Madam, – Your Editorial “Wrong Route” (January 21st) rightly condemns the bus transport cuts and bemoans the failure to create an authority to promote and regulate transport after 20 years of promises.
In fact, it is even worse than that. In 1986 a Dublin Transport Authority was created and actually set up, only to be disbanded in the 1987 cuts before it got a chance to do anything. In a speech to the Dublin Crisis Conference at the time the then taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, said:
“We have had 20 years of mistakes, 20 years during which the city has lost enormous amounts that need not have been lost and has, despite improvements in some areas, deteriorated in many others. . . We should use this unhappy recession period constructively to ensure that when development resumes it will resume in a way more structured to the needs of the city and much more sensitive to the appearance of the city and its quality as a place to live, than we saw during the last boom period.”
On transport, Dr FitzGerald also said:
“The whole way in which the city has been developed in the outer suburbs with extremely low density housing is quite unsuited to mass transportation. .. Given that it is low-density, transport has to be buses rather than mass transit, for the greater part, and an efficient system of busways is probably the primary method of improving things in that area for the future.”
Farcically, 20 years later both Dr FitzGerald’s points are equally valid today. – Yours, etc,
JAMES LEAHY,
Park Terrace,
Dublin 8.