The OECD report on transport has highlighted a yawning gap in our policy. What's next?
Our car-dependent mobility system is extremely expensive, and it eats up time that could be more productively spent. File picture: Larry Cummins
The OECD has published an acutely challenging report on Irish transport, and the related spatial planning policy. The report expends much energy in skewering the inadequacy of our current approach, mainly relying on electric vehicles to massage models towards meeting our national emissions targets.
The report does an accomplished job in comprehensively considering current policy limitations, and clearly documents the traps into which we are falling. Moving from fossil to electric mobility is a useful and necessary step, but relying on it is grossly simplistic, and a major folly of policy efforts. It is unlikely to meet emissions reduction objectives and does little to nothing for wider sustainability goals.
It leaves untouched the costly congestion that chokes our urban centres, the road traffic accidents that plague our communities, and how car dependency damages our towns and cities, as places to live and work. A shopping list of sustainability problems remains ignored by plumping for improving our vehicles.
Our car-dependent mobility system is extremely expensive, and it eats up time that could be more productively spent, costing our economy dearly. Considerable public monies are spent on enhancing the road system, to alleviate congestion, which then induces more traffic.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
Fundamental to car dependency is our spatial planning policy, which has failed to support affordable housing, where people want to live close to employment and services and without long stressful commutes. Instead, spatial planning has broadly turned a blind eye to tackling the urban sprawl, that worsens car dependency, and that hollows out the towns and villages of rural Ireland.
The OECD report goes to great lengths to catalogue and characterise existing policies, running to 55 pages. Where it comes off the rails, is where it seeks to recommend the measures that are needed for transformation in Ireland.
The OECD report recommends three core measures, proposed as of ‘high transformative potential,’ in road space reallocation, shared mobility services and enhanced communication efforts. It notes the challenge of highly centralised government in Ireland, and of distinctly different geographies across urban and rural, but does not follow these through in identifying solutions that are Irish-specific.
Road space allocation is a useful measure but is a small sub-group of the measures to encourage significant shifts to active and public transport in urban areas. Shared services, such as renting cars and e-bikes are at the lower end of transformation, and do not always reduce emissions.
Communication efforts can encourage new thinking, but on their own are piecemeal. The proposed measures are consequently out of step with the scale of the challenge, the current state of global knowledge, and with the specific needs of Ireland.
The deeper problem with these recommendations is that they leave out all of the most transformative measures that are available. Curiously, the OECD does not appear to have taken into account the three previous reports that formed its genesis in Ireland, and pioneered transformational approaches to transport, from the EPA in 2020, the Climate Council in 2021 and an Oireachtas Committee report that followed in 2021.
What is needed is big vision for change in our settlements and infrastructure, analysis that allows us to understand the implications of major system shifts, and then the leadership to pursue implementation. Our transport and spatial patterns are locked-in and will not be transformed with the kind of marginal change the OECD have highlighted.
Deep transformation of our systems, of spatial and transport planning, is a long-term process that addresses the fundamentals of settlement design and infrastructure. Given the centralised nature of Irish policy, this will require a national 2050 vision for the future of settlement, integrated with major shifts to active modes of walking and cycling, and also to rail and bus.
A bottom-up process of shared mobility and road space re-allocation is not ideally suited to our centralised political system, nor to prevalent rural development, and does not redirect the big lumpy infrastructure and related investment.
Transformation in Ireland means a new long-term spatial strategy that avoids sprawl altogether, by promoting development within our cities, supporting a move from one-off housing to securing development of vibrant towns and villages in rural Ireland.
Transformation means providing home availability and affordability, and high-quality community services, accessible by active and public transport, not the expensive sprawl that drives up emissions and imperils the future of rural Ireland. This approach can deliver significant emissions reductions, and multiple benefits, with potential economic savings rather than costs.
After working on spatial planning, comes related transport planning. For thousands of years Ireland, as was common across the globe, had settlements that were defined by the ability to walk between origin and destination. This was replaced in the 19th century by a comprehensive rail network, followed from the 1970s onwards by growing car dependency, and all the negatives that have come with it.
Moving to high levels of walking and cycling can reduce emissions rapidly, at low cost, with a plethora of benefits across public health, road safety and emissions. Moving to dominance by rail requires significant investment, and is a long-term project, but fundamentally alters the system towards the public good, and efficient systems.
Rolling out a comprehensive bus system, with moderate investment, can also reduce emissions rapidly, and in rural areas can significantly counteract disconnection and loneliness, and the expense of the private car. Together, these plans offer considerable opportunities for both urban and rural communities to significantly improve our wellbeing, and our sustainability.
The dominance of the current path in Ireland, of urban sprawl and car-dependent design, has so squashed these profoundly beneficial alternatives, that we not only don’t have a long-term plan, we also don’t even have analysis that would allow us to consider other paths.
All of these approaches noted are already successfully in existence in other nations today, contributing to improving wellbeing and sustainability, and often at little economic cost. The OECD report is correct in stating that our mindsets must change.
We urgently need to recognise that we are locked into the systems at the root of climate breakdown, that are not meeting our social or economic needs. We must move on from the constant refrain of denial, of finding reasons why “we can’t,” to awareness that indeed “we can”.
Seeking a transformation can be like pushing a rock up a hill, our minds are colonised by old systems, old ideas and old limitations, while vested interests typically provide stiff resistance, regardless of how beneficial change is for the wider community. But this can be overcome by building knowledge, through studying transformation, and developing skills and movements for implementation. We need visionary thinking allied to participation and leadership.
The OECD report provides another wake-up call on decades of policy failure in Ireland, across spatial and transport planning. History will judge us poorly if we fail to evolve in response. However, moving to transformation is going to require far more ambition than the thin-end-of-the-wedge the report has proposed.
Spatial, transport and climate policy planning are essentially entirely separate in Ireland. This gap was identified in the Climate Council review of 2021, yet there is no policy or research process in existence today that addresses it. We are flying blind at a time of crisis, and researchers will need support to start addressing these major gaps in our knowledge.
Deep innovation is where this game is now at, and it provides considerable scope for a brighter future for us all. We are at the beginning of a new journey, clearly mapping out the different routes is the crucial next step.
- Dr Tadhg O’Mahony is Research Fellow at Dublin City University School of Law and Government, focused on transformation, and an advisor at the Finland Futures Research Centre, at Turku School of Economics in Finland.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
