N25 - Carrigtwohill to Midleton [route options published]

niloc1951 wrote: »

If it's to have a motorway 120km/h speed limit make it a Motorway and let cyclists, L drivers and slow-moving machinery use the parallel L3004 / L3680 (the old N25).
It's only asking for trouble to have such a traffic mix on a road with a 120km/h speed limit.

Yes I believe that's exactly the motivation: they want an M-status road and a new junction. And hey presto, the land is ready for development.

The problem is that the LADP doesn't see an upgrade of the parallel routes.

For me (and maybe everyone here?) the obvious solution is upgrading the Ballyrichard road to work as a distributor. Tie existing houses into this and the new WaterRock interchange. Plan to continue a bypass (not distributor) around the North East of Midleton, since the current bypass is now a congested development corridor.

If TII are allowed to upgrade that local road then great. But if they don't, then it's a mostly pointless exercise compared with the other issues in the area. There isn't a hope in hell that the existing slow machinery will detour all around and through the centre of Carrigtohill and Midleton. There will be tractors with a sticker hauling grain all day on the M25.

Edit: my own personal hobby horse of sustainable transport goes out the window without a proper distributor road. It's a PFO route for cyclists and walkers in its current format unfortunately.
And the addition of a WaterRock junction without a WaterRock railway station means lots and lots more cars. Absolutely nobody is going to walk to the existing train stations from WaterRock.

niloc1951 wrote: »

My post didn't need 'fixing'
My point b is quite valid. The presence of slow-moving machinery on a two-lane road with a 120km/h speed limit is madness. Such mixing of traffic regularly results in a moving road-block and all the fast moving traffic is forced into lane 2 with the result that lane 2 becomes a queue travelling at perhaps 90 km/h with 'new arrivals' arriving at a higher speed often braking aggressively resulting in the regularly reported crashes.
Allowing such machinery, which is not subject to roadworthiness testing and may be under the control of a person who has never undertaken a practical driving test, to mix with other traffic travelling at motorway speeds is the height of folly.
As a side issue, drivers who might remain in lane 1 are not allowed into lane 2 when they need to overtake the slow-moving road-block and through frustration may move into lane2 when it is unsafe to do so.

Your point is valid, there should be no need for slow moving vehicles on the N25 West of Carrigtohill. And the mix is absolutely a hazard. I was just tongue-in-cheek emphasizing the volume of problems I've personally experienced on the N25 West of Carrigtohill from bad behaviour. People doing 140kmh+, people driving continuously in the right-hand-lane, people overtaking while intending to take an oncoming exit, etc.

And of course slow vehicles (40kmh) driving in the hard shoulder, half-in half-out of the hard shoulder or in the standard lane as a rolling roadblock.

Red Route:
https://www.n25carrigtohillmidleton.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Red-Route.pdf

Blue Route:
https://www.n25carrigtohillmidleton.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Blue-Route.pdf

Brown Route:
https://www.n25carrigtohillmidleton.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brown-Route.pdf

Purple Route:
https://www.n25carrigtohillmidleton.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Purple-Route.pdf

marno21 wrote: »

The 4km stretch to be upgraded here is a glorified mess with the brick wall verges, housing fronting onto the road, median gaps, T junctions, variable with HS, the half arsed 2009 median closures etc.

It does need upgrading and this corrects some of the poor slip roads at J4 and J5 too.

No question on all of the above

marno21 wrote: »

Regarding development, the Amgen site would be a useful site to develop for industrial uses, there is a cluster of industry around there with Merck, the Tullagreen IDA site, Little Island etc. However development around there should exploit the rail line, and that's a LA issue rather than a TII issue.

I suspect the primary objective here is actually housing NE of the proposed new junction Marno. Check out Midleton UEA. It's going to be a very large area.

The Amgen site gets touted for everything but we're not really that short of development land out East, and AFAIK the Amgen site doesn't have ideal ground conditions. When Little Island gets a new junction at the West, the Mitsui Denman site and Harbour Point site will be hot property.

marno21 wrote: »

I do bow to your superior local knowledge regarding the Amgen site. I am aware of the Water Rock plan too - however TII have a different view here and will be providing input should the development there continue. They shouldn't leave the N25 between Carrigtwohill and Midleton in the mess its in because of the potential for the council to ruin it. Maybe a better option might be upgrading J4 and J5 and using the existing N25 as a two way single carriageway between Barryscourt and the junction near Abernethys.

If there was one thing I would prefer here, it would be that the N25 had a masterplan for east of Barryscourt. This scheme is an ad hoc road development given that there's issues further east that need rectifying in the short/medium term. The lack of any plan as to what is actually to be done east of J5 is disappointing, even if the actual construction got long fingered.

I don't know very much about it but older lads in the area say it's porous limestone rock, big cavities underneath.

I fully agree with fixing up the N25, and I would like to see the J5 Midleton West junction upgraded. There's queuing on it now which is the biggest issue: they can't put in more houses accessed from J5 because of the queuing. The NTA and TII have put a halt on anything later than phase one of the UEA going ahead.

There should of course be a masterplan for East of Barryscourt. There's huge issues East of J5 getting ignored, because it's not really important to the cause of opening up the Waterrock land parcel that Cork Co Co themselves put together. Since February, the Golf Course is closed. They're sitting on a large land bank and not progressing its development.

But what happens East of J5 after this scheme? There will be tractors and cyclists and a lot of East Cork and Refinery traffic on it. That's not dealt with, but a new junction to access Waterrock is included in 3 of the 4 proposals.
And East of Lakeview has enough safety issues to keep you going for weeks, if you wanted to look at it. But that's not being looked at.

Not wishing to hijack the thread but a few km's east of Lakeview acurate signage is required, despite what they indicate the road is not curving to the left it's curving to the right click here for the 100m sign and here for the 250m sign
It's unbelievable that those signs haven't been corrected since they were installed over 10 years ago .

I'm still getting my head around the variations, but there seems to be minimal difference between Blue and Purple.
I like that these two continue straight at Hedgy Boreen. The local distributor road is more valuable to me in that configuration.

All designs appear to deal with medians and houses and all create a link-road-link-road, so probably worth calling out what I see as the "differences":
Carrigtohill Eastbound slip
Hedgy Boreen upggrade design
New "Amgen/Waterrock" junction placement
J5 queuing/merging

None of these designs appear to deal with the tractor/cyclist question. Really not sure what they're thinking about these: through Midleton Main Street, or use the N25 East of J5?

This was the option I expected from discussions with the team. But I don't really see how this option deals with some of the biggest issues: slow moving agri machinery, cyclists, etc.

And I'm still baffled a year later, by the motivation to upgrade this section but not the Lakeview Roundabout, Midleton-Castlemartyr, Castlemartyr, or Killeagh sections of the N25.

Yep it's a very strange one for me too.

Anyone who knows me on here will know I'm hardly a staunch advocate of "more roads projects" but the N25 is a fairly low standard interurban corridor. Obviously not as important as the N20 or N22 in terms of strategic infrastructure, but there is no alternative transport method on the corridor. Maybe upgrading the N24 is the "preferred option" for Cork-Waterford, but the N25 isn't just going to go away!

East of Midleton, there’s very little justification for a dual carriageway. The reason it backs up is because of the bottleneck movements in Castlemartyr, not because there’s a lack of capacity: the section between Killeagh and Castlemartyr is able to accommodate the volumes of traffic using it, but that traffic gets caught in Castlemartyr itself. A relief road in Castlemartyr would make a huge difference to this section, without the cost and disruption of a dual carriageway.

Lakeview is a major problem because there’s so little space around. I agree with Pete_Cavan, and I suspect that any upgrade would result in Lakeview becoming a limited-access junction with N25 (join for Cork, leave for Midleton only): that would fit my own experience of traffic at the roundabout.

A large volume of traffic is currently diverting via Mogeely to avoid Castlemartyr, so a single carriageway relief road would likely end up over capacity in a short time if this traffic rejoined the main line.

Definitely can't justify dual carriageway east of Killeagh though.

That traffic going via Mogeely is what creates the problems in Killeagh.

If the single-carriageway road west of the Two Mile Inn can accommodate the traffic it carries, then a relief road at Castlemartyr can too. Castlemartyr itself needs a relief road to stop its main street being used as the road to Garryvoe, and this will have to be done regardless of what is done for N25.

Exactly yes, I agree with you both and I think Lakeview needs to become limited in exactly the way you describe.

And as Pete_Cavan says, a full junction East of the existing Lakeview.

There actually is quite a lot of space immediately South East of the existing interchange, but I suspect a new interchange would need to be even further east?

Given this project will happen within the existing road space plus a strip to the side (plus the land required for the new junction), does it have to go through the full planning process with oral hearings, etc? Or can they shorten the process?

There must be some threshold above which oral hearings and the like come into play, what was the process for the multiple reasonably large National Secondary road projects (N52, N55, N56, etc.)? This project will affect much fewer people than a new build offline road.

But....this project wasn't supposed to be a development facilitator, right? This was a "SAFETY" project they said. They went to great lengths to say that this project was for safety of vulnerable road users, and that it happened to also open up development land in the area. Nobody was proposing this road upgrade to facilitate development atall atall. I think you can see what I'm saying.

The provision of a distributor network in the Carrigtohill/Midleton area should be a LA project, with assistance from NTA/TII. Plugging all residential and commercial developments in the area directly into the N25 would have been highly irresponsible. Particularly when there's an active rail line on the corridor.

Given the care they took to ignore the real road safety and traffic issues in the East Cork area, I felt it was an extremely cynical project.

Yep mothballed I believe. I think there's a discussion after starting on Castlemartyr/Killeagh though. Both would be higher priorities, as far as I'm concerned. I'd like to see the Carrigtohill-Midleton corridor developed properly, but not under the guise of some "helping out pedestrians" roads upgrade project.

There is still the Ryan problem though.

Actually I suspect that the low commitments for 2022 are partly due to the built-in 2:1 ratio of spending between public transport and roads. They are fast realising that due to lack of planning and NIMBYs there aren't really any public transport schemes ready to spend that level of money on.

I believe that to be the case too: they don't have enough sustainable transport schemes ready. Very frustrating really, from both perspectives (roads & sustainable transport).