With the National Development Plan's motorway programme facing a serious financial shortfall, James Nix argues that a network review woulddeliver more for less.
The National Development Plan proposes to upgrade five national routes to motorway standard: Dublin to Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and the Border. However, soon after its publication in November 1999, it became clear that this would entail building entirely new stretches of road.
Greenfield alignments were selected because the widening of existing roads would have serious implications for houses along their routes; on a section of the Dublin-Cork road, for example, 63 houses would have to be demolished compared with three houses for a new route.
The key point, however, is that each alignment proposed under the NDP broadly parallels old road. In other words, Ireland's future motorway network would have the same layout as the network of two-lane national routes we have inherited, all leading to Dublin.
At EU level it is questioned whether the construction of a new road beside an old road represents value for money (Towards Balanced and Sustainable Development of the Territory of the EU). Yet the EU is part-funding our roads programme, despite this reservation.
Colin Buchanan, a leading planner, expressed the same view in his seminal 1963 report, Traffic in Towns. He concluded that building new motorways beside all trunk routes, a strategy he called universal bypassing, would pose a heavy liability in terms of cost, land and severance.
Instead, he advised that traffic should be attracted onto a new, high-capacity, "skeletal" road network. Not streaming traffic onto a new skeletal network has stark consequences: the NDP requires the same number of motorway kilometres to connect Dublin with Ireland's regional urban centres as needed centuries ago with much inferior technology and narrower roads.
It also means new motorway would be very badly used. The N8 Dublin/Cork route near Cahir carries 5,821 vehicles per day. A new motorway parallel to the N8 would entice approximately 3,000 of these vehicles, or just 6 per cent of its capacity of 50,000 vehicles per day.
It seems important to take a step back and ask ourselves: what shortcoming does the roads programme seek to address? The answer is set out in chapters 2 and 3 of the National Development Plan, which identify regional imbalance as Ireland's critical weakness.
However, according to Mateu Turró, economic advisor to the European Investment Bank, a wholly radial motorway network in Ireland centred on Dublin would "simply reinforce past biases". Planners in Germany work to avoid the development of a motorway network with a radial layout.
Where regional balance is the objective, road planning literature favours the use of a grid network to provide accessibility to the whole country, a benefit emphasised in Portugal's current roads programme. Any motorist can reach the grid within a reasonably short time.
A grid provides more motorway interchanges. This reduces the concentration of traffic, and consequently, congestion. The NDP roads programme, on the other hand, provides only one motorway interchange: the M50 around Dublin, which is already heavily congested.
In 1914, before modern traffic became a problem, it was realised that concentrating all main roads on one point would have grave disadvantages, all routes becoming congested long before the destination is reached (Abercrombie, Dublin of the Future).
Grid planning has been used in Portugal, the US and Germany. It delivers much better value for money than replicating the inherited road network. Less is more: less road can provide superior accessibility to the whole of the country and distribute traffic much more efficiently.
On November 25th, Frank McDonald revealed Department of Finance documents hinting at the need for a review of the NDP motorway proposals. Clearly, multi-billion euro savings can be achieved by a network consolidation and by ceasing the practice of mimicking old route corridors.
For example, instead of building separate motorways linking Dublin with Waterford and Dublin with Cork, it should be possible to extend the Kilcullen N9 link southwards towards Waterford and then continue on towards Cork. Good roads that could be upgraded to motorways are also needed to link Cork with Limerick, Galway and Sligo.
Routing the Dublin-Cork motorway across the River Suir near Waterford has not even been considered by the National Roads Authority. There would be no significant difference in journey time and the proposal would save €570 million, based on an average cost of €10 million per kilometre.
In the interests of long-term planning, an efficient and effective motorway network needs to be mapped out to support the objectives of the recently-published National Spatial Strategy.
In the short to medium term, existing transport infrastructure must be better used.
Thus, a review of the NDP roads programme should not be a formula for inaction. It is a simple recognition that such investment must make sense and pay its way.
At present transport infrastructure is not being maximised. Ireland's railways yield many examples. Bulk cargoes flow between Waterford and Limerick, containers, cement and lumber in particular.
But with the Waterford-Limerick railway earmarked by Iarnród Éireann for closure, all traffic is set to be placed on an overburdened two-lane road, the N24.
The competitiveness of long-haul trains has a lot to do with the fact they are kept going around the clock, travelling an average of two hours from depot to depot. But this model of intensive wagon use and a Ryanair approach to turnaround times has never been applied to rail freight in Ireland.
PLANS to downgrade or close the Roscrea-Nenagh rail corridor are similarly ill-conceived. Currently, the inter-city network has capacity problems at Limerick Junction because the rail line to Limerick consists of a single track. Resulting delays annoy customers and feed road congestion.
Providing an alternate east-west route, the Roscrea-Nenagh corridor is a solution waiting to be seized upon. It seems quite incredible that the Government intends to spend €850 million on a new motorway in this corridor at a time when the existing rail link is being run down.
To paraphrase Tallyrand's famous dictum, to implement the NDP motorway scheme would be worse than a crime, it would be a blunder. For the Irish taxpayer, it makes little sense to shoulder the costs of new transport links while existing infrastructure idles.
James Nix is a student at the King's Inns and is pursuing an MPhil in the design of transport networks at the Dublin Institute of Technology.