Lack of vision has left us in the slow lane

Amid all the pomp and ceremony in Washington recently, Taoiseach Enda Kenny shared an anecdote with the world.

"I was accused in Cork three weeks ago of blocking up the Irish roads with people going to work. That's the challenge of success, I suppose," he said.

The room broke into laughter and applause. Poor Enda, those voters are never happy.

Looking out of the window of Capitol Hill, he could have seen that his strange rationalisation didn't add up.

Washington, with a bigger population and lower unemployment rate than even Dublin, has a traffic system that flows like honey.

Still, the US press secretary repeated the Taoiseach's words, his claims were carried on the official White House website and, in recent days, Kenny again told the Dail that this heavy traffic the Irish have become so used to is the price to pay for the numbers back at work.

So let's look at the reality.

In 2011, six months after he became Taoiseach, the Government shelved plans to build Dublin's Metro North and an underground network for the capital.

Since then, peak-time traffic has slowed to the speed of "an ass and cart", according to Conor Faughnan, of AA Ireland. And he's not speaking figuratively: 200 years ago the animal-drawn transport trudged along at 5.5km per hour - the same rate as today's rush-hour traffic.

During his time as Ireland's leading transport commentator, Faughnan said "year after year, I have seen plans for world-class traffic systems that have never left a PowerPoint presentation".

Kicked from one government to the next, there is no long-term vision for transport. There is still not as much as a spade in the ground for Dublin's Metro, which will now arrive in 2026 at the earliest. As for the underground, there is no plan and no start date.

The fact that the Government is prioritising transport to the airport before building an underground is questionable in itself.

The route already has substantial services operating between the city and Dublin Airport. This includes two Airlinks operated by Dublin Bus and a number of private bus coaches such as the Aircoach, which services five separate city routes, all zipping through the port tunnel.

Meanwhile, traffic in the city centre is at a standstill with no underground in sight.

A recent Merrill Lynch report confirmed that Dublin is the slowest of the world's wealthiest major cities. "When you see how fast infrastructure can be delivered in other European countries, you despair," Faughnan said. "We have been bedevilled by short-term thinking."

He gave an example of what life could be like if Dublin had an underground service. "If we were in a different European city and you were trying to get from Blessington to Drumcondra, you would get on at a Tube station in Tallaght, switch from one line to another around St Stephen's Green, and come out into the blinking daylight at the Docklands before going to work - without ever being seen in the city centre."

Instead, we have more than 200,000 commuters a day - fewer than half of them using public transport - in the city's business district between the Grand Canal and the Royal Canal. Faughnan added: "It's not as if the buses and the Luas and the trains are empty, they are stuffed to the gills. The services aren't there.

"We have a tendency in Ireland to see people who bring their cars into the city centre and block up the roads as obnoxious, selfish, anti-social and too snobbish for public transport. But the truth is our public transport system is so poor that we wind up having to use our private cars.

"You can take another example of someone going to work in the morning from Finglas to Tallaght. With everything working perfectly, in good weather, it could take two buses and 90 minutes to get to work but on a bad morning in poor weather conditions it could take up to three hours. The safer alternative is to go around the city using the M50. For many people, the car is their only option."

The INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, published last month, showed congestion is costing us up to 4pc of GDP. Other experts have claimed the loss is €1.2bn a year.

Long-term vision would reap massive benefits for the economy. Plans for an underground, which Dublin Chamber of Commerce will champion, are up for review this summer.

More than 150 cities in the world have an underground - some are so far forward that they have artwork on the walls (Moscow) and 3G phone technology on board (Hong Kong). Isn't it time Dublin at least got up to speed?