The DART is to be extended to christchurch and on to the docklands under the river. What I have always felt is that Dublin needs to move closer to the kinds of models that are used in other major cities around the world. This is a kind of integrated plan involving all public transport services. You have one card and it works on all the various kinds of vehicle - Bus, Dart and Luas. You can hop-on and hop-off wherever you wish, it works at all times of the day and the various services are times to work well together. Probably take a bit of time to tweak all the timetables and a bit of work to divide the funding across the various services according to the number of customers, journey length, etc, but it should not be impossible.

It is also obvious that the centre of Dublin is overcrowded by cars. I have to confess that the bus service near where I live is so bad that I rarely, if ever, use it. I live in Harold’s Cross and the bus simply cannot be predicted. I usually walk if I have to go into town, or else I take a taxi. This is unfortunate. With fewer cars, we could have more frequent busses, since people would use them more. So, I am in favour of a ring around the centre of Dublin with cameras set up on the perimeter. If you bring a car inside this ring on any given day, your number plate is read and you are automatically charged through the standard income taxation system, or a monthly bill is sent to the person who owns the car and it is paid in the same way as the electricity bill. This wold tilt the economic balance in favour of public transport in a big way, reduce noise in the centre of the city, reduce the amount of pollutants from fossil fuel combustion and make the quality of life better for everybody. This kind of system is in place in London and I think it works quite well. I noticed a huge difference between now when Ken Livinstone has the legislation in place and beforehand when I lived in London and it was so noisy and dirty.

For those that feel they need to bring their cars into the centre of town there is also the benefit that ther will be more parking spaces, so you don’t have to drive around all the time looking for one (thereby reducing fuel consumption, saving time, reducing pollutants, saving money) and there should be a reduction in the number of cars that park illegally and a reduction in clamping. Aaaaaargh!! Clamping.