Is the bus better than the bike? Does the Dart beat the car? Catherine Cleary asks Environment Minister Dick Roche, Dublin City Manager John Fitzgerald and businesswoman Rosheen McGuckian to give up their usual vehicles for a day and reports on their commuting experiences
Rosheen McGuckian is tying the laces on her walking boots and preparing to take a journey into the unknown. It is shortly after 8am, and at the front of her home, on the side of a hill in Rathmichael, in south Co Dublin, you can hear birdsong and the low hum of traffic. She is reluctantly leaving her shiny, red motorbike parked in the driveway and will be taking the bus to her city-centre office. It will be her first time on a bus in almost 20 years.
A few miles away, at his home in Bray, Co Wicklow, Environment Minister Dick Roche is getting into his comfy shoes, ready for his journey to Leinster House. There is just the matter of a telephone interview with Morning Ireland to handle before he heads to Bray Dart station for a relatively emission-free commute.
Over in the southern Dublin suburb of Blackrock, Dublin City Manager John Fitzgerald has just watched his second or third full bus sail past his nearest stop. He and dozens of other people will watch several more packed 46As drive by their hopefully- outstretched arms before they finally manage to get on a bus with some room on it, which will take them smoothly along a quality bus corridor (QBC - that empty stretch of road to the left of the line of cars going nowhere) to the city centre.
The businesswoman, the Minister and the city manager have all agreed to a small, deeply unscientific experiment. Try and live in an imaginary, oil-free world, a place where the oil has dried up and our love affair with the individual combustion engine has sputtered to a rusty end.
IN FACT, McGuckian loosened the grip of the petrol pump on her finances some time ago. Her weekly petrol bill is €6. That's a leap from the fiver a week it used to cost her, before the price hikes of recent times. She is one of a small but growing band of people who have opted out of a four-wheeled life.
It was at the petrol pumps, more than two years ago, that she finally changed her mind, when she spotted an alternative in the shape of a pod-like BMW commuter bike. She approached the driver, a doctor living in Blackrock who commuted to Beaumont Hospital, and she was sold on it.
Prior to that, she used to set off at 8am (the earliest she and her husband could persuade anyone to start minding their two young children). Her car commute to the GE Money offices, off South Great George's Street in Dublin, could take anywhere between 90 minutes and an hour and three-quarters. With her husband working in Leopardstown, their homeward journeys in the evenings were fraught with stomach-churning stress, never knowing if a snarl-up around the next bend would mean a delay in getting home to relieve the childminder.
So she took lessons, conquered her nerves, bought helmet, boots and overalls and became a biker. Now her journey takes an almost- guaranteed 40 minutes. Even in the worst conditions, she bikes. The night before we spoke, she came home in a downpour, and remained dry apart from a pair of damp elbows.
Safety is a consideration. "There are very few aggressive drivers, just a lot of unthinking drivers. And they forget when they pull out in front of you that it takes longer to stop on a bike."
This morning, though, the bike stays at home, and for the first time since she started driving, at the age of 18, she is taking a bus. Her walk to the bus stop will take her down a country road with no footpath, where she will see not a single other pedestrian. In a game of spot-the-SUV, on this road you could lose count after the first two dozen. As large gleaming bumpers and bull bars nose their way around the bends, they seem to outnumber normal cars.
MEANWHILE, in Bray, the Environment Minister's State car (Charlie McCreevy's old one, as it happens) will stay off the roads today, parked instead at the local Garda station, and Dick Roche hopes to hold an impromptu constituency clinic on the 9.08am train to Pearse Station.
It is 13 minutes to nine, and that Morning Ireland interview has turned into a roasting. The Minister has been confronted by Cathal Mac Coille with reports that the country could face an annual bill of up to €121 million for failing to reach emissions targets set down under the Kyoto agreement. Denying the figure, the Minister argues that he has already arranged to buy 3.7 million tonnes of credits, at what he says will be an annual cost of €55.5 million. He argues that industry carbon-trading arrangements will look after some of the rest, to bring the total reduction to 8.1 million tonnes per year. He will not agree to a carbon tax on petrol and diesel, he says. It is a measure the Opposition parties say could persuade people to leave their cars at home.
"The Dart has improved a lot," he says, settling into his seat and spotting a familiar face in the seat opposite. "It's incredible. Isn't it?" The constituent, postgraduate student Robert Bridge, does not appear to be working from quite the same script. "It's less packed, but that's because it's longer. I've only twice seen an eightcarriage Dart, and I'd like to say it was at rush hour, but it wasn't."
Life in an oil-free world would mean we would have to schedule our days differently, Roche muses. On the recent car-free day, he lined up appointments in the RDS, Jurys, Leinster House and Customs House. He is hopeful that the car industry will provide part of the solution to dwindling oil resources. "The motor industry has effectively started to decouple itself from the oil industry. In London two weeks ago he drove the latest Prius, Toyota's hybrid car that runs on battery and petrol power. "It is a fascinating debate," he says, describing the arguments about measures that might prise the hands of the population off their steering wheels.
"What we can do is try to subtly change consumption, which is what we did with the plastic bag tax." But isn't changing to a cloth bag easier than changing to the train for many people, simply because of the availability of reusable bags? He concedes that commuter train services that finish at 6.30pm do not suit anyone outside a nine-to-five routine.
What about the costs of the State car, which I estimate to be about €340 a day? The Minister's €3.85 return Dart ticket represents a massive potential saving on the usual daily cost of his transport. He prefers the Dart, he says. "It's quicker and more comfortable." More comfortable than a chauffeur-driven car?
"These seats are more comfortable, at least on my back. I have Charlie McCreevy's old Volvo," he explains. Not that it's not a very nice car, and nothing against Volvos, he adds hastily. But it would not be possible, he says, for any Minister, even one for the Environment, to contemplate giving up the State car. "It's certainly not cheap. But if I were doing the driving myself, it still would not be cheap."
At 10am the train pulls into the station, and we set off on a brisk walk to Leinster House. On the way, Roche scoops a copy of Metro off the footpath. Its lead headline screams €600 million as the potential cost of Ireland's Kyoto bill. The Minister's annoyance quickens his pace further. His progress along Westland Row is now fuelled only by the prospect of getting the Green Party to name its price per litre for carbon tax in his next radio interview, on East Coast Radio.
Standing at pedestrian lights with cars streaming past, he defends his position. "I actually don't believe that putting 10 cent on a litre of petrol will do anything other than hit people's pockets. You will have a marginal impact. Look what's happened in the past three or four months as petrol prices have gone up dramatically. Has the number of cars decreased? It hasn't."
Would the Government ever see a day where spending on public transport would match thaton roads? No, he says bluntly. "The roads are the most critically important infrastructure that we have. And we have to have roads if we're going to have industry; if you're going to try and get industry dispersed around the country."
FIFTEEN minutes after the Dart has delivered the Minister to his office, GE Money chief executive Rosheen McGuckian is sitting at her desk in Dublin city centre. Her bus journey from Rathmichael took her an hour and 50 minutes, 90 minutes more than her usual journey by motorbike. The number 45 bus arrived promptly after a 20-minute walk to the bus stop. At €1.85 the fare was about double her normal petrol costs. The bus was clean, but seemed to make slow progress. Another 15 minutes' walk at the other end got her to the office.
"It will be the last time I do that," she says. She saw it as part of something GE Money was calling Responsibility Week. The previous day she had been painting walls in a convent. Today had been Responsibility towards the Environment Day. Tomorrow it would be back to the biker boots and helmet.
DOWN at Dublin Civic Offices, city manager John Fitzgerald has unfolded his crumpled 46A bus ticket as proof of his efforts this morning. After five or six full buses passed him, he eventually got on, arriving in his office at 9.10am, an hour after leaving his house. Without the 20-minute wait, the commute would have taken 40 minutes, the equivalent of a gentle drive during the height of the summer traffic lull.
The bus is the short-term key to urban traffic problems, he argues. But the system is facing a critical shortage of buses, even on one of the city's busiest routes, that of the 46A. "We were concerned for a very long time that, having set aside the road space, having proved that bus corridors are a good solution, and a very inexpensive short-term solution, their effectiveness could be undermined."
The Dublin Bus fleet needs 70 to 80 new buses immediately and, some experts believe, up to 300 in the long term if the QBC solution is to work. "Once you get on the bus, it's an absolute dream. It's a pleasure. You look out the window, and all the car drivers sit there, and you kind of say: 'Why do people do that?' Well, what about a 20-minute wait at the stop, and throw in a drenching with rain?"
He has seen a change in the profile of the average bus user. "I recognise a lot of the fellow passengers, and the big change is you now see people with briefcases and umbrellas at the bus stop. You'd never see that five or six years ago." His €1.75 return ticket was very good value when you consider driving and parking costs.
His own parking costs are nil, as the city council has hundreds of free parking spaces in its basement, a public-service perk that really gets up the noses of the rest of the commuting population. The council has cut its spaces from 1,000 to 350, he says. And those with parking spaces are now those who genuinely need a car. "Sometimes people say to us that in the past seven or eight years, despite all that we've done, traffic hasn't improved. Of course, the reality is that if we hadn't done what we are doing, the place would have ground to a halt long ago. It would be one big, long, wide car park."
Is the city ready for the day the oil runs out and the idea of owning a petrol-guzzling three-litre car is obsolete? "There's almost a kind of naive acceptance that somebody, somewhere is going to come up with a solution. The fossil-fuel deposits have taken something like 50 million years to lay down and have been Hoovered up in the last 70 years. I think we've got to bite the bullet and say that there is a kind of a looming problem and it's not going to go away.
"Long after other cities had begun to reinvest in public transport, we were continuing to shut it down. For the past 10 years we've been playing catch-up. How I wish somebody had gone and built an underground in 1890 or 1910, when everyone else was doing it. I think we all go abroad and look in envy at what was done. But you start from where you are."