We are now facing the consequences of a delay in dealing with the huge increase in Dublin traffic which has inevitably followed the rapid acceleration of economic growth which started five years ago.
Yet our discomfort is not to be attributed solely to a slowness in assessing correctly the scale of the problem. For even since the extent of the problem was correctly assessed, the removal of obstacles to a freer traffic flow has been dilatory and ineffective.
It is taking an aeon to establish bus lanes and cycle paths, the need for which was identified years ago. Unfortunately, the inevitable local NIMBY objections to any project designed to serve the public interest have been allowed to hold up progress for far too long.
And while the city manager and his colleagues in charge of the Dublin authorities do have the power to impose bus lanes and cycle paths after local consultation, they have been reluctant to use this power because of persistent opposition from councillors representing those affected.
An excess of local democracy is imposing frustrating delays on many of the 400,000 workers and 275,000 children who daily have to find their way between home and office, factory, or school in the Dublin area.
Those involved in trying to release us from this traffic straitjacket have seen examples of extreme selfishness. There have been householders who have resisted a cycle path outside their homes on safety grounds when what they actually want is to be able to park their second car on the pavement outside.
The latest reports suggest we may have to wait for a further year to see the bus lane project completed.
As for Luas, for reasons which even the traffic planners cannot understand, the potentially more profitable Dundrum line, for which the old Harcourt Street rail line provides an easy path, has been postponed to an unspecified date. Yet construction of the Tallaght line, which is almost entirely on-street, is to begin in a year's time and to be completed by 2002.
Both these routes were originally to have been brought into operation in or before 2000 but were delayed by stalling on the part of both CIE and the Government, resisting a re-examination of the dubious, and now rejected, concept of on-street running in the congested city centre.
Meanwhile, in the absence of bus lanes or of any other effective measures to control private car traffic, Dublin's bus services simply cannot provide an adequate public transport service. The bus fleet is inadequate and because of a persistent delusion by the public authorities that urban transport should "pay its way", bus fares have been held at such a high level that car owners have been inclined to use their vehicles.
Dublin's public transport demands a radical change similar to those adopted in other major cities, i.e. one which recognises that to shift car owners to buses the buses need to be adequately financed.
True, the present existence of a monopoly bus provider makes it difficult to justify such a change as there would be a clear danger that large subsidies to such a monopoly would end up feather-bedding a high-cost, publicly-owned system.
To overcome this difficulty, and enable Dublin Bus to survive the introduction of competition, it will be necessary to create a dual bus organisation structure: one which would involve a separate Bus Planning Agency which would determine routes, the frequencies of buses, standards and fares.
This agency would seek tenders from Dublin Bus and other bus operators for these services. The contract for each group of routes would go to whichever operator sought the lowest subsidy or, in the case of profitable routes, was prepared to pay the highest rent.
It would be essential that the ticketing arrangements for such a bus service would facilitate transfers between routes operated by different companies. This should not be too difficult, however, and older Dubliners will recall that such a system existed between the cross-city 18 tram and the Nos 7 and 8 trams to Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey, connecting with it at Lansdowne Road.
Yet even with all the proposed 10 bus lanes fully in operation - and enforced - under present conditions any restructuring would still be inefficient as only a fraction of bus movements would be on roads with bus lanes.
And in the absence of any constraint on car use in Dublin, the increase of 42 per cent since 1991 in car ownership in greater Dublin - from 290,000 to an estimated 410,000 by the end of this year - has already created conditions inimical to the efficient operation of buses.
It will, therefore, be necessary to introduce simultaneously limits on the use of private cars on routes into the city. Parking restrictions are known to have a very limited impact as motorists are incorrigible optimists who believe they will always find somewhere to park.
One method of limiting car use would be to permit only travel by cars with odd number plates on certain days and those with plates ending in an even number on others. However, this could favour two-car families with both types of plate.
Yet the most effective method of controlling commuting by car would be the use of the price mechanism, a principle we accept for our acquisition of all other goods and services other than water. However, there is an irrational resistance to the idea of road pricing as very many people seem to share with the Orange Order the curious belief that the "king's highway" in cities and towns should be free.
The concept of road pricing in cities has a long pedigree: former students of mine in UCD in the mid-1960s will recall that I was lecturing then on the Smeed Report on road pricing. That report's time may now have come.
A preliminary study of the application of road pricing in Dublin is now being undertaken and this will probably be followed by a more detailed analysis.
Dublin is particularly suitable for such a system. Bridges across the double ring of rivers and canals on the north and south sides of the city provide suitable locations for the electronic equipment required either to record vehicle movements or to activate meters in the vehicles.
If we aren't prepared to facilitate bus lanes; to permit the Government to pay for many extra buses while subsidising adequately their operation by Dublin Bus and competing companies; and, finally, to accept road pricing, then we must face the consequences, a permanently strangled city.