Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:29 pm on 15 June 2022.
Thank you, Minister. I was pleased to hear you saying about the weekend, because it's one thing to talk about international bands coming here to Wales, but when our national team is playing in our capital city, I would hope that we could have public transport so that everyone in Wales could come to support their national team, if they chose to do just that. I think there's also a point about connections not just in terms of people from the north coming to south Wales, but people from south Wales need to be able to go to the north, so we have more events there, and that will pose challenges, if we have major events happening in places such as Wrexham, and so on, that people can travel there. That does mean having public transport that does respond to these kinds of major events.
What concerns me most is these stories about overcrowded, late-running trains, or those that don't run at all, when there aren't major events, and also, how do we get not to London, but to the Valleys and areas of Cardiff via public transport. We know that there are new developments in the capital, such as the new arena in the Bay, which will have a capacity of 15,000. We know about all of the housing developments in the north of the capital, and so on. And we know that traffic is in gridlock at the moment. I think about the major challenges that are facing us—the metro isn't going to solve all of those either. So, how are we going to ensure that we now get people out of their cars—if they have cars, and can afford to use them—so that they use public, affordable transport, so that we, as you have already said in your response to the first question today—? How are we going to tackle the climate crisis if there are so many barriers facing us, preventing people from using public transport?