Interview: Dublin Green councillor on why free transport won't solve the city's traffic woes

Councillor Micheal Pidgeon

WELCOME TO POLICY Matters, a series from The Journal that takes a deep dive into the ideas and solutions proposed by Ireland’s politicians on some of the biggest issues of the day.

As part of the series, The Journal sits down with different spokespeople from across Ireland’s political parties to take a deeper look at what they believe needs to be done across areas like housing, health, the environment and childcare.

Last time, we spoke to Sinn Féin’s higher education spokesperson Mairéad Farrell about the big issues facing students in Ireland where the conversation largely centred on the accommodation crisis, mental health, and what can be done to make third-level education more affordable.

This week, we sat down with Micheal Pidgeon, a Green Party councillor for Dublin’s South West Inner City to discuss transport in Dublin City.

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IT ANNOYS COUNCILLOR Micheal Pidgeon when he hears politicians talk about making public transport free.

Not because he is opposed to the idea, but because he believes the infrastructure isn’t there yet for it to work properly in Ireland.

“It’s an attempt to come up with an idea that is simple and sexy, but it’s a total misdiagnosis of public transport problems,” he tells The Journal.

Instead, he believes investment is needed to improve and expand existing services first.

“If you have no bus service or a rubbish bus service and it becomes free, you’re not helping someone,” he says.

Pidgeon gives the example of the Luas Red Line, which he points out is already at capacity.

“If you make that free, yes you’ve saved me [as a user] a bit of money, but it’s not where I would prioritise investment,” Pidgeon says.

He argues that for the same cost of making public transport free in Ireland for one year (estimated to be between €350m and €550m), Ireland could introduce a new Luas line instead.

Pidgeon also argues that for most people, cost may be a factor in choosing whether they use public transport or not, but is not the biggest factor in most people’s decision-making.

“The Greens in Government have reduced fares and held them at the two-year level – and that’s a good thing. We want to encourage people into it,” he says.

He adds that he would “love to get there one day” in terms of free public transport, but  that infrastructure needs to improve first.

Now in his mid-thirties, Pidgeon has been a Green Party councillor since 2019 and in that time has centred much of his work on how to make Dublin City a better place for people to walk and cycle.

As an active user of TikTok, he frequently highlights best practice from other European cities when suggesting ways of improving transport in Dublin.

One recent example of this was when he highlighted that Dublin City has just three zebra crossings and proposed that Ireland should copy Brussels’ approach, where zebra crossings are usable on almost every street corner.

“Big fan,” Pidgeon says when asked about this during our interview.

“It’s quite a dingy city but the walking experience is really nice, because you just have priority all the time,” he explains.

“Zebra crossings can be controversial, particularly for some people with visual impairments, because they don’t provide the certainty or the near certainty you get from a traffic light. And I agree with that.

“I think Brussels is actually too light on traffic lights, and they overdo the Zebra crossings but a traffic light junction is probably the guts of €100 grand to install, it’s a lot of work. And you’re just not going to put it in every housing estate or small street corner.

“Whereas a zebra crossing in areas where you’re never going to put in lights, is better than nothing,” Pidgeon says.

He also explains that it was only recently that the national guidelines relating to zebra crossings have changed and flashing amber beacons are no longer required.

This means the cost of rolling one out has gone from circa €80,000 down to one or two thousand Euro.

“If I was the chief executive of Dublin City Council, I’d be out there with a bucket of paint,” Pidgeon says.

This is one example of a relatively quick and low-cost way of improving transport infrastructure for people in the city that Pidgeon gives throughout the course of the interview.

Another piece of low-hanging fruit that Pidgeon believes should be tackled is improving bus priority.

“It often requires a lot of design, but doesn’t require a lot of actual work on the ground,” he says.

“When you do a bus lane, you pretty much have to reline an existing road. There can be huge infrastructural changes with it but it’s low-hanging fruit in the sense that it doesn’t have to be high cost.

“And having more bus lanes will revolutionise the bus system and cut out the amount of time people spend stuck in traffic,” Pidgeon says.

It’s Pidgeon’s view that buses will always form a key part of Dublin’s transport infrastructure, “not just as a second rate interim measure”.

“The bus is going to be a big part of our future for a long time and I can’t see that changing,” he says.

He argues, however, that it can be made a lot better and noted big problems with reliability.

“There are some people who swear by the bus and others who don’t see it as a relevant part of their lives.

“But the proof is in the pudding, public transport use now has grown by a quarter last year.

In one year. That’s crazy.

“Most other countries are still below pre-Covid peaks and we’re moving more people than ever before,” Pidgeon says.

One thing that Pidgeon admits he has found frustrating since becoming a councillor is the pace of delivering change.

“It’s much faster than it used to be, but it’s still very very slow,” he says.

He gives the example of a two-way bus lane that is being put in place in Rialto: “We’re looking at seven months of what seems to me like half-assed work.”

“They’re coming out well, the outcome is good but it’s just the pace.”

Pidgeon says he still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of what causes these delays.

“I found when it comes to the transport stuff, and this is particularly true when the Greens came into government nationally, we try and deal with one barrier, and then we’re on to the next barrier and the next.”

Pidgeon also says that when he became a councillor initially, it was a case of the Greens having lots of ideas and no money.

“So that was the first target. So in the Programme for Government we got €360 million a year for cycling up from probably 20 or 30 [million].

So suddenly, money wasn’t an issue. In fact, it was difficult to spend the money in the first two years.

“And then it was design capacity,” he says, referring to a shortage of engineers.

“So you get rid of one barrier and then you realise there’s another one. But by removing them gradually, hopefully you can up the pace and the quality of the work.”

Model of success

In Pidgeon’s view, if Dublin and Ireland were to model themselves on the success of another country, it should be the Netherlands.

He makes the point that pictures of Amsterdam and Utreacht from the 70s look very different to what the cities look like now.

“This is not some sort of cultural thing, that we have windmills, and also bike lanes.

This is a policy choice they made because a lot of kids were being killed on the roads.

“They just embraced this stuff. And got it done. So I don’t think there’s necessarily any obstacle to us just copying a lot of what they’ve done and learning from some of the mistake,” he says.

“The thing I always trying to emphasise is that it’s about giving people options.

“We haven’t given people good, workable options. We haven’t given people good cycling options, we haven’t given them great public transport options. And the lesson from other places is if you do people love it.”