I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. I had been a county councillor for 11 years back in 2010 when Government expanded the DTA to become the NTA. I may have the dates wrong but I am roughly right. This Bill provides a big opportunity. I agree with a lot of what the previous speaker said. There is a real democratic deficit when it comes to the NTA. I suspect the public view of the NTA is not hugely positive. I want to defend it by saying that very often when its schemes are completed the furore calms down and people say actually that is a good piece of work. I was at Parnell Park on Sunday to watch the Dubs in the hurling match. I went out the cycleway, the Fairview one. That road has sufficient width and there is room for everybody. It has a cycle track, a dedicated bus lane and traffic lanes with the same on the other side of the road. It is an excellent piece of work. There were a lot of eggs broken making that omelette, but it is a bespoke piece of infrastructure. Back in 2010 the Dublin transportation office was all about bus rapid transit. Those are the bendy buses as the Dubs called them. They are to be seen everywhere in Europe. They are in Belfast and Derry. I remember putting around a leaflet in the 2009 local election campaign, proud as punch that this was the next piece of infrastructure that was going to come in. Then the DTA became the NTA. God knows how much money was spent on the bus rapid transit. Bendy buses disappeared because people would be standing too long in them. The people in the NTA then came back to the double decker buses without the central door - they previously had the double decker buses with the centre door. Then they bought a fleet of buses without the centre door. A few years later they decided they liked the centre door and they did away with the buses without the centre door. Then they had the bus pull-ins at bus stops. Then they decided they did not want the bus pull-ins at bus stops and did away with the bus pull-ins. They cannot make up their minds. It leads to an impression that they do not know what they are doing sometimes. That is terribly disparaging for the really good engineers who work there, men and women, and there are some fine people. They also engage in a lot of desktop stuff which wastes a colossal amount of public money. What Deputy Gogarty said is right. They come before a transport committee. Time is limited to five or six minutes for those on the committee - I am not on the transport committee. Then they come to do a public session in Buswells and we get to have a few minutes from an official. A senior official in the NTA said to me with a wry smile, “You’re the Deputy who writes all the letters.” I was really taken aback and said, “Actually it’s my job to do it. Let it pass.” There is not an adequate mechanism for public representatives to liaise with the NTA. Whose fault is that? It is Fianna Fáil’s and Fine Gael’s fault because we created the legislation. It was also the fault of the Green Party the last time. The Minister has an opportunity to do something to rectify this now and build in something really democratic. We have all experienced what happens. When a scheme comes in, county councillors on the ground say it is not down to them because it is Government policy. TDs say that actually the council designed it. Everybody is fobbing off responsibility. The public wake up and the first they hear about a scheme is when they see the diggers in the road and they want to know who decided it, who voted for it, who is responsible for it and who they can talk to about it. Everybody is running a mile from it because there is not an identifiable structure. I do not know who is responsible for the schemes. I know the council designed it. When I was a councillor, I know they all had to go out to full Part 8. There is this section 156 which seems to replace that so there is only minor consultation about it. The public consultation of local authorities is just not comprehensive enough. There need to be genuine public meetings properly set up and properly advertised. I will give one example. I have said this to the NTA. I could speak for an hour on this, as most of my colleagues could. The active travel scheme involves walking and cycling. My area has a number of active travel schemes that are really good but they have resulted in impeding the movement of public transport. I remember having a conversation with an engineer and asked what side of the NTA they were talking to and they said it was active travel. I asked if they had spoken to the BusConnects side. They said they had not because their budget was coming from active travel. It is still the same road space. I will finish with this. Way back in the day there was a road that we, as councillors, called the green route because it was drawn in green on a map. It connected the N81, which is the Tallaght bypass, all the way out parallel to the M50 to Leopardstown. There was sufficient road width and public realm space for 95% of that route to actually create a connection between the red Luas line and the green Luas line. In the absence of funding for that, there was still sufficient road width to put cycle lanes on either side of the road, proper bus corridors and actually landscape them really nicely. The bus corridor could have been behind trees and not just purely on the road. On some stretches of it there is a double cycle track, then it meets a cycle track on one side of the road and a cycle track on the other side of the road. All I know is this: they have gobbled up the space that could be used for a dedicated bus corridor from the Tallaght bypass to Leopardstown at a time when the M50 is saturated with traffic - a parallel public transport route. It makes no sense to me and I do not understand it. Here is probably our one opportunity in this term to give public representatives and the public a real voice in how the NTA does its business.

Sentiment score: 0.08