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As part of the efforts to solve the gridlock on Dublin’s roads, the Council is planning to bring in Congestion Charges on certain routes. This means the road users will have to pay a fee to use certain roads at certain times. As a result it is hoped that the level of traffic on heavily congested roads will drop as users move to different routes in order to avoid paying the fee. According to research carried out by the Department of the Environment, this could lead to a reduction of up to 12% in the level of
traffic1.
The theory behind this plan is simple: a high percentage of people will not use a road if they are charged for it. But outside of Dublin the government is proposing to put user charges on roads that they want people to use.
Many of Irelands towns are to be bypassed in the near future, for example Fermoy and Waterford. The purpose of a bypass is to remove unwanted traffic from the centre of town. It is supposed to ease traffic congestion in the town that it bypasses. Yet under the current road building scheme users of bypasses will be charged whereas a journey
through the town centre will be free. From the Government’s own figures 12% less traffic will use the bypass as a result of the tolls. That means that the bypasses being built to reduce congestion in town centres will not do that as effectively as they should. At the recent public enquiry on the Waterford bypass a picture emerged as to what effect tolling will have. The
year 2000 traffic volume on Rice Bridge in Waterford was 33,500 cars per day. In 2005, with a tolled bypass in place, this will have increased to
40,000. The tolled route, with a capacity of 42,000 cars per day, will only have 14,000 cars crossing.
1 Dublin Transport Office, Strategy 2000-2016, A Platform for Change, p17.
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