Reduction in motorway speed limits proposed 120 km/h to 110 km/h

pete4130 wrote: »

I didn't point out Australia as an environmental example. I pointed out the time difference to drive 100km at 110kmh compared to 120kmh.

Australian cars are just as efficient as any car that is available in Ireland and Europe. There is more choice here for larger engine vehicles considering it is about 91 times the size of Ireland.

If you were to drive the Wile Atlantic Way in Ireland at 2600km long, it would take 21.6 hours at 120kmh or 23.6 hours at 110kmh. If you could drive at thos speeds the whole time.

The choice is down to a political one rather than a practical one. There's much, much more focus on CO2 emissions in EU regulations driven by European political emphasis on reduction of environmental impact due to Green politics being mainstream.

Seriously who in Australia drives those kinds of distances on a regular basis? Your average journeys in Australia in my experience of it are not that different to Europe. People don't tend to opt to drive Sydney to Perth unless they're making a documentary.

You can drive vast distances in Europe too, and truckers do it all the time and there's a lot more places go go en route. I mean if you REALLY want to take it to extremes, you can get on a ferry to Rosscoff and drive to 12,354 km to Vladivostok in Eastern Russia.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Roscoff,+29680,+France/Vladivostok,+Russia/@24.8178768,-1.5428628,3z/am=t/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x4813e1457ead5c67:0x7edaeff9d05b4845!2m2!1d-3.985325!2d48.726199!1m5!1m1!1s0x5fb39cba5249d485:0x186704d4dd967e35!2m2!1d131.9112975!2d43.1332484!3e0

Australia actually emits more CO2 per capita than the USA on average. Ireland's at roughly half those levels/

punisher5112 wrote: »

We have tracks which use to be used to their full potential, it's nuts running huge trucks on roads constantly when freight should have mainly been on rails.

The vast majority of Ireland's freight is point-to-point and delivered by truck the whole route. There's a very poor business case here for rail freight due to lack of any long distances and the diversity of routes involved.

Logistics companies aren't going to say start in some random part of Co. Cork. Drive by truck to an Irish Rail freight depot. Unload a container. Have that queued up to be loaded onto a freight train. That then goes to say Dublin. Then has to be unloaded again, reloaded onto a truck and so on.

There might be some sense in having it for stuff that's going directly to port, but a lot of that is driven the whole way on Ro-Ro ferries.

Then to top that off you're dealing with an non-reactive, semi-state railway company that tends to have huge cost overheads and inflexibility and giving them a monopoly on your logistics.

None of it adds up unfortunately. It would do if we were on the continent and had long distance freight with bulkier items.

Most of our fright nationally is distribution stuff and on top of that the rail network runs on diesel.

If we could have rapid, electric fright lanes on motorways without any impact on the driving surfaces - just a pantograph system installed overhead, then you just end up with zero emission trucks running at 100km/h as they do now without any diesel being burnt.

In terms of generation, the vast majority of our energy needs can be met with offshore wind and we're very close to serious battery storage technologies that don't require huge amounts of nasty heavy metals. So, it could all change extremely quickly.

We're not going to get down to zero CO2 electricity for a while, but we can certainly keep getting closer to it and it's better than burning diesel, if we don't have to and can keep improving as the generation and storage tech evolves, without having to rollout different infrastructure the point of use.

All a system like that would be doing is opening up a new way of powering very large vehicles on motorway, and could be done with minimal impact and double as a green public transit alternative for anyone who wanted to hook up an electric bus to it.

It's just one of many, many possibilities out there and I find we're not thinking outside the box at all and green transport doesn't always = railways.

When will they start the work replacing every sign on the road network?

More pie in the sky rubbish from the greens. What a public headache they are becoming and this is only the beginning

Another utterly ridiculous idea from the greens when they should instead be targeting a nationwide charging infrastructure for electric cars and a serious tax incentive.

Ciarán Cuffe was just on Newstalk there making a case for the 110 km limit. He said that he just does 100 km/h and listens to his favourite radio nice and relaxed on the motorway. He described people "gripping the steering wheel" to do 120km/h. Talk about making it a ridiculous argument. He made the road safety (speed kills) argument but Conor Faughnan who was also on, firmly disagreed with him saying the road safety benefits aren't there for such a change on motorways and that the downside outweighs any environmental benefit.