M50 - apalling gridlock

gflood

Appalling Grid all this week on M50. Northbound today was back up to Sandyford. When I hear about upcoming "carbon tax" changes I wonder how much wasted fuel happens every morning with the Dublin commute due to crap infrastructure. Not to mention peoples time.


Until we improve situations like this carbon taxes should be postponed.

blastman

Southbound traffic was backed up from J4 on the M1 to J12 on the M50, apparently. It has been a disaster area all week. I gave up a few weeks back and started taking the back roads again.

amcalester

What improvements can you suggest?

Allinall

I thought the carbon tax was to incentivise people out of cars.

Maybe it needs to be introduced quicker, rather than delayed.

Xterminator

Until we improve situations like this carbon taxes should be postponed.

Climate change isn't pausing for traffic. Ireland is nowhere nears its commitments to cut emissions. under current agreements that means Ireland will be required to either pay fines or purchase carbon credits from countries who have exceeded their emission reduction targets.

And that money would be tax payers money, and you would still have to pay it! This isnt an easy fix.

Should Ireland abandon all its international commitments to reduce carbon emissions until the m50 is expanded or the mythical second ring road constructed? Maybe we should follow Donald Trump's lead and abandon climate change accords and just tell people its fake news and we don't believe the experts, not even our own ones? That way perhaps your children and future generations will pay but you might escape a couple of euros on your petrol.

Del2005

Allinall wrote: »

I thought the carbon tax was to incentivise people out of cars.

Maybe it needs to be introduced quicker, rather than delayed.

The carbon tax is to increase taxes and that's all. Where they spend the money makes no difference, like motor tax.

Also if people stop driving ICE for EV the congestion on the roads will be the same, your lungs will be better but that's about it.

realdanbreen

amcalester wrote: »

What improvements can you suggest?

No idea what improvements can be made but the powers that be don't even have a proposal or intention to sort out this problem which can only get worse.
It's like the health or housing problems, no plan, no proposal. Even if they came out and said it would cost 10 billion and take 10 years to solve at least that would be a start.

.......

The M50 is not fit for purpose - end of.

Morning rush hour seems to go from 6am til 10am and evening from 3pm til 7pm. Ive even been caught gridlocked on it at 8pm on a Sunday evening recently.

It cannot even be used as a proper motorway as there is far too much traffic on it. All lanes are used as driving lanes during whats become 8 hours of rush hour in recent years.

Its simply not big enough to cater for the volume of traffic on it. Add in poorly designed entrance/exit ramps with nonsensical decisions about traffic flow in the areas surrounding those exit ramps and its a disaster. What I mean by that is best illustrated by example. Recently some fool decided the North bound exit ramp at Firhouse should now be stop/go traffic light controlled rather than freeflow, the result is queues of traffic every evening that end up blocking the driving lane on the M50 before that exit. Another disasterous decision has been the appallingly bad redesign of the road system in Knocklyon leading to a queue of traffic that cant exit the M50 in a timely manner anymore both North and South so causes more congestion.

There is no joined up thinking for infrastructure in this country, decisions are made with no regard as to the effects on traffic flow up or downstream and roads are built like a firefighting exercise rather than a long term plan.

Add in the propensity for councils to grant planning for thousands of houses with no thought to the extra traffic they will bring and you get what we have - a crappy so called motorway.

Why not build another M50 on top of the M50? Remove the meridian and allow all lower deck traffic to travel South and all upper deck to travel North. In a stroke you would more than double the capacity of the road without having to use up more land for it. Elevated highways work fine in other countries.

tomplate

You'd have to be mad to be driving on it every day

sweetie

....... wrote:

Why not build another M50 on top of the M50? Remove the meridian and allow all lower deck traffic to travel South and all upper deck to travel North. In a stroke you would more than double the capacity of the road without having to use up more land for it. Elevated highways work fine in other countries.

Jesus, we can't be destroying the lovely views by building upwards!

CatInABox

A new ring road (or indeed, any road in general) won't sort this out, it'll merely move the problem elsewhere. We need to massively improve public transport so that the majority of people currently using cars swap onto it.

Metrolink will have a dramatic effect in traffic reduction on the M1 and north sections of the M50, while the BusConnects Core Corridors project will reduce traffic all over the city. They really need to be fast tracked through, and once they're done, more PT transports should be lined up for the day that they're finished. These public consultations where every Tom, Dick, and Harry put their oar in, no matter how selfish, is incredibly frustrating.

Case in point is the rumbling from Noel Rock about making the Santry one way. A minor 5 minute inconvenience to a couple of hundred people, while massively benefiting thousands on a daily basis.

EDIT: I should note that I'm not anti-car at all, there's people out there that simply need to get in their car every day to go to work. What I'm anti is those car users that don't need to use their car. Move those people from the road and onto buses/trams/trains, and an awful lot of traffic problems will be significantly reduced. They're never going to be gone entirely, but much better than now is the aim.

realdanbreen

tomplate wrote: »

You'd have to be mad to be driving on it every day

And they keep locating new industries in the Dublin area and neglecting the rest of the country.

Triangle

gflood wrote: »

Appalling Grid all this week on M50. Northbound today was back up to Sandyford. When I hear about upcoming "carbon tax" changes I wonder how much wasted fuel happens every morning with the Dublin commute due to crap infrastructure. Not to mention peoples time.


Until we improve situations like this carbon taxes should be postponed.

The trouble with ring roads is it causes urban sprawl and is a short term solution to a long-term problem. The only real solution is for efficient public transport imo.

CatInABox

sweetie wrote: »

Jesus, we can't be destroying the lovely views by building upwards!

An Taisce would be all over it.

I can imagine the story on the Irish Times now:
"An extra story on the M50 would ruin the Victorian Vista from the south end of O'Connell St", said the An Taisce spokesperson, while cleaning his monocle.

gflood

Suggested improvements :

• Car pool lanes.
• Widen motorways.
• Fix planning so it doesn't take 20 years to build a road.
• I get a rebate on my fuel due to poor infrastructure.
• Massive tax incentives/cheap ticket prices for public transport especially at peak times, not how it is now where off-peak is cheaper.
• if an incident happens on the road its closed off so no reason for rubberneckers to hold everyone up. Seriously ... is changing a tyre that interesting?

Personally, I dont have a choice but to use my car especially in Winter. Its too far to train and multiple of Luas, buses. Its doable but it would be very long mornings and evenings.

Mrs OBumble

If you build more roads, you get more traffic.

We need to incentive employers to hire people who live locally, wherever possible, to remove the crazy commutes.

RayCun

realdanbreen wrote: »

And they keep locating new industries in the Dublin area and neglecting the rest of the country.

"they"

facehugger99

If you're on the M50 complaining that there are too many other people on the M50, you are part of the problem that you are complaining about.

Triangle

Triangle wrote: »

The trouble with ring roads is it causes urban sprawl and is a short term solution to a long-term problem. The only real solution is for efficient public transport imo.

Pretty much, but no matter how any times this is said, and articles supporting it posted, people just won't believe it.

Personally I say build a skyway luas over it, it would be crap, but it's the type of big nonsense project planners love instead of doing simple things right.

mickoneill31

amcalester wrote: »

What improvements can you suggest?

How about we build the Metro.

I live in Swords. I won't work anywhere that requires me to travel on the M50 but there are many people who don't have a choice. I get the Swords Express in from Swords every morning and it's creaking. This morning 1 bus rolled past full, another filled up from my queue before I got on it. I got on the third.

If I have to listen to Colm McCarthy on RTE say that it takes 20 mins to get to the airport from the city centre one more time I'll throw my radio out the window. Frequently it takes 20 minutes to just get down the quays. And the metro isn't just for Dublin Airport. If they ever get that built I could expand my radius of work down to Sandyford. I'm sure it'd remove several hundred / thousand of trips from the M50 daily.

tomplate

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

If you build more roads, you get more traffic.

We need to incentive employers to hire people who live locally, wherever possible, to remove the crazy commutes.

Lol

Nermal

amcalester wrote: »

What improvements can you suggest?

Spend Dublin's property tax on public transport in Dublin, not roads in Leitrim.

Withdraw from climate agreements so we don't pay fines.

loyatemu

gflood wrote: »

Suggested improvements :

• Car pool lanes.
• Widen motorways.
• I get a rebate on my fuel due to poor infrastructure.

these 3 would just encourage more people to drive (unless by "I get a rebate" you mean just you)

magicbastarder

gflood wrote: »

[*]Massive tax incentives/cheap ticket prices for public transport especially at peak times, not how it is now where off-peak is cheaper.

it's not necessarily that we need cheaper PT, it's that we need more PT.
and better cycling facilities.

facehugger99

mickoneill31 wrote: »

How about we build the Metro.

A colossally expensive project that will have a near negligible impact on traffic volumes

mickoneill31 wrote: »

I live in Swords.

That figures.

tomplate

magicbastarder wrote: »

it's not necessarily that we need cheaper PT, it's that we need more PT.
and better cycling facilities.

It's so true what you're saying

It's ingrained into politicians to solve traffic problems with roads

And we do it badly here

mickoneill31

facehugger99 wrote: »

A colossally expensive project that will have a near negligible impact on traffic volumes



That figures.

I said I'm in Swords so people would know that I'm just talking about my commute.

Obviously you've done some analysis yourself.

So we're getting your wisdom from
A: you are knowledgeable in this area
B: you can see the queues of traffic and buses in Swords every day.
C: your ass.

Just wondering which one it is.

Do you have any suggestions yourself or do you just like to moan?

amcalester

mickoneill31 wrote: »

How about we build the Metro.

Oh, I agree.

I was just curious if the OP's suggestion would be improved public transport or more roads.

I find that a lot of the people who complain about traffic don't include themselves in that complaint. "I'm not the problem, it's the other people"

I use the M50 daily, so am part of the problem.

Macy0161

mickoneill31 wrote: »

I live in Swords. I won't work anywhere that requires me to travel on the M50 but there are many people who don't have a choice. I get the Swords Express in from Swords every morning and it's creaking. This morning 1 bus rolled past full, another filled up from my queue before I got on it. I got on the third.

Capacity is an issue on many routes, that on the face of it are well served by public transport.

I'm on the N11 corridor in North Wicklow. There's a suitable BE bus route, if I could...

1. Park and ride (zero options, bar roadside)
2. Get on the bus (to guarantee that I'd have to be as early as driving)
3. Not get caught in the same traffic as the cars (to guarantee that I'd have to be as early as driving).

There is the Greystones park and ride for the dart, which is full around 8am these days, so again getting to the situation that it's nearly as early as driving. And a limited service.

I try to drive so far, and then bike commute. Again, there's a lack of park and ride options, poor cycling infrastructure, especially from Donnybrook in. But I don't have to leave as early as I do in the car.

On the cycle commute, I see packed bus stops and witness buses driving past stops several mornings a week. I wouldn't even consider my commute time to be peak.

While I support the principles of bus connects (albeit with reservations of it addressing cycling infrastructure), there's so much more that could be done within existing infrastructure with investment in buses, hard shoulders as bus lanes etc that could be done relatively quickly. But there's no will in the NTA or politics to do this.

facehugger99

mickoneill31 wrote: »

So we're getting your wisdom from
A: you are knowledgeable in this area
B: you can see the queues of traffic and buses in Swords every day.
C: your ass.

Just wondering which one it is.

Do you have any suggestions yourself or do you just like to moan?

Wow, you're pretty touchy. I've worked for over 20 years in transportation engineering and associated planning - so, yeah it's an opinion but one based on some experience.

The solutions to Dublin's transportation problems are actually quite simple but unfortunately not terribly sexy or popular with the voters who tend to like big shiny (and expensive) solutions like Metros.

Congestion-charges combined with a complete expansion of the bus network -routes, frequencies, etc. would work.

The population densities are too low to be cost-effectively served by anything else.

If you price most motorists off the road and provide quality bus routes and decent cycling infrastructure you'd solve the problems within 2-4 years.

CatInABox

CatInABox wrote: »

Case in point is the rumbling from Noel Rock about making the Santry one way. A minor 5 minute inconvenience to a couple of hundred people, while massively benefiting thousands on a daily basis.

I haven't seen anything about this, have you a link by any chance?