No free fall flow as traffic plan is launched

Operation Freeflow was introduced by the Dublin Transportation Office yesterday morning - on the day the city experienced some of its worst traffic congestion so far this year.

A number of factors contributed to yesterday's traffic delays: the huge turnouts for special 20-per-cent-off "invitation sales" in a number of Grafton Street stores, a gas leak in Cork Street and the bad weather.

The traffic stopped moving on St Stephen's Green and the surrounding streets from Harcourt Street to Dame Street.

The problem area took in the Liberties, and traffic backed up as far as the Grand Canal.

Tempers flared as garda∅ attempted to move traffic along, junctions ceased to function and traffic attempting to exit the St Stephen's Green, College of Surgeons, Drury Street and Brown Thomas car-parks was held up for an hour.

Callers to this newspaper complained of a 45-minute car journey from Brown Thomas to Castle Street, normally a five-minute walk; a two-hour trip from Leeson Park into Stephen's Green and straight out again following a missed appointment; and a one- hour journey from the top floor of the College of Surgeons car-park to South Great George's Street.

A distributor, Mr Tony Shannon, said he was unable to access his customers in the city and would not take on any new customers in Dublin in future as it did not pay him for his time.

Explanations were offered.

The AA mentioned the sending out by Brown Thomas of an undisclosed number of invitations to a special discount shopping event. The Dublin Transportation Office blamed the gas leak.

Whatever the causes, queueing for spaces in city-centre car-parks blocked surrounding roads.

The chaos rippled out to meet the disturbances caused by the gas leak.

The result was immobility across a wide stretch of the city centre for much of the afternoon.

It was spectacularly unfortunate timing for the Transportation Office, which had earlier flown a press party over the city in the Garda helicopter.

The helicopter crew monitored traffic on all the main approach roads, relaying recommendations for traffic-signal switching.

It effectively demonstrated how it can have an instant impact on traffic congestion at key trouble spots such as St John's Road, Inchicore, where it had signal sequencing changed.

But as the helicopter hovered over the DTO offices in St Stephen's Green shortly before midday, there appeared little even it could do to stop the chaos in the city centre.

The DTO had just minutes earlier finished defending its freeflow plans against allegations that they had been scaled back this year.

The Assistant Garda Commissioner, Mr Tony Hickey, pointed out that there would be 100 extra garda∅ assisting traffic on the streets of the capital this month, but acknowledged that last year there had been 128.

The director of the DTO, Mr John Henry, said key infrastructural works such as Luas at Dundrum or the Red Cow roundabout and the Dublin Port Tunnel could not be stopped.

Neither could works at Wyattville or the Glen of the Downs on the N1.

He acknowledged there was a difficulty with the M50 junction with the N4/N6 and the Westlink bridge itself at which considerable congestion occurs.

Mr Christy Stapleton of Iarnr≤d Eireann said the DART could not be run round the clock for maintenance reasons.

Mr Michael Ahern, of the DTO, said it would not be organising bus park-and-ride sites in Whitehall and Simmonscourt this year. And he caused some surprise when he said it was no longer DTO policy to provide such facilities along key transport corridors.

Mr Ahern said the current DTO thinking was that, while it was good to take public transport, driving to that public transport was something of a contradiction.

The policy was to provide such facilities at "rail heads" such as Greystones and Maynooth, but not in the suburbs as this encouraged car use, he explained.

A Fine Gael TD and member of the Dublin Transportation Office's monitoring committee, Ms Olivia Mitchell, described yesterday's event as "no flow instead of freeflow".

The former Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, who introduced the first Operation Freeflow in 1996, said it was meant as an emergency measure at the time.

"The Government has had 41/2 years and has not driven this traffic issue along at all," he said.