Thank you for this report, which is very interesting. Getting people out of their cars in a city like Cardiff is absolutely essential in order to reduce congestion. Counterintuitively, of course, congestion reduces the number of people who actually want to travel by bus, because they think that if they go in a car they can rat-run and they can get there faster by private vehicle. So, it’s hugely important that we do something to tackle bus congestion because we’ll all drown in our own air pollution if we don’t do that, in a city.

What are the measures that we might introduce? Well, we could go for road pricing—I’m sorry to say that David Melding is not here at the moment. It is obviously a very logical way of reducing private motor cars on the road at the time when they are preventing the buses from getting through. It did, in London, cause a significant increase in the speed of bus journeys and cut their waiting time by 30 per cent just in the first year. But when a cabinet member in Cardiff proposed this as a proposal, the balloon went up in Cardiff. Everybody produced loads of reasons why we shouldn’t be doing this.

A softer alternative, but one that I think we should be absolutely pushing for now, is to increase the number of bus priority lanes. Cardiff Bus gave evidence to this inquiry that it isn’t much use having a bus priority lane along, maybe, 300 yards rather than the whole route. That certainly applies to the bus routes along Newport Road. It’s a real stop-start operation in a restricted space. But, frankly, the bus has to take priority. That has to be the way in which we can do it. I also am aware that when a bus lane along Caerphilly Road was proposed, it was strenuously opposed by all the local councillors, even though they ought to be thinking about the needs of the whole community, not just those who want to use their private motor cars, who probably don’t even live in their local areas. So, there’s a need for education there.

There’s obviously, also, an important role for priority traffic lights to ensure that buses go first at the traffic lights, before the cars, and that is an important way of ensuring that you get there faster by bus than you do by car. That is obviously one of the key factors, when people are running to work, that they will use. We can see how, when new proposals have been constructed in key areas like, for example, getting to the Heath hospital in Cardiff: a new park and ride from Pentwyn, the Llanedeyrn interchange, has been hugely popular and not just with car users who, instead of sitting in appalling traffic jams trying to queue to get into a multistorey car park, are able to get there in seven and a half minutes. It’s also benefited people who don’t have cars, because they can either get a cab or walk across the road and join in the park and ride. So, it’s been a fantastically useful way of ensuring that people can get to the hospital in a less stressful way, which is obviously very important when you’re talking about people who are either ill themselves or are visiting somebody who is ill.

But, in the week that the nudge theory economist Richard Thaler has just won the Nobel prize for economics for his work on the human propensity to make irrational choices, we have to think of ways in which we can encourage people to make the right, rational choices. So, I think bus priority lanes is certainly one of them, and I think we need to reflect on our policy on free hospital parking, which may be entirely appropriate in an area like Betsi Cadwaladr, where I’m fully aware that Glan Clwyd Hospital serves a huge diaspora of rural areas, where I’m sure the bus services will be infrequent and do not necessarily serve those communities, and they shouldn’t, obviously, be penalised for getting to the hospital, but in an urban area, it seems to me that free hospital parking in the middle of an urban area, where it’ll be tempting for commuters to dump their cars at the hospital, is something that we need to reflect on quite carefully, as it may have the opposite impact to what we want.

I thank the economy and business committee for their report, and I hope we can make a much greater push on the role that buses ought to be playing in encouraging people particularly to use buses for getting to work and school, and particularly pending the delivery of the metro system, both in Cardiff and Swansea, where until the alternative of the metro exists, we are going to have to offer bus services as an alternative, otherwise Cardiff is simply going to seize up with the congestion.