The recent €36m cut in local road maintenance is due to excessive motorway construction
While millions is being cut from local road maintenance budgets, millions are being wasted designing unviable motorways. Existing roads will become compromised by potholes unless the planning process to build further motorways is formally cancelled.
The €36m cut in funding to maintain local and regional roads is the other side of the coin of excessive motorway construction over the last ten years, according to PlanBetter, a joint initiative of environmental organisations An Taisce, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the Irish Environment and Feasta.
Ireland now has 2.5 times more motorway per person than Britain; yet plans by the National Roads Authority to build another 800km of motorway have still not been officially shelved.
While the cut of €36m will leave potholes on our local roads, the Government must still pay out some €105m this year to service borrowings for long sections of motorway which have proven unnecessary. Traffic is 20 to 30 per cent below the level projected by the National Roads Authority on some new motorways, including the M3 via Tara.
On top of loan repayments, taxpayers are also paying penalty fees to make up for less-than-expected revenue at the M3 toll booths. As the most recent motorways have turned into subsidised toll roads, a new approach is long overdue.
Falling traffic and figures withheld
Over the next three years more than €275m will have to be found to make further motorway repayments – even as traffic on them falls, and this burden will result in further cuts in budgets to fill potholes and re-surface local roads.
Just as the Minister for Transport is refusing to reveal how much money each council will have for local and regional road maintenance in 2011, his department declines to say whether or not motorway repayments have been included in the Four Year Plan presented by the Government in late 2010.
Yet the Government continues to allocate millions for new motorways including proposals for a new 28km four-lane road in Wexford between Oilgate to Rosslare, much of it to replace a recent bypass, and even though traffic on the route is 75 per cent short of the volume required to justify building what’s proposed.
The outgoing Government used the Four Year Plan to falsely claim that every Transport 21 project was still viable. The incoming Government needs to be honest, and openly acknowledge that long sections of motorway are as unnecessary as they are unaffordable.
Traffic has fallen more than 7 per cent from its peak, and as oil prices continue to rise, the number of journeys will decline further. New toll motorways will become ghost roads if projected increases in diesel and petrol and diesel materialise.
Dedicated bypasses with selected enhancements along existing routes are what’s required. Proper transport planning must begin after the new government takes office.
Disgracefully, the recent announcement for local and regional roads maintained a 14 per cent cut in the Low Cost Safety Improvement Programme. This programme – which is used to remove accident blackspots on dangerous roads all around the country – stands at a paltry €6m a year.
Removing accident blackspots saves far more lives than motorway building per euro invested – something the Department of Transport and the NRA are perfectly well aware of, but seem engaged in a strange form of delusion while the wrongful allocation of taxpayer funds persists.
Increasingly it is acknowledged that we are in the sunset era of private motoring with fossil fuel while the alternatives, such as electric cars, are neither sufficiently advanced nor affordable to maintain private car use at the rate to which we became accustomed over the Celtic Tiger years.
Continuing to build and plan motorways, while at the same time cutting funding to tackle high-accident locations and maintain existing roads roads, compromises road safety and long-standing investments, according to PlanBetter.
As Fred Barry, CEO of the National Road Authority, recently told the Joint Oireachtas Committe on Transport, many of Ireland’s existing roads do “not come close to meeting current design and construction standards” while others “were never properly designed in the first place”.
The main challenge for the new government will be to maintain existing transport links and public transport services, and PlanBetter would welcome a shift in focus under an incoming government where our existing transport links are maintained and enhanced.
In a policy briefing for the incoming government to be published later this month PlanBetter will propose innovative measures, including:
1. A partial rebate on fuel duty for all public transport operators, including private bus operators which hold route licences, with the level of rebate linked to the efficiency of the vehicle and the number of passengers carried.
This will ensure a far greater provision of public transport, enabling a wider shift from single-person car commuting, helping families now struggling with higher fuel bills.
2. A concrete commitment to progressively extend the School Travel Programme to all schools across the State over time.
This programme, which currently involves 650 schools, is achieving a far more radical change than initial estimates suggested. Pilot studies indicated that around 15 per cent of pupils would switch to walking, cycling and public transport from car, but results from 2010 are almost double that, with 27 per cent changing to healthier and more environmentally-friendly modes. No other measure is achieving comparable results for the investment involved (€2m a year).
3. Mobility management plans for workplaces, starting with all organisations with more than 500 staff.
Through mobility management plans, commuters will be helped explore alternatives to single-person car commuting. A range of measures would be included, including cycle training for those who would like to become more comfortable in traffic, advice on combining public transport with the active modes of walking and cycling, as well as incentives to dedicate space in large-scale surface car-parks to alternative uses over time.
ENDS
PlanBetter is a joint initiative of environmental organisations An Taisce, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the Irish Environment and Feasta.
Attribution – spokesperson for PlanBetter
Contact:
Miles Deas – 086 200 7998 – mile...@gmail.com
James Nix – 086 8394129
Additional information
- There is no point in ever more motorway that’s used less and less, especially when investment in dedicated road safety measures, such as tackling accident blackspots, save the most lives per euro spent, according to international data.
Examples where the Government continues to allocate millions for the National Roads Authority to plan new motorways include proposals for a new 28km four-lane road in Wexford between Oilgate to Rosslare, much of it to replace a recent bypass – and even though traffic on the route is 75 per cent short of the volume required to justify building a four-lane road.
Other examples where the Government is still allocating millions for new motorways at the expense of re-mediating existing routes include Clontibret to Aughnacloy (N2), Blarney to Patrickswell (N20) and Adare to Abbeyfeale (N21).
Removing dangerous bends and realigning hazardous junctions save far more lives per euro invested than building four-lane roads. (The research here is clear, as shown by international texts such as “The Handbook of Road Safety Measures” by Elvik et al, and confirmed by road safety experts, e.g. Fred Wegman; see further below.)
- Half of Ireland’s road network obtains the lowest possible safety rating under European standards.
- PlanBetter urges the Government to focus on eliminating high-risk locations along our roads: safety must come before building more and more motorway.
- Half of Ireland’s road network obtains the lowest possible safety rating under European standards. That’s according to the European Road Assessment Programme, or EuroRAP, the EU agency responsible for monitoring road safety. (see http://www.eurorap.org/library/pdfs/20080519_IRLAND_RESULTS.pdf )
Ireland’s national secondary network fares particularly poorly. Examples of roads with the lowest safety rating include Mallow to Killarney, Birr to Thurles, and Dundalk to Castleblayney. Parts of the N87 in Cavan; the N14 in Donegal; the N69 between Limerick and Kerry; the N81 from Carlow to Dublin via Wicklow and Kildare; the N30 in Wexford; the N29 in Kilkenny and the N58 in Mayo are also poor in safety terms.
While close to 50 per cent of Ireland’s road network has the lowest safety rating in European terms, only 5 per cent of Northern Ireland’s network achieves the lowest grade, while just 2 per cent of roads in Britain have the lowest rating.
Motorway construction must no longer be put ahead of cutting road mortality. There is ample work for Ireland’s road engineers and contractors in eliminating high-risk locations along our existing network.
Already more than €1.7m has been misspent planning 28km of new four-lane road between Oilgate and Rosslare for example – and such misspending continues. In the case of Oilgate – Rosslare, motorway is not warranted before 2040, and depending on future price of oil, motorway may never be justified. More than 20 accident blackspots across the country could have been eliminated with this money. This waste of taxpayers’ money has to stop.
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