EPA - Ireland's Environment, An Integrated Assessment - 2020

Ireland’s Environment – An Integrated Assessment 2020 Spatial and development planning needs to be deeply integrated with long-term sustainable transport planning, for active and public modes, to 2050 and beyond. This is a careful synchronisation and coordination, working in tandem with and reinforcing each other. Transit-oriented development allows the integration of planning for settlement with strategic policy for active and public transport infrastructure (Seto et al. , 2014). Since the middle of the 20th century, transit-oriented development has been applied successfully in many cities, from Amsterdam, Stockholm and Vienna to Hong Kong, Melbourne and Vancouver, to promote dense and compact urban forms within walking and cycling distance of public transport. This has the impact of both avoiding journeys and cutting their distances, and making sustainable transport modes convenient and desirable, by concentrating urban development around public transport hubs. Applied to freight, it involves planning for economic activity that leads to concentrating the highest density of goods movement near rail. The feasibility of long-term expansion of Irish rail freight needs to be considered, in line with linkages between rail, road and shipping networks, the logistics of goods movement and advanced communication technologies. The IPCC notes that urban redevelopment and investments in new infrastructure, linked with integrated urban planning, transit-oriented development and more compact urban forms that support cycling and walking, can all lead to modal shifts. Such mitigation measures could evolve to possibly reduce greenhouse gas intensity by 20-50 per cent below the 2010 baseline by 2050 (Sims et al. , 2014), depending on policy and country. Applying the integrated approach involves a sustainability hierarchy, from avoid and reduce, to shifting to active modes and public transport. It requires giving priority to expanding walking and cycling, followed by rail and then bus. The EEA highlights the importance of the change between modes as first-/last-/only-mile options (EEA, 2020b), acknowledging that public transport hubs are not destinations. Effective planning of modal shift requires systemic provision for active and public transport modes, at journey beginning and end. It facilitates the use of the public transport system as the backbone of mobility, without the private car. Mobility sharing and information technology also offer approaches to assist mode shift and reductions in demand. The measures included in the National Development Plan and NPF are a useful addition. It is now necessary to advance the discussion by considering the potential of deepening avoid and shift measures in the long term, to 2050 and beyond. Discussions that consider enabling a deepening of avoid and shift have begun to emerge in Ireland (CCAC, 2019b), including transit-oriented development (NTA, 2013; NESC, 2019); the hierarchy of active and public modes (JCCA, 2019); shifting to walking and cycling (DTTAS, 2019b); rail expansion (CCAC, 2019a; DTTAS, 2019c); and high-speed rail (An Taoiseach, 2019). The dublinbikes scheme is an example of an effective measure to shift journeys to active modes in Ireland. Widely regarded as one of the most successful shared bike schemes in Europe, dublinbikes was established as a partnership between Dublin City Council and JC Decaux in 2009, and has been expanded since then. This public bicycle rental scheme is free for the first half hour. It now has more than 100 stations across the city, generating over 30 million bicycle journeys since opening, 96 per cent of which have been for free (dublinbikes, 2020). Other cities have been successful in establishing successful cycling cultures. Beside the recognised cities of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, there are solutions around cycling being rolled out in cities such as Seville. Here 80 km of segregated cycling lanes was constructed in one go. In Seville, the ‘build it and they will come’ approach increased cycling from an average of 6000 to 67,000 bicycle trips daily. The network has now grown to 180 km, and the aim is to increase the current 9 per cent of trips a day to 15 per cent. To illustrate a further success story of modal shift internationally, Topic Box 11.6 discusses a shift to public transport in Vienna. Urban design of transport-oriented development (Source: Rotbert, J.) 294