Professor Brian Caulfield

It's not in there specifically as an outer orbital because that would have, I suppose, maybe complicated the question.

It would have added in, you know, what side you put it.

Do you put it to the west or do you do the eastern bypass?

So extra road capacity is one of the options.

So it's very popular in North America where they have lots of space to build extra lanes.

So basically what happens is there will be cameras on the M50 that would check to make sure that there were people and there was more than one person per vehicle.

And when that happens, people could get access to these faster lanes.

So that is one solution that works in other countries.

Typically in North America, it's used with cameras.

So cameras are able to detect when there are one or more people in the cars.

But there's obviously ways to game that system.

I've seen papers represented in North America whereby people come along with mannequins in the car with them as well.

So there's ways to get around that if somebody was minded to.

So first of all, the toll money from the M50, and it was announced there during the week, I think it's doubled over the past decade.

I think it's less than 30% of people that actually pay the toll because the toll is at one specific point.

And it's there as a historical legacy because it was there to pay for the infrastructure of the M50, which has been well paid for at this stage.

So in theory, that could work.

So TII themselves, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, that run the motorway, did a report about a decade ago and they modelled this and they showed that if there were multiple tolling points on the M50 and the price could vary through the day depending upon demand, like it's done with the Port Tunnel, that they expected that there will be a drop in traffic and there will be a drop in congestion.

So that's always kind of been an option on that motorway.

But for whatever reason, probably political, it's never been enacted.