How much did Motorways improve the driving times

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607152#Comment_120607152

In your example a car is €2 and a HGV is €6.30 on that road

I have no problem with them being tolled in an effort to raise funds to maintain the road... But I can't get over why they are being tolled triple what a car is tolled

magicbastarder

partly due to wear and tear, maybe? a HGV causes thousands of times more wear and tear on a road surface than a car does.

salmocab

I do think that if there is an easy alternative then HGV’s should be encouraged to use the motorway if it’s by cheaper or free tolls that’s fine.

blingrhino

Dundalk to Dublin with my dad in the late 70`s was at least 2 hours.

Castlebellingham, Dunleer , Drogheda - over west st and down shop st , no bridge of peace (Drogheda still the worst town in ireland for traffic today ) through Balbriggan and through the north Dublin suburbs but at least you could park outside the ice cream shop in o connell st !

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607195#Comment_120607195

Just highlighting more inadequacies of our government in taking the short-term lazy option

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607212#Comment_120607212

And, honestly, who cares. Should be factored into the budget in planning.

Getting HGV away from rural towns and villages, with their danger/pollution/building damage, should be a no brainer. It's one of the main reasons for the network in the first place

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607204#Comment_120607204

The real problem, with that road, is that during Off-Peak you can come through the tunnel, get off at WaterGrassHill, go through Rathcormac and Fermoy, rejoin the motorway and not pay a toll until Laois. You lose, maybe, 10 minutes. It's absolutely not worth it for many companies to pay that toll. Others rather face Urlingford-Abbeyleix than paying the toll there.

I'm against HGV tolling, altogether, as our rail network is so poor (Ringaskiddy will never get a link) an this is just a perfectly awful example.

*I am not involved in haulage*

kippy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120606868#Comment_120606868

This is very true. It's no coincidence that road deaths and injuries have been significantly reduced over the past couple of decades per capita. A combination of better roads and one could argue better/safer cars.

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607623#Comment_120607623

I remember 2006 I was doing my leaving cert and the figure of 395 road deaths occurred in our country in 2005, more than one a day. Fast forward to 2019 (ignoring the COVID years) and we are at 140, a 62% decrease

Better cars help for sure but the main reason, I believe, is better roads

Padre_Pio

Dublin city to Cork on the bus was 5 hours, with a pee break in the middle. Now it's 3 hours or so, and the last 30 minutes is from Heuston to O'Connell St.

magicbastarder

massive falloff in drink driving, and hugely improved safety standards in cars are the two reasons i see mentioned most, i think.

Cookiemunster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607239#Comment_120607239

The Dublin Port Tunnel is a prime example of this. Free for HGVs and a charge for cars.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607683#Comment_120607683

would be worth offering a single luas ticket in the price, so passengers could hop off at heuston and get the luas to o'connell street, which could save the bus (and driver) being tied up for that extra time.

Eircom_Sucks

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120605098#Comment_120605098

70 mins recently , used to be about 2hrs on the old roads through thomastown etc

Red Silurian

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607692#Comment_120607692

Drink driving was never much of an issue, in fact you could argue that with a reduction in public transport and Taxis our drink driving rates might be higher (although still very low) than it was 20 years ago

Charles Babbage

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607272#Comment_120607272

The Bridge in Drogheda was built around 1976. Before that, a passenger could probably get out and buy an ice cream and walk up the street and catch up on their car. Two HGVs meeting while turning from West Street into Shop Street could jam things up.

https://goo.gl/maps/yrshUYyLiho6CeXW8

People in those days often chose not to face Drogheda but took the R169 from Dunleer to Collon and proceeded on the N2. Slane was a delay, but no queue. Ashbourne was a village then, and while there were lights at Finglas there was a relatively quiet dual carriageway to Glasnevin.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120608051#Comment_120608051

not sure if i agree with you that drink driving was never much of an issue!

even recently, i found a report stating that in something like 800 fatalities, alcohol was measurable in over one third of the bodies. from people i know maybe ten years older than me, driving home with quite a few pints in you would barely have raised an eyebrow in the 90s.

Hibernicis

from people i know maybe ten years older than me, driving home with quite a few pints in you would barely have raised an eyebrow in the 90s.

100% agree. Was thinking about this earlier while reading some of the posts on driving Cork-Dublin and the other long drives. People thought nothing of stopping off in Morrissey's of Abbeyleix or The Silken Thomas in Kildare or similar for a few scoops to break the journey, driver included.

And it wasn't just the drivers on the long runs that contributed. One of the big cases of accidents was drunks emerging from a pub after midnight and hopping into the old banger to head two miles over the road and driving, often on sidelights or one headlight, onto or across a main road. Had some close shaves of this nature on the N8 in places like Horse & Jockey, Kilbeheny, Rathcormack and the like.

I think there are five factors which have contributed to lowering the death toll:

• NCT improving the roadworthiness of cars, especially tyres (No more remoulds, regrooves, rethreads, or just plain bald tyres)
• Better (more skilled) driving
• Better roads
• Better/safer cars
• Complete change in attitude towards drink driving

It's difficult to guess at which of these has had the biggest impact. There are of course new factors which have the opposite effect: Using hand held mobiles while driving, faster cars, a lot more cars on the roads etc. But I definitely feel safer on the M7/M8 today than I did on the N7/N8 thirty years ago.

Hibernicis

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607212#Comment_120607212

It's perfectly fair that all road users should pay tolls, no category should be exempt other than perhaps emergency vehicles. And it is logical that the toll charge should to some extent at least reflect the wear and tear on the road surface. The issue of trucks driving through villages to dodge the toll should be addressed by penalising those that do so - by charging a higher penalty toll for this behaviour. The technology exists to do this.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120608431#Comment_120608431

You cannot remove untolled routes. Roads through towns/villages are National roads.

Having heavy goods out of population areas is worth the trade off with some extra wear on the road.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607590#Comment_120607590

I actually don't think it's a big issue. I cycle Watergrasshill to Rathcormac a lot. Most of the toll-dodgers are commuters, not HGV's.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120609024#Comment_120609024

Commuters are a large issue but MicroBio send chemical trucks through Fermoy and Rathcormac several times a day. Glennon Brothers send loaded lumber trucks. They're two habitual users I see on the road a lot as they're distinctive but they're far from alone

Gold7

I remember travelling Dublin to Belfast in the 80s it sometimes took nearly 4 hours, Swords, Balbriggan, Drogheda,Dundalk, Newry. Now I have done it in 2 hours 20 Minutes on the Aircoach bus from O'Connell street.

Hibernicis

“You cannot remove untolled routes. Roads through towns/villages are National roads.

Having heavy goods out of population areas is worth the trade off with some extra wear on the road.”

I agree 100% that HGV’s should be strongly discouraged from passing through populated/residential areas unnecessarily.

I didn’t suggest removing anything and I didn’t and don’t dispute that roads which pass through villages may be national (or regional or local) roads.

I cannot agree with your approach of rewarding HGV operators or anybody else for their current ignorant behaviour. The motorway bypasses were built at great expense, not just for the convenience of the few who are willing to pay the tolls, but equally if not more so for the benefit of those whose lives were made miserable and unsafe by large volumes of through traffic. The current toll regime is arbitrary and downright illogical however this is neither here nor there as it is what it is and should either apply to all road users equally or be scrapped and replaced with something more logical.

It would be fairer and better all round to apply a toll, being at least the same amount as the Motorway toll, preferably higher, to vehicles leaving the motorway at a junction immediately before the toll gates and re-joining within a short period at the next junction after the toll gates. This could apply to all vehicles and not just HGVs.

Not wishing to derail an otherwise interesting thread, I’m more then happy to disagree on this, but I can’t see any reasonable grounds for your approach.

Chris_5339762

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607590#Comment_120607590

To add to the temptation, if you skip the Fermoy toll you have the cheap garage for Diesel in Rathcormac, and if you skip at Abbeyleix, you can get the really cheap Diesel in Urlingford. It doubles the saving.

If I'm doing a Cork - Dublin - Cork run on a Sunday, which I do have to do sometimes, I'd always skip one toll out of the four. And top up.

road_high

They are one of the biggest reasons irelands poor road safety record went from bottom to top of the class in a short time in the late 2000s. We need to complete the puzzle now though. The N20, parts of the N4, N17, N14 etc are still not acceptable

road_high

It used to be a pretty regular thing to hear on the news of multiple deaths on the old inter Urbans. That’s thankfully rare now

road_high

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120607979#Comment_120607979

Carlow and castledermot were pretty bad. I drove the old N9/10 from Kilkenny to Waterford recently just for nostalgia and Christ what an awful road that was for a national road. Only thing is now there’s no traffic on it and it was actually a kind of a pleasure to do.

North of Thomastown and Carlow it was an ok road in parts and had been improved through the 80s and 90s but certainly wouldn’t handle the traffic on the M9 now.

L1011

The good bits of the N9, Moone bypass for instance, were fine but south of Thomastown was a goat track. Was always expecting to come around the corner and find a HGV in the side of Jerpoint Abbey.

Ninap

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120610210#Comment_120610210

Yes, pre motorway national roads were notorious for crazy overtaking - fellas trying to overtake whole streams of cars at a time. And all fairly pointless too, as the cars would concertina at the next town anyway. Head-on collisions were a major component of road deaths.