Green Party Leader Eamon Ryan has defended plans to relocate traffic in Dublin city, insisting it is not a “traffic ban”.
A strategy developed by Dublin City Council and the National Transport Authority (NTA) seeks to reduce the number of private cars driving through Dublin city centre.
Mr Ryan told reporters this week that the relocation of traffic will be in place by August.
Speaking on The Anton Savage Show today, the Environment Minister said people should remember what traffic the plans actually seek to divert.
“People are fearful of those words ‘ban on all traffic’,” he said. “It won’t be a ban on all traffic. We’re stopping the through-traffic.
“It’s reorganising traffic.”
He said this reorganisation is necessary to make way for current and future public transport expansion, such as the ban on private cars on College Green and increased cycle lanes.
“Bus corridors are already being rolled out,” he said. “What you don’t want is buses stuck in traffic.
“You also don’t want people in the city centre dominated by cars. Look at Pearse Street, look at Tara Street, look at the quays – is that working for anyone?
“We can't keep going down the quays with the way it is at the moment – it's dangerous and it’s not fair.
“There’s no reason we can’t double and triple and quadruple the number of people cycling.”
'The carrot is here'
Critics of Mr Ryan and the upcoming traffic changes have said reducing private traffic without new public transport is “putting the cart before the horse”.
Mr Ryan, however, has insisted “the carrot is here”.
“The carrot is here in the sense that we just opened up five of the Bus Connect route corridors, we’re going to open another six,” he said.
“The Metro will go to public consultation the week after next and I'm confident it will get approval and it will be built.”
Mr Ryan recalled he worked in the Dublin Transportation Office when the plans for a Metro were first introduced.
While progress has been demonstrably slow, he argued that an overhaul of transportation in a country takes time.
“Amsterdam was like Dublin – it wasn’t always this cycling Nirvana,” he said.
Eamon Ryan in the International Energy Agency
Mr Ryan was also elected co-chair of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which will meet this week in Paris.
Founded in 1974, Mr Ryan he would have been critical of the IEA before.
“But in the last seven or eight years it has become centre stage in a lot of the global efforts in the use of fossil fuels,” he said.
He said the IEA will focus on long-term plans to prevent further gas and oil exploration in the largest countries, such as the US.
