Professor Brian Caulfield

So we launched a survey there yesterday to understand better what's happening on the M50.

Obviously, we know it's very congested, but what we wanted to understand more about is what are the impacts of this congestion?

What impacts is it having in terms of economics, in terms of jobs, in terms of, you know,

well-being in terms of family life, that type of thing.

The thing then that we did was we presented seven options that could possibly change the congestion on the M50.

They include a carpooling lane, more investment in public transport, bus-based park and ride to increase motorway management to remove collisions as quickly as possible.

to increase the capacity of adjacent roads, and then finally to increase the number of tolling points, which is a controversial one, which TII themselves looked into.

And sorry, then the final one is to give better information on it.

So we're asking people to rank those in terms of what they think might be able to solve the problem.

So on average, it's just below 190,000 vehicles.

Since the motorway opened up, the population of the Greater Dublin area has increased by 20% and the population of cars in Ireland has increased by 40%.

So right now, this vital artery, which it is for the region, is not working in terms of freight and in terms of passengers.

So stages of it opened up from the kind of mid-90s onwards, and then it was kind of more or less finished going into the 2010s.

The very first thing they did with the M50 once it was finished was to expand it by an extra lane.

That happened, alleviated the congestion for a while, and then what we called induced traffic happened.

So when you provide more road space, basically what happens is more congestion follows.

So the cars fill up that space.

Right now, the M50, it's not possible to add lanes either side because of the physical constraints on the motorway.

So it is.

An increase in capacity on adjacent road networks is one of the options.