking way longer than they should.
Last year, I wrote a news piece about traffic in Douglas and David Teixeira-Lynch who placed a Telraam device which records traffic flow along a street in west Douglas, in Cork city where he lives. You can access the data he records here. I dropped David a line this week to ask him if he had noticed traffic spikes since the return to school in September. Traffic was up, as predicted, with more than 60,000 vehicles flowing through the village on a weekly basis.
What the OECD recommends is that if Ireland is going to halve emissions in the transport sector by 2030 we need to reimagine how roads are used, so that public transport becomes more efficient and more widely used. It would also help with increasing active travel (cycling, scooters, walking etc).
Last weekend, Virgin Media had a short report from Ballincollig highlighting some of the concerns of business owners there, including those of former Lord Mayor Colm Kelleher, about how BusConnects plans would hamper business in the area. The report subsequently drew criticism in that it was entirely one-sided. BusConnects is centred around what the OECD calls road space reallocation - especially by prioritising bus corridors.
There is evidence though that road space reallocation away from car use works. There’s even a term for it: “disappearing traffic.”
“Evidence on disappearing traffic has been documented for several years now. After examining over 70 case studies of road space reallocation in 11 different countries, Cairns, Atkins and Goodwin (2002) concluded that, given the right conditions, road space reallocation can result in significant reductions in traffic: on average, the case studies examined resulted in a 21.9% traffic reduction, while in half of the cases, at least a 10.6% drop in car traffic was found. The authors find that the claim that road space reallocation is associated with “traffic problems” is “unnecessarily alarmist.”
The OECD report runs for hundreds of pages and it drills down into many of the reasons why we are such a car dependent nation (our housing policies also play a major role) and how we can turn this around, and perhaps someday soon witness disappearing traffic, like we see once a year on Douglas Street.
-JJ
