Comment: The decision by Dublin city councillors this week to approve the city council's strategy for dealing with heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) may have seemed like a positive move for the capital. It will, the council says, take heavy goods traffic off the city's streets, making it a more pleasant place in which to live, commute and do business.
However, while the utopian vision of a truck-free city as put forward by Dublin City Council may seem a favourable move forward for the capital, the outward face of what the city council calls its HGV strategy masks the huge economic impact the full implementation of that strategy will have.
As an island economy, business in Ireland is already constrained and hindered by major costs that our Continental neighbours do not incur. The cost of moving goods between Ireland and its main trading partner, the UK, is vastly higher than those incurred by Belgian businesses, for example, when moving goods to and from France or the Netherlands.
This omnipresent reality may be unavoidable for Irish businesses but, in an expanding European Union with free movement of goods and services, Ireland's competitiveness is being challenged on a daily basis. Lower production costs in new EU countries such as Poland already challenge the competitive ability of Irish businesses, with ancillary costs such as transportation often proving to be a key factor in the tight balance between cost-effectiveness and a lost deal. Thus far, Irish businesses that depend on moving goods in and out of the country are competing - just. However, this will be seriously challenged by the implementation of the city council's plan.
It proposes that all HGVs travelling to and from Dublin port will be effectively forced to use the new Dublin Port Tunnel, regardless of their ultimate destination.
Dublin Port Company has undertaken a number of surveys that confirm the negative impact on journey times. For example, a truck carrying goods from Dublin port to the Pfizer plant in Dún Laoghaire will see its journey increased from eight miles to 29 miles, with a fourfold increase in journey duration from 25 minutes to one hour and 40 minutes.
Not only will the city council's proposal result in increased journey times, it will also merely shift traffic congestion from a number of areas to one key bottleneck, with no alternatives should something go wrong. It is interesting to note that, in the week the plan was approved by councillors, city manager John Fitzgerald admitted that the M50 could not accommodate all the traffic that the proposal would create.
Dublin Port Company has always stated that forcing all large trucks into an already over-capacity route would make it impassable for both business and consumer traffic. And these trucks are not merely "passing through" the M50 en route to other locations - 43 per cent of all goods that pass through the port either originate or terminate within the M50 corridor. Thus, once these trucks hit the M50, they will then turn around and move back towards the city, bringing a new set of traffic problems to different areas.
It would be easy to pass off objections to the council's plan as objections to progress. However, this is simply not the case. Dublin Port Company, along with all the companies that bring HGVs through Dublin Port every day, ultimately shares the same aims as the city council: the careful, sensitive and controlled management of the vehicles that move goods around Dublin.
However, with just 20 per cent of peak-time traffic at the major traffic interchanges around the port made up of port-related traffic, it is both unfair and inaccurate to cast port-bound HGVs as the scapegoat for all the city's traffic woes.
The economy as a whole is hugely dependent on the successful (and cost-effective) management of the movement of goods in and out of Dublin port. Every day, two out of every three containers that enter and exit our economy travel through Dublin port. These contain everything that the Irish consumer demands and takes for granted, from breakfast cereals and fresh fruit to dishwashers and washing machines.
In turn, consumers and businesses across Europe demand goods from Ireland in a cost effective and efficient manner - if not, they will simply buy elsewhere, eroding Ireland's position as a trade partner.
Dublin Port Company has repeatedly outlined these factors to the city council. It has continuously attempted to engage in a process to create a strategy that benefits all parties involved, and it has recommended a number of procedures that have yet to be carried out, including an independent regulatory impact assessment, an independent origin-destination survey and a comprehensive independent traffic modelling study.
The company believes these must take place to ensure that the correct strategy is implemented, particularly when there is so much at stake for the city and its economy.
As one part of a wider strategy to improve traffic in Dublin and its surrounding areas, the opening of the Dublin Port Tunnel is welcomed by Dublin Port Company, which appreciates the tunnel's potential for contributing to overall traffic reduction in the greater Dublin area.
However, in the absence of a widened M50, the proposed Macken Street Bridge and an appropriate measure to relieve south-east bound traffic, it is clear that the port tunnel alone is not the solution to all of Dublin's traffic woes. The council must act now to ensure that its proposed solution does not become a much larger problem for Dublin and the economy as a whole.
Enda Connellan is chief executive of Dublin Port Company.
