What is the Eastern Transport Plan?

And how important is it to increase that population in Belfast City Center?

I think when we started the, uh, work on the local development plan, we identified a number of, of key challenges.

Um, traffic congestion, as, as Tony pointed out, is one of them.

Historically, we have, uh, a large, uh, commuting hinterland into Belfast, which is, which relies very heavily on, um, on, on travel by car.

Um, that means that we have, um, over 100,000 individual car journeys every day coming in and out of the city.

That has a knock-on effect in terms of the quality of environment, air quality, um, the desirability of people wanting to live in that type of environment, um, and, and, and even as, as we're seeing in recent times with obviously the cost of, uh, fuel, um, that, that need to, to, to try and live in a much more sustainable way means that, um, the, the, the objective of getting people living in the city, bringing the vitality that comes with that, the, the, um, the footfall that comes with that that supports local businesses, um, and, and really sort of keeps the city alive 24/7.

And Karen, all those journeys that are made by car, and, and many of those journeys are just a handful of miles.

Um, and to be honest, we're, we're kind of at capacity in terms of, um, our road network and being able to facilitate cars.

Um, Dermot mentioned there are about 100,000 car journeys trying to get into the city center.

There's the same number trying to cross the city.

So w- we experience on the likes of Westlink every day that it reaches a peak at 8:00 in the morning and stays congested for the whole day.

Uh, the difficulty is historically, way back from the 1960s when we built our first motorways, we were always building for a car.

Um, if you use the American examples, you see that they've got 10 lane highways.

So every time they add an extra couple of lanes on, there's latent demand, and immediately that lane fills up.

We're now in a position in Belfast where our strategic routes for carrying cars into the city center are full.

You can't squeeze another car onto that corridor, so we need to think differently.

We need to start thinking about people and movement and think about how we move people.

So the development of the Eastern Transport Plan, um, is very much a, a, a new insight into how we think about moving people and being better for the city center.

At the end of the day, our transport network is the glue that holds everything together.

Everything that we want to do, we either have to get goods there or we have to get people there, and, and the same on the return journey.

So our transport network is such a vital part of that, um, infrastructure that we need to maintain.