The new National Development Plan 2021-2030

Of the above list not included in the previous NDP, I would say very little of it is worthy of inclusion now. N22 Macroom-Ovens, N21 Abbeyfeale-Rathkeale and N5 Turlough-Bohola (which I assume would be a relatively cheap mix of online upgrade and offline sections) should certainly be added but everything else can wait.

The 2:1 ratio is fair - the bulk of the big road improvements are behind us (M20 is likely to be the last inter-urban motorway project): the remaining schemes will be in the €200~500 million range, not the €1 billion of M20. Meanwhile, we really need to spend on rail and bus. Limerick-Galway was a lesson in what happens if you do a cheapest-possible project: a rail line that’s slower than driving. The whole point of that link was that it would eventually continue to Sligo and even up to Northern Ireland, creating a western rail spine to link Cork, Limerick, Galway and Sligo. Basically, I wanted to see this rail line done properly for the same reason I want M20 to be built.

There’s a hidden positive to this ratio though - it actually eases the opposition to large road projects, because they will be matched by much larger public transport investments. Another good point is that it stops public transport and roads being seen as mutually exclusive options: roads aren’t “stealing” from public transport budgets. There are even quite a few road improvement projects that could be enabled by this funding rule: an urban distributor road, with cycleways, dedicated bus-lanes and new higher-frequency bus services will meet that 2:1 spend, and improve traffic conditions for people who genuinely have no other option but to use a private car.

RTE News had the following headline figures

The NDP will commit to €35bn in spending on transport up to 2030. This is likely to include €12bn for public transport, €6bn on roads, €4bn on walking and cycling infrastructure and €13bn on maintenance.

€6bn should ensure that a lot of road projects don’t get past the starting line.

This is nothing other than a repackaging and reannouncement of the same projects that have been going on for years. Except this time it's even less clear what the timelines and budget being allocated to these are. Massively disappointing.

Disappointing plan in the end. Nothing really new except the asterisk at the end of every project saying "may not actually be built."

It feels like the era of serious bold infrastructure investments of any kind in this country is long behind us, and what we have now is as good as it gets. It is hard to see many projects meeting the ever-higher barriers erected to oppose development in Ireland, and these barriers will presumably only continue to worsen in years to come. Even Green pet projects like the Metro have become effectively undeliverable.

I think it is pretty clear from my post that I do not consider infrastructure investment to be all about roads, unless you think the Dublin Metro is a road project.

I would count infrastructure investment as projects which make people's lives easier, support Irish businesses and industries, and help to create jobs by moving people and goods ever faster to ever more places. Cities choking on ever-worsening traffic as scant road space is reduced even further doesn't seem to meet any of those criteria.

This has been promised as far back as I can remember.

There is quite literally no interest in actually delivering real public transport in Dublin

It might help to understand the argument being put forward by the Greens, which is fairly simple: large construction projects of any kind, produce a lot of CO2 emissions, but these can sometimes be discounted because they will result in lower emissions in other parts of the economy. Where a project costs a lot of emissions to build, and then encourages activities that also create emissions, then it be penalised in the ratings.

This doesn’t mean that “all roads are bad”. Quite a lot of road-building is needed to enable more environmentally-friendly transport. It’s not a good look for the Green Party leader to say this, but it’s buried in the documents. (The NDP document also admits that some projects that may be bad if primarily used by combustion-powered cars would become carbon-neutral as drivers shift to EVs powered by renewable energy)

Performing a realignment of a rural route is going to score well, because it will actually reduce the emissions from traffic that is already using the route, and in a low population area there’s little risk of induced demand. I think N16 would fall into this category (especially as the emerging preferred route would result in a de-trunking of part of N16 in Sligo itself)

Building urban distributor roads with dedicated bus lanes and segregated cycleways is also not penalised, because this kind of construction allows more efficient mass transportation and a higher takeup of cycling, and if you have no option but to use a car, it makes things better for you too.

Replacing a national road that enters many town/village centres with a modest (2+2) dual carriageway is less positive, but it does improve quality of life for those places bypassed, and it facilitates more energy-efficient transportation (trucks waste a lot of fuel when they’re crawling through town centres), and it does not have a much greater CO2 cost than a singe-carriageway option. Given that most of these projects have strong safety and town-bypass grounds behind them, I think they will be safe.

Motorways are where things get harder to approve, because it’s getting very hard to find a route that still requires a motorway (Type 1 DC) to be built along it. We’ve already done the major arterials that needed it (M1, M7, M8, M6), plus the ones that were marginal (M11,M18), and even a couple that should never have been built as motorways at all (M3 Kells, M9, M17). The only candidate left is N20. Every other long-distance route that needs capacity upgrade can be accommodated as a 2+2, even looking ahead for decades.

The last category of projects, capacity upgrades on urban approaches, is pretty much f___d. These were on shaky environmental grounds anyway, and were usually proceeded because they’re actually the cheapest option. The better option, mass transit, is much more expensive (a 20 km Metro, mostly overground, is five times the cost of a 90 km motorway between Cork and Limerick), but it has a much better payback. I expect these to be scaled back, with money diverted into improved bus systems.