a boyle

@Angry Rebel wrote:

You keep harping on about Cork and Dublin not being able to take the traffic. That’s a good point, but it’s not a reason to not build DC/motorway between the two biggest population centres in the state. DC all the way could save drivers probably 3/4 hour, an hour or more at peak times.

You and the others are still not actually listening to what i am saying. It is pointless to build 2 dual carriage ways from limerick and cork and then join them together into one three lane dual carriage way. And then it is further pointless to bring all that traffic to the three lane m50 in order to join it up with all the other traffic.

Yes we want bypasses

Yes we want those bypasses to have slip roads on and off them , so that you don’t have to stop everywhere.

But no it is not a good idea to have two lanes of traffic between the edges of the two cities, on the WHOLE.

If you built a 2+one road WITH slip roads on and off you would have a much higher capacity than a normal 2+1 road . given that earlier it was quoted that a dual carriagway can cope with 20000 and a 2+1 6500 then a conservative number for a two+1 with slip roads on and off is 9000. Now this bring BIG savings . If you have been to america you will have noticed that on many of the motorways they use much smaller slip roads which are designed for 30mph /50kph. This is the kind of thing that could be put in place .

WHY is my idea so good ? 1 every bridge is halved , 2 each road is halved. 3 the slip roads do not have to be half as elaborate.

WHY Half the project ? becase then you could build a completely new 2+1 with slip roads somewhere else. With respect to cork a very good place to do this would be to build a road starting near mallow and heading due east ,clipping clonmel, and passing in between kilkenny and waterford berfore curling up to the south of wicklow.

This is much better because you provide that nice freeflow driving for more people to more places.

The new motorway/dual carriage way section just anounced is costing 450 million , and the minute it is finished you will save half an hour only to waste it again gettting into dublin . WE are not getting value for money .

micko forget abou yesterday. no road well ever be able to cope.

Regarding the use of trains . well current our trains are not being used very well.

in terms of capacity , there is (almost) no limit. Trains can run up to frequencies for 90 seconds. now that is a bit over kill for dublin to cork, but there is no problem on capacity on the line.

At the end stations , well dublin has space (some) at heuston , but more importantly dublin has a complete spare station at broadstone. Cork is not so busy , so i don’t see why a train arriving could not pull in before continuing on towards cobh where an additional side track could be provided ,if needed.

Regarding the number of trains , I am confused as to what your point is. 15000 odd people use the road every day so provide a service for ten thousand say or fifteen.

For things like match days would it not be better to spend some million on a few spare trains than a spare road. the road is subtantially more expensive.

If you are right about a 2+1 being a disaster , when cars a pilling back into the one lane , then you have only confirmed what i have being saying all along . building a dual carriage way to cork and limerick is only forcing four lanes in at naas. Then those four lanes have to share the m50 with all the other people who live in the vicinity of the m50 . so you need to upgrade the m50 to a 6 lane or maybe even an 8 lane motorway.
But then you get back to the most important point which is that dublin does not have the space inside it to cope with ANY more cars. the same applies to cork

Why accomodate cars in abbeyleix if they are only going to sit in a traffic jam in cork and dublin. If you really want a dual carriage way to cork then you have to do two things : stop other traffic getting to the m50 and corks ring road , and building a dualcarriage way the WHOLE way through cork and dublin .

@Micko wrote:

After just getting home and driving home from the match in Dublin, I am even more against Boyle’s point of view with the road network.

The stretch of road between Cashel and Portlaoise is a disgrace and only a standard motorway/dual carriageway would be sufficient.

if you were in the traffic that we were in coming into Abbeyleix you’d know about it too. And seemingly this is the same situation every Friday too.

You have just reinforced my point about wrong investment. No road will ever be able to cope with all the supporters driving up to dublin. It is not surprising that there was traffic problems on the way back.

What i am saying is that you did not need to be on that road. That a train should have been provided to move the thrity thousand people up to dublin and back home again . That is what trains are good at .

Yes the road is not of good quality. But you and others are confused as to what we need. We need a 2+1 road which is fully seperated from other roads like a motorway. that is more than enough road space. Alongside that we need a direct train link running on the hour direct (no stops or one max at limerick junction) and then another running on the half hour servicing the other stations.

Just because there are too many people on the road at the moment does not mean you should build a motorway. This is for two reasons :
1. car drivers currently have no choice but to drive, since the train stops at so many places that taking it is a waste of time. The bus is even worse because it is held up in every single town. (serious consideration needs to be given to providing a dedicated route through even town and village for buses , it would saves hours.)
2. car owners actually have an incentive to drive as much as possible . The huge amount of vrt , road tax , and high insurance are a once off payment. This has the effect of an all you can eat restaurant. You have no incentive to stop using your car once you have got it because you spent so bloody much on it in the first place.

In NO other part of our lives do we run things so badly.

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Putting a motorway between cashel and portaoise is completely pointless for another reason. Cork and Dublin can’t and won’t cope . Firstly both cities have commuter belts , one streches to fermoy/michtlestown , the other to portloaise. So on both dual carriage ways into both cities there is already a good amount of traffic taking up a good amount of space. NOW it has been pointed out that this is not a great thing ,but it is however enevitable, and has happened in all cities.
What that means is that there is only some much space left over for more cars, those going the whole way between the two cities.

NOW it have been argued that this is result of poor planning . But i would say it is just the way thing pan out when you start building motorways.

EVEN if we could reverse it , this is what we would need to do. 2 lane motorway between cashel and portloaise, then 4 lane motorway between portloaise and dublin (for the limerick boys), then the m50 would need at least 6 lanes at certain points. NOW even if we could afford to build such a ring road , the plain fact is that it is pointless because there simple ISN’T the space to let so many cars into the city and there never will.
This is at both ends cork and dublin, as both cities are some thousand years old.

Because of this we have pretty much built as much capacity as our cities can cope with. (that means number of lanes, we could and should build bypasses)

Inside each city we need to focus on freeing up space by booting commuters out of their cars and onto buses that actually work. This will allow more space for those who actually need to use a car, like people doing their groceries, bying furniture, vans , delivery trucks.

the point is that the train service is so poor that there is no option other than to drive or fly . if the intercity service was of some decent standard the numbers using the roads would drop dramatically and as for flying …

@kite wrote:

:rolleyes: I’m booked on ryanair next Wens. 9th Aug. to Dublin, FR9844 @ 9.15 returning on FR9847 @ 17.15, the cost 163.34 !!
Are the 1 cent flights advertised elsewhere?:confused:

mr kite would you be flying if the train went direct in an hour and a half ?

@Thomond Park wrote:

a
Heavy enough for a DC but certainly not motoway or anything close to it. The solution to the M3 in my opinion is to continue the N2 DC from Ashbourne to a point north of Navan with the N51 upgraded to serve Navan

surely the solution is to reopen broadstone and create a new dart line between navan and broadstone. supplemented by an arcing tram line passing blanch/ liffey and square.

the m3 IS mad. the m50 has more dual carriage way leading onto it than it can cope with , and the m3 can only make this worse ? should be not be turfing the people onto rail ? i may be over optimistic regarding rail’s effectiveness between cork and dublin by why should any attempt be made to accomodate meath ?

@Thomond Park wrote:

I don’t think there can be any argument on building a DC between Cork & Dublin if the traffic flows are currently 11000 at Cahirp.a. and 15,000 plus close to Portlaoise they will be close to 20,000 per day within 10 years.

I do however feel that the rationale for the N9 and M3 are crocks in comparison

How can you be sure. we have no idea what business these travellers have and where they are going . what fraction say are going to the city centre ? what fraction are tranporting goods.

All we can say is that some 15000 people move between cork and dublin each day. These people have no choice but to travel by road.

Would they drive if the train took half the time ? As minister he gets to decide what service to provide. He does not have to respond to demand , but can decide what the demand will be.

The question is what is the right balance. Thomond why build a motorway when you know as well as i do that the naas road is chock a block . All the improvements going into the m50 and the naas road will only keep the situation from deteriorating not improve it.

I accept that roundabout are not ideal , so fine don’t build them.
I accept that i am mistaken regarding the subsidy for flying.

But it still does not change the main idea of my arguement .

It is a waste of time and energy to accomodate 20000 thousand people on a dual carriageway from cork to dublin , when there is no room to accomodate these cars on arrival.

You should only build for what you can cope with .

If a two + one road can only cope with 6500 and more are going to try to use it , then toll it till they don’t.

build them something else like a train or a hugely improved bus service.

@Micko wrote:

Boyle, 2+1 isn’t good enough for Cork Dublin and recently has been shown that it will not even be good enough for the Cork to Galway western corridor.

… while the Dubs are getting motorways EVERYWHERE.

Same goes for the M50. the reason the M50 is blocked up is due to the poor usage of roundabouts in the M50’s interchanges. If the the road building authorities had any idea at all, the M50 would have been built with no roundabouts at its junctions.

Boyle, you also do realise that Irish Rail have announced that the Cork – Dublin trains will be travelling at 200k/h once all the track upgrades will be completed by around October ?

1Again the two+ one is not good enough because there is no alternative to the car.

2the dubs get motorways everywhere because a few hundred thousand people moved here and now 40 per cent of ireland lives here.

3.

4. is this is true the improvement will be nill as there are no direct services between dublin and cork (except a sunday)

no i don’t think rail should take priority over other forms of transport , i think it has it’s place.

with regard to the volume of traffic. what is it ? do you know ?

fine don’t put in any roundabouts , no problem. The main point remains valid. building a single two plus one road that is fully seperated from other roads is more than sufficient between portaoise and fermoy.

With respectto flying . these flights are subsized to the tune of 300 400 500euros per person per flight. It is a plain waste of money by comparison with a decent rail link.

I repeat such savings would allow for a rail link between dublin and cork with a journey time of less than one and a half hours. I put it to you that such an investment would radically reduce the demand for road space. (and incidentally air space too). This is the appropriate investment. Already the whole motorway concept has fallen flat on it’s face with the tremendous build up on the m50 . And although some of that is attributable to the poor interchanges , the new free flow interchanges are expected to improve things by 10 percent when they are built .

You are confusing what is needed with what appears to be needed.

If you don’t improve the trains and don’t give any priority to buses then motorways will seem vital (and flying).

Bluntly what is the point of building a motorway between the two towns , allowing ten of thousands of cars to drive on it, when either end cannot cope and never ever will because both cities were designed centuries ago.

It is a question of getting the most for your money . we are getting very little. Now go travel and look how other countries service towns of comparable size to dublin and cork . look at the availability of public transport and road network.

because the decision to build a motorway system was entirely political.

The motorway system we need is built: that is a motorway to portlaoise and one to belfast. The routes the rest of the way only need relief road (with lots of roundabout in some case and flyovers in others).

You might not believe it but we actually very low ownership of cars in europe. We just have such trully atrocious other forms of transport that it forces us onto the roads.

You can see this by the fact that some people actually fly between cork and dublin which is just mad.

With respect to the dublin/cork road. Very simply none of the train tracks between dublin and cork have been changed since originally built. The metal used has been replaced with new improved track, but none of the bends of turns have been removed so the time takes the same. Also none of the train stations have been improved to allow a train to bypass a station. If this was done you could have a journey between dublin and cork of less than 2 hours. While this might not stop you driving it would stop a lot of other people.

You would be able to drive at a hundred kilometres between cork and portlaoise and 120 km/h to dublin.

Now while you probably think that you deserve to drive at 120 or 160 km/h(as i want to) , you would have to agree that if you were sitting taking the decisions with 10 billion in your pockets to spend that you would not have proceeded as we have.