Crass blatant ignorant stupidity on M2 earlier today

Irish Steve

Amazed that no one else has mentioned this.

M2 was down to one lane at one point between J2 ( St Margarets) and J3 (Ashbourne) earlier due to a vehicle fire, which caused massive tailbacks, at the time we were going in to Dublin, the back of the queue was just at the J2 on ramp slip.

There are 2 issues.

The first, why was there no garda presence at J2 to divert the traffic off on to the old N2, and reduce the pressure on the people working at the incident scene? At the time we went in to town, about 18:30, the queue had to have been over 2 miles, both lanes. The incident looked like a 4 x 4 on the hard shoulder that had been on fire, and emergency vehicles were parked in Lane 1 at the incident, so the motorway was reduced to one lane.

More significantly, why were so many people prepared to drive the wrong way down the on slip at J2 to avoid the queue. I saw at least 10 vehicles as we passed in just a few seconds that had done a 180 turn on the motorway (cars and at least one HGV) and were driving the wrong way down the slip, and they were then going to have to make another very sharp turn to get off the slip on to the exit direction, putting other drivers at serious risk of a collision, you don't expect to find a truck making an illegal turn blocking the road as you come round a motorway junction, and that is what would have been happening.

I've seen some pretty ignorant responses from drivers over the last while, but never anything this blatant, and stupid.

Am I wrong to be surprised by this sort of behaviour? It's making me seriously consider that a forward facing safety camera in car is going to be essential equipment before too long, as there are just too many ways that an innocent driver can be involved in an accident for my liking, and if people are prepared to be so ignorant as to completely ignore basic road safety rules, it's no wonder that the deaths on Irish roads are rising again.

Mister Jingles

Same thing was happening a few weeks ago in blanchardstown. About midnight there was a serious accident on the n3 inbound besides the Quinn building under the bridge, because of the time traffic wasn't bad but there was still a small tail back.

People ended up getting inpatient and drove up the slip road (the one new/upgraded one) the wrong way. Most of them got up it without coming across any oncoming cars but of the 15 or so I saw drive up it about 5 were driving toward's oncoming traffic.

Would of helped if there was a couple of guards directing traffic but that was not the case nor an excuse for what some people did.

ardmacha

A camera on slip roads programmed to record anyone proceeding in the wrong direction would seem a reasonable plan. How much are cameras nowadays?