5.5 | Developing

5.5 | Developing Investment Plans

While good transport planning is necessary to deliver spatial plans and vice versa, without careful planning, investments which help achieve certain objectives can inadvertently have a detrimental impact on others. For example, investments which have a transformative impact on interurban connectivity can lead to urban sprawl. Unintended consequences such as this can be avoided by ensuring that transport and spatial planning are correctly sequenced; that is, ensuring that the order in which investments are made drives the desired spatial planning outcomes. This means ensuring that development planning is coordinated and integrated across transport and other sectors.

The revised NDP has set out a public capital investment programme of nearly €165bn to help deliver on the ten NSOs, with €59bn of this expected to occur between 2021 and 2025. Of the €59bn, an indicative allocation of over €13bn has been earmarked for capital expenditure by the Department of Transport in the first five years of the plan.

As part of future capital planning exercises, Strategic Assessment Report output will improve the evidence base available to Government when comparing and prioritising projects against one another. The existing appraisal process helps to ensure that the best option, in terms of overall value for money, is selected to meet a specific project’s objectives, but is limited as a tool to compare projects against one another. Strategic Assessment Reports will, however, be used to inform decisions on overall capital planning. In the future, Strategic Assessment Reports will be produced for projects in the transport sector in advance of the commitment of major resources to a project.

An NPF National Policy Objective is that the statutory arrangements between spatial and transport planning that exist in the Greater Dublin Area are extended to other cities. This will help to ensure that transport investment decisions reflect population planning concerns. Moreover, the Department of Transport, in consultation with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, will consider how transport appraisal requirements around assessing spatial and land use considerations can be strengthened in our sectoral guidance. Advancing this work will be a priority after the new Common Appraisal Framework is published in 2022 and is likely to encompass considerations such as sequencing, parking availability and how potential adverse impacts of a given investment on one or more of the NIFTI Investment Priorities will be mitigated.

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Implementation Action

Strategic Assessment Reports will be developed at a sufficiently early stage to inform project prioritisation in long-term capital planning.

National Investment Framework for Transport in Ireland |Project Ireland 2040