Comment & Analysis: Covering Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary’s vision for transport for Dublin is so divorced from reality it’s now mainly propaganda.
The latest example today is from Jon Ihle, deputy business editor at The Sunday Times Ireland, which echos his other coverage of O’Leary’s bonkers views. But it is billed as space for “Ireland’s business leaders on Trump 2.0 and building self-reliance”, so, the Ryanair boss is given even more free rein to spout off unchallenged by little things such as reality.
O’Leary does not mention Trump, and most of his space is dedicated to surface transport. It’s full of 1970s traffic and land use planning thinking, which many decades of evidence have shown results in poor outcomes.
In fairness, giving him space also clarifies that he is as opposed to public transport as he is to cycling. Much of the national media coverage of his views overly focuses on his views on cycle lanes when he just as much wants key bus priorities removed and rail projects not to go ahead.
“Plans for unaffordable, uneconomic railway schemes, including Metro North and the Dublin-Navan line, should be scrapped,” he said in the article while he suggests building a load of urban motorways around Dublin and elsewhere.
O’Leary said we need to plan for Dublin’s population to rise to more than two million people, but his solution for transport around this would align with the 1970s road-focused thinking, which has been proven to fail repeatedly.
But — aided by the media — O’Leary is using repetition to make-believe that congestion is the fault of cycle lanes.
His idea of “a tolled eight-lane bridge across Dublin Port linking Clontarf to Blackrock” is nearly as bad for its lack of understanding of geography as it lacks realism. If an eastern bypass of Dublin has half a chance of being built, it would be a tunnel and not a bridge which would attract such criticism from locals that no national environmental group would need to bother to get involved.
His second idea, “A new tolled M75 outer orbital motorway would then link the M1 at Drogheda to Navan, Kilcock, Naas and on to the M11 at Bray,” is already being partly proposed as the Outer Orbital Route, but with the bonkers addition of a route maybe under — or who knows, maybe over — the Dublin Mountains.
With O’Leary, it’s hard to truly know if he understands the Overton window more than any journalist in the country or if he’s just being as daft as his Ryanair stunt persona, but I think it’s the former.
His next suggestion is pure propaganda: “All underused cycle lanes should be removed from main arterial roads around Dublin, restoring two and three-lane roadways, eliminating congestion, so that traffic once again moves freely.”
Which roads with cycle lanes on them were moving freely before during the day?
Then, we are given token references to bypasses in other population centres such as Galway, Cork, and Limerick. Just as with his self-declared use of taxi licences for personal use to use Dublin’s bus lanes to skip traffic, O’Leary is deeply concerned with his own travel and has come up with ideas around what he thinks might improve travel for him and people like him.
In a line that will be seen as trolling, he calls for “self-funding multistorey” car parks to be built under much-protected Dublin squares and the grounds of Dublin Castle, Trinity College Dublin, and, apparently, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
While these kinds of outlandish suggestions can be dismissed as trolling, both this and calls for a second orbital route to include a section in or around the Dublin Mountains can also be seen as attempts to push Overton’s window towards his real goal.
O’Leary said he would “Free up the quays to become the circulatory arteries of Dublin again, with four lanes of traffic on both sides of the Liffey, only one of which should be allocated to buses and taxis.” This line is devoid of reality, but too many journalists keep repeating it.
There is no space on the quays for four lanes of traffic in both directions. If there was, providing bus priority, a continuous cycle route and continued through access for motorists might be possible, but the quays are, in the main, smaller than their widest sections.
The reality is that on the wider central sections of the quays, space is reserved for stopped buses, and at the pinch-points around Temple Bar and Smithfield the quays narrow to two lanes. This means the quays never had more than two lanes at these locations. The quays are also constrained by their many junctions and what they connect to.
Attacking cycle lanes is just the in-vogue way of attacking sustainable transport.
The new bus gates introduced under the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan and sections of double-lane bus lanes (with the inside lane mainly for bus stops) are what currently restrict car space on the quays.
Vastly more people are transported by the humble bus while car access is maintained. He has some cheek talking about Dublin’s future growth when his ideas for the city centre would cripple it now. To put his street-transport idea in airline capacity terms — it would be like reducing the capacity of Ryanair flights by installing business-class seating through their aircraft.
Some people who object to bus priority use rail as a tool against fixing street transport. O’Leary is a realist in one sense that he knows it is not possible for the Government to engage in a massive road expansion programme at the same time as expanding public transport as planned. Not in terms of funding or other capacity.
So, after proposing madcap road expansion to push forward what will be seen as “more sensible” road expansion, he rallies against railway schemes as being “unaffordable, uneconomic”.
He says this includes Metro North and the Dublin-Navan line. He doesn’t clarify any public transport investment which he supports besides making some provision which is largely already in place free (and with less priority).
But the Ryanair CEO doesn’t stop there. His suggestion of finishing the M50 ring with an eastern bypass and building a new outer bypass under the name M75, will clearly induce demand. He suggested that housing, hospitals etc and “All government offices should be redeployed” around the new motorways — a path to induced demand on steroids.
While railways are built as “loss-making” it’s claimed that the road development he proposes can be “self-funding thanks to toll roads and car park charges”.
What about emissions and sustainable development? He says cars “will be will be largely electrified in the next decade” but as the YouTube account Not Just Bikes explains in their video on induced demand, planning around large roads increases sprawl. And sprawl is linked to increasing emissions.
He also claims rail will not work because of low density, but Dublin has just as high or around the same population density as other EU cities with far better rail networks. The density myth is one that he media and anti-rail advocates love to push.
Maybe one of the most implausible parts of the article is claiming that a massive expansion of the motorway network around Dublin and other cities “can be achieved within the five-year lifetime of the next government.”
Ireland might not have oligarchs in the sense of what they are like in Russia, but he’s one of the closest things we have to one: He has money and influence. The media keeps spewing out his nonsense even when it clearly does not fit with reality. He recently launched the election campaign for a Fine Gael Minister.
What he says needs to be tackled and debunked, dismissing him will not work.
