The failure to join the two Dublin Luas lines was costing the company five million passengers annually, Fine Gael's transport spokeswoman Olivia Mitchell said.
"Failure to join the lines was not just an inconvenience to passengers. We must always be conscious of the opportunity lost by not doing things or changing them," she said. Criticising the Government's Transport 21 initiative, Ms Mitchell said she knew nothing about the list of projects involved. She did not know the cost, or how the projects were prioritised.
She said that Transport 21 was too big a project for secrecy. "We must make decisions based on hard information and not on intuition. We need transparency, openness and the hard-nosed professional cost-benefit analysis of the network and individual projects to common criteria."
Labour spokeswoman Róisín Shortall said that in a modern society and economy, which we claim to have, it was intolerable that we were on such a knife-edge that a little rain could bring traffic to a standstill.
"We know from accident statistics that trucks are disproportionately involved in fatal accidents and have an environmental cost in terms of wear and tear of the roads. The Government needs to draw up a policy on how we can encourage industry to switch from road transport to rail freight."
Another matter ignored by Transport 21 was the traffic congestion associated with the school run, said Ms Shortall.
Green Party spokesman Ciarán Cuffe claimed the Government would be remembered for "its guff and fluff" relating to transport. The Navan rail link, for example, had been promised on the eve of elections in 1997 and 2002, but had not been delivered.
"It was promised again during the byelection campaign in Co Meath a couple of years ago. When I stood on the rail bed of the Navan line last Saturday, I noticed that grass was growing up through the tracks." Seán Crowe (SF, Dublin South West) said that many people in his consituency were suffering because of the M50, which was "a giant car park".
It was an issue which divided people, he said. "The lucky people who are not stuck in traffic every day do not really understand the grief and frustration suffered every morning, day in, day out, by those who are trying to get on with their lives by going to work, dropping their kids to school, or going to the shops."
Joe Callanan (FF, Galway East) said that Transport 21 provided for investment in transport infrastructure in excess of €34 billion over a 10-year period, covering the areas of national roads, public transport and regional airports.
"Never in my lifetime have I seen such investment in infrastructure, and I congratulate the Minister, Mr Cullen, in this regard. This investment is shared all over the country."
Cecilia Keaveney (FF, Donegal North East) claimed the northwest had often failed "to have lines on maps recognised, particularly in respect of transport infrastructure".
Unfortunately, a simple and clear reason for that was that most access to Donegal was through a jurisdiction over which the Republic could not legislate or plan.
