Christopher O'Sullivan: Free public transport would reduce emissions and improve communities

With cities and countries across Europe introducing free public transport, Ireland should join the experiment as it attempts to meet its climate objectives, writes Christopher O’Sullivan

Clearly, there is an urgent need to expand our public transport system to ensure all regions of the country are connected and, for that to come to fruition, a lot of difficult decisions will have to be made.

The idea of free public transport is by no means new. It has been a reality for hundreds of thousands of people living across various European cities, such as Tallinn and Dunkirk, for quite some time. In 2020, Luxembourg took those initiatives one step further and became the first country to make public transport free in a bid to tackle the country’s high level of private car usage and the resulting emissions.

In 2018, Dunkirk introduced free travel for both residents and visitors. A subsequent study found that bus use had increased by 65% during the week and by 125% during the weekend over the course of eight months.

In Germany, across the months of June, July, and August of last year, passengers could travel for €9 per month on public transport and regional trains systems, in response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and the resulting increase in energy prices. The measure was widely successful, with 31m people purchasing a pass for June alone.

The latest greenhouse gas emissions projections from the Environmental Protection Agency highlight the challenge Ireland faces in meeting its climate objectives. We must not and can not shy away from this challenge.

It is vital that we fully implement the actions in the Climate Action Plan, and strengthen the additional measures needed to reach our targets.

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Achieving these targets will provide numerous benefits to the country, in terms of health, competitiveness, employment opportunities, biodiversity, and climate impact. It will undoubtedly require changes across all sectors of our society and economy, a collaborative effort by Government, and changes in individual behaviours, including how we travel.

In Ireland, the transport sector represents about 18% of our carbon emissions nationally with road transport and private car usage carrying the most significant carbon footprint.

I appreciate that the avoidance of private car use is not a viable option for everyone but I do believe that free public transport would go some way in reducing those journeys.

Clearly, there is an urgent need to expand our public transport system to ensure all regions of the country are connected and for that to come to fruition, a lot of difficult decisions will have to be made.

Public transport will not be a silver bullet for the more regional and rural parts of Ireland, but we can do better.

This month, for example, we are starting in the delivery of a service which has never existed before in my own county of Cork. Two remote West Cork peninsulas, the Sheep’s Head peninsula and the Beara peninsula, will be connected for the first time ever by bus. Communities are going to use this route but making it a free service will guarantee its success. This is the approach we will need to get buy-in for people in non-urban areas to use public transport.

In recent budgets, this Government introduced a 50% reduction on travel fares for young adults aged between 19 and 23 years and, with that, we have seen a marked increase in the number of young people using public transport.

In fact, a Bus Éireann Expressway survey released in November last year showed that 72% of young adults (19 to 23 years old), outside of Dublin, said that they were using public transport more now than three years ago, which proves that cost can be a prohibitive factor in the use of public transport.

Promoting clean, safer, and more sustainable mobility is not only critical to our climate agenda, but it also represents an opportunity to improve our health, boost the quality of our lives, address congestion in our towns and cities, and better connect our rural, urban, and suburban communities.

To reverse the current trajectory of emissions and meet our targets, a significant shift is required in the speed at which we roll out and ramp up the measures and actions that will decarbonise our economy.

We have already seen some examples of how we can expedite our processes to support climate action; we must consider free public transport as one of those measures, as our European neighbours have done.

The time to act on climate change and emissions is now.

• TD Christopher O’Sullivan is Fianna Fáil spokesman on environment, climate action, and biodiversity.