James Wickham: According to the Taoiseach before COP21, Ireland needed
special consideration because: "We have lost a decade of investment in our
country because of what happened”. Yet
in terms of climate change, such talk of Ireland’s lost decade is nonsense. Given that in Ireland the level of CO2
emissions has been closely tied to economic activity, the crisis reduced Ireland’s own contribution to
global warming. Going back to the earlier
form of growth would therefore ensure that Ireland made its own significant contribution
to global disaster. It’s not just a
question of more or less investment, it’s a question of what investment.
Moving towards a low carbon economy requires that carbon
emissions stop increasing in line with economic growth – that they are decoupled. During the boom there was absolutely no sign
of this happening. For all the current
talk of emissions from agriculture, in the early stages of the boom between
1990 and 2003 these rose by 3.2 percent.
By contrast, as I showed ten years ago, during that period CO2 emissions
from transport in Ireland rose by an astonishing 129.4 percent (Wickham 2006). As
Figure 1 shows, up until the crisis the number of cars continued to rise faster
than the growth in population.
Figure 1 Cars and population, Ireland 1990-20012
The rise in transport emissions was largely because of the
continued expansion of private car ownership and private car usage. It’s highly unlikely that there was a
concerted plan to increase car usage – and so greenhouse gases – in Ireland,
but what actually happened with investment was as good as if there had been
such a plan.
Firstly, public investment in transport infrastructure was
disproportionately in roads. In
particular the motorway building programme ensured the final motorisation of
Ireland. Building motorways doesn’t just mean that existing car-based journeys
are quicker, safer and more convenient, it encourages more such journeys. Although most research on such
‘infrastructure induced mobility’ (e.g. Cervero 2009) has focused on urban
motorways (think the M50)), the motorway network has made it much easier to
reach all parts of Ireland by car – so more people make such journeys. Because car drivers can travel door to door a
motorway network also facilitates suburbanisation – there is no need for those
who wish to travel to live near a transport hub.
The motorway programme has made Irish inter-urban rail less
competitive and many Irish trains still travel at speeds close to those of the
19th century. Compared to
twenty years ago the public investment plans certainly show some increased
investment in public transport, especially of course rail. Yet the plans and the reality are somewhat
different: planned new roads get built, planned new rail systems often don’t. Political
dithering and planning delays hold up rail far more than roads. The classic example of this is the failure to
build DART Underground – the investment that would potentially tie together
Dublin’s fragmented public transport ‘system’.
Initial decisions are biased in favour of roads because there is
virtually no consideration of the environmental externalities, while there also
appears to be a great if usually unspoken reluctance to fund anything that
would be operated by the public sector.
So Luas Cross-City gets built, Dart Underground (which would have to be
operated by Iarnród Éireann) does not.
The other major investment contribution to Ireland’s
greenhouse gases is the particular form of private housing. The boom showed how ‘urban planning’ in
Ireland is really an oxymoron.
Essentially houses were built where developers wanted to build them –
this was ‘developer-led development’.
Most new building was on prime agricultural land adjacent to existing
towns and cities – especially in the Greater Dublin Area suburban sprawl
accelerated. In particular the new
housing areas out beyond the M50 have virtually no public transport and are
utterly car dependent (Caulfield and Aherne 2014). And across the country, as we are now
realising, an as yet uncounted number of houses were built on flood plains.
Certainly there has been some investment in public transport. The Dublin Bus fleet has been modernised and
there has been some upgrading of Irish Rail.
Indeed, improvements in the DART and Dublin Suburban services have
probably been especially significant, since national and international research
shows that such ‘heavy rail’ services are most likely to persuade commuters to
leave the car at home (e.g. Commins and Nolan 2010). There have been infrastructure projects such
as the Dublin Port Tunnel - an imaginative and massive investment which has
enabled HGVs to be largely excluded from the city centre. And despite the almost interminable delays,
in Dublin the Luas did finally get built and is now being extended.
All of this has made some difference. In Dublin, unlike in other Irish cities, the
apparently inexorable rise of the private motor car has slowed. Whereas in cities such as Cork and Galway,
travel to work by car increased between 2006 and 2011, in Dublin the modal
share is not only lower but constant.
Within the Dublin area there has also been a significant
increase in cycling, facilitated by the limited but real investment in cycle
lanes and cycle tracks. Young workers
in the internet companies in ‘Silicon Docks’ (Google etc.) seem more likely to
cycle to work than travel by car. Here
we can see Ireland’s (or at least Dublin’s) version of ‘peak car’ – the point
at which car ownership and car usage starts to decline (Goodwin and Van Dender 2013).
Yet such change is very limited and very localised. Cycling may even be increasingly concentrated
in the central area of the city – in the outer suburbs cycling to work is
almost non-existent. Cycling is also
still largely limited to a particular demographic – managers and professionals
aged between 35-54; cyclists are also more likely to have switched from another
sustainable mobility mode (walking, public transport) than from the private car
(Caulfield 214). Equally, the new growth of apartments could be
seen as a counter-balance to suburban sprawl, except that many new apartments
are so small that they are hardly an adequate basis for urban living.
Curbing the emissions of the Irish transport sector will
require more and different public and
private investment. Within the Dublin
area it will require investment in transport that ties the city together rather
simply facilitates movement along existing corridors; it will require effective
land-use planning to ensure good housing is built in areas that are not only
reachable by private car. In other
words, it will involve the opposite
of what would have happened if the lost decade hadn’t been lost.
Caulfield, Brian (2014) Recycling a city: examining the
growth of cycling in Dublin. Transportation
Research A: Policy and Practice 61: 216-226.
Caulfield, Brian and Aoife Aherne (2014) The green fields of
Ireland: The legacy of Dublin's housing boom and the impact on commuting. Case
Studies on Transport Policy 2: 20-27
Cervero, Robert (2009) Transport infrastructure and global
competitiveness: balancing mobility and livability Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 626.1:
210-225.
Commins, Nicola and
Anne Nolan (2010) Car ownership and mode of transport to work in Ireland. Economic
and Social Review 41.1: 43-75.
Goodwin, Phil and Kurt Van Dender (2013) ‘Peak Car’ – Themes
and issues. Transport Reviews 33.3:
243-254.
Wickham, James (2006) Gridlock:
Dublin’s transport crisis and the future of the city. TASC at New Island.
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