Transport strategy ‘seriously flawed’

ONE of the country’s leading transport experts has condemned the new 10-year Transport 21 plan as totally inadequate.

Dr Sean Barrett of the Economics Department of Trinity College, writing in the Economic and Social Research Institute’s winter economic commentary, also described the €34.4 billion transport plan as “seriously flawed”.

This document fails on several counts, not least on the grounds that individual projects are not costed — making it impossible for an objective analysis of each project to be made.

“We can have no assurance, at this stage, that the published figure of €34.4bn will not end up being three to four times over Budget,” he said.

He also accused the plan of failing to take into account the Goodbody Stockbroker report into the private bus sector, of 11 months ago, which makes a very strong case for using independent bus owners and quality bus corridors as a key part of meeting the country’s future transport needs.

Good bus lanes can deliver passengers faster than the LUAS or DART networks, but a huge part of the new plan is skewed towards expensive rail connections that take years to deliver and whose efficiency is questionable, he said.

Some of his findings:

* Individual projects are not costed but bundled to the overall figure of €34.4 billion.

* No cost benefit analyses have been published.

* No alternatives are compared.

* No origin and destination data has been published to support the investments outlined in Transport 21.

* Transport 21 shows the lack of any evaluation culture in the Department of Transport and its spending agencies.

* Transport 21 has no set of shadow prices for evaluating the benefits of transport investment, such as time and accident cost savings.

* Transport 21 ignores the Goodbody Report on the independent bus sector, which showed that the sector had a larger passenger income than Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann and Iarnród Éireann and a bus fleet double that of Dublin Bus, and Bus Eireann combined.

Transport 21 involves a major investment programme that has been bundled into a total cost package of €34.4 billion that is “woefully short on detail”, he said.

It compares with the €5.6bn programme of 2000 to 2006, which ended up €10.8bn above Budget.

He added that new plan “shows [the] regulatory capture of the Department of Transport by its spending agencies” [and is] dominated by engineers whose focus was on delivery and not cost.