Transport 21 - Flawed plan is the road to nowhere

What was described only a month ago by Transport Minister Martin Cullen as a “radical” plan, Transport 21 has become a “seriously flawed document” in the words of one of the country’s leading economists.

In a review published in the ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary, Dr Sean Barrett of the Economics Department of Trinity College, presents a very worrying picture of the Government’s €34.4 billion transport strategy.

Dr Barrett delivered his grave warning on the day Taoiseach Bertie Ahern officially opened the €750 million Dublin Port tunnel — behind schedule and over-budget.

He comprehensively criticised the plan, which is a huge investment programme to cater for the country’s transport infrastructure for the next nine years.

His evaluation points to the fact that immense funding that has not been costed but “bundled” to produce the huge €34.4 billion total.

He warned that — pending proper economic evaluation of its contents —Transport 21 should not become a “letter of comfort” for the spending agencies favoured in it. In light of other spending fiascos like e-voting — a project costing tens of millions of euro that the Government had to abandon — it would be well-advised to re-visit the vastly ambitious transport plan.

Dr Barrett’s finding that individual projects were not costed underlines a lack of any evaluation culture in the Department of Transport or its spending agencies.

Not only does Transport 21 not cost projects individually, but it also ignores several sources of readily available detailed information.

Among the sources ignored is the Goodbody Report on the independent bus sector, which showed that the private sector had a larger passenger income than Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann and Iarnród Éireann, and a bus fleet double the size of the Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann fleet combined.

According to the ESRI commentary, Goodbody is not alone in being ignored. Transport 21, for example, has no consumer focus.

Dr Barrett points out that competitive bus services were invariably cheaper and more frequent than railways.

Air travel on competitive routes, such as Dublin to Cork, is faster and frequently cheaper than railways, he notes, posing the question why air and bus are ignored in favour of rail.

Importantly, the strategy does not take into account the Comptroller and Auditor General’s analysis of the large cost overruns on national road investment, over the past six years, which witnessed over-runs totalling €10.8 billion on initial cost estimates of €5.6 billion.