NRA chief seeks Eastern Bypass, M50 MK II, and €400m/year for maintenance

OTK

Fred Barry has gone all political, setting out his stall for new juicy road projects and a regular income to keep the NRA in business after motorways have connected every village in the country.

Eastern Bypass sounds good: an underwater motorway across Dublin Bay should prove very handy for southsiders needing to get to the East Wall in a hurry. And you know what? Why not stop off at the subaqua Loftus Retail Park and pick up some shelves from Atlantis homecare?

I'm sure it won't pose any engineering challenges and should come in far below budget because that's the way these things work. And it won't generate traffic or encourage people to drive into town who would have used a train because that's a myth. New roads that terminate in cities don't encourage people to drive they make congestion go away. It's been proven in every city in the world.

And M50 Mk2. Beautiful. Because the first one was such a success.

Multiple ring roads are a great way to grow your city. Check out our sustainable rational democratic Chinese friends who are planning their seventh ring road for Beijing. If that's not progess I don't know what is.

Let's just make Fred Barry the new Minister for Transport or maybe Minister for Odophilia.

Alun

I agree on his points about maintenance though. There appears to be absolutely no proactive maintenance work being done on any of the existing motorway or dual-carriageway network if the amount of abandoned cars, bags of household refuse, general junk, broken glass, broken or graffiti'd road signs etc. etc is anything to go by.

Zoney

Alun wrote:

I agree on his points about maintenance though. There appears to be absolutely no proactive maintenance work being done on any of the existing motorway or dual-carriageway network if the amount of abandoned cars, bags of household refuse, general junk, broken glass, broken or graffiti'd road signs etc. etc is anything to go by.

Also those wire barriers lying slack along M7, etc.; they are completely useless in such a case. They're supposed to be retensioned (and supports fixed if necessary) after any incidents. The NRA's advice document on 2+1 roads (or possibly the report on the N20 pilot in Co. Cork?) details the level of maintanance required for such barriers (seems relatively high - they have to be pro-actively checked as well as dealing with them after recorded incidents).

The sooner the maintanance issue is sorted out the better. It would result in a mammoth operation if *all* roads were maintained by a central body (aka Roads Service in NI) and so it's reasonable enough to have local councils deal with roads on their patch but certainly it doesn't seem a great idea to have local councils dealing with motorways/important DCs.

Skyhater

There's a long list of things that I'd take away from the Local Authorities !!!!
- National Road Maintenance
- All Speed Limits
- Voting Register
- etc.

Everything they touch is a complete disaster!!!!

Victor

He mentions 32 local authorities. 4 Dublin councils, 27 county councils (2 in Tipperary), and 4 regional cities = 35.