Motorways: Do we need them?

Due to decades of underinvestment, the road network in Ireland is at such a poor level that in most cases, a full rebuild is the only option in order to bring it up to a reasonable standard. However, this full rebuild would necessarily involve the destruction of most or all of the houses along it, and any that were left behind would have to be given direct access to the road, which has traffic safety implications. In addition, a factor which is much more serious in Ireland than elsewhere, is that rural roads here are lined with tall hedges on both sides, so you would be killing animals in their thousands when you removed them as part of the work. Also, an "online upgrade" (improvement of the existing road as opposed to building a new one) is very disruptive to traffic during the construction. Finally, you can't even build the road this way where the road passes through towns, which must be bypassed anyway.

As for building motorways instead of dual carriageway/wide single carriageway/2+1 etc, the handy thing about motorways is that they're the highest class of road, so in most cases it's decades before you need to revisit it. You can upgrade a route, and not have to worry about it anymore.

In many countries such as the UK, they upgrade a road slightly, then 15-20 years later come back and upgrade again, etc. Each time you upgrade, you disrupt traffic and residents. Finally, you often realise that you should just have built a motorway or similar on a new alignment nearby in the first place.

The A1 in N. Ireland between Belfast and Newry is a perfect example. Back in the 60s, it was proposed to replace it with a motorway, but this was canned in favour of widening to dual of the road. This took about 20 years and the southern part is still not finished. Then the Newry Bypass opened as a single carriageway. Finally, they came back and realised they were going to have to build loads of new junctions all along the route and widen the Newry BP to a dual carriageway. And the crazy thing is that even when all of this is finished, the road will still be low capacity, with a dangerously high number of private accesses onto it. You look at the road, and immediately wonder why they didn't just build a new one on a new alignment nearby. So it always ends up coming back to that.

Oil IS running out, it's a finite resource. However, this has little or no impact on driving. The car as a way of getting from A to B is far too useful, once invented, to ever disappear, though we certainly should be managing its frequency of use and its tendancy to cause traffic problems.

So in the future, driving will be as common if not more so than now, just with different fuels - so we still need loads of motorways. In fact, we would even need a certain amount of motorways if traffic levels were a lot lower than they are now. So whatever way you look at it, you still have to build them.

I never bought the idea that you should just build one or two big motorways and have everything feed into them. This results in a small number of really wide, very busy motorways which are constantly having to be upgraded and suffer from traffic jams - plus there's no alternative route in the case of a traffic accident. This was the model that the British followed.

The German way is to have a big network of smaller motorways. This appears to be the idea that we're following here in Ireland - we're duplicating all our N-roads with motorways. This will mean there'll be several ways of completing a journey e.g. Dublin-Cork, 3: direct, via Limerick, and via Waterford.