M20 - Cork to Limerick [preferred route chosen; in design - phase 3]

If the bypasses are put in over the next 10 years attitudes could well have shifted to the point that finishing the complete M20 is considered unnecessary. By that time the cost of personal car ownership may mean negative growth in traffic and an increased demand for public transport with the towns bypassed there will be a lot less people pushing for it.

AFAIK there were initial rumblings of what was called "M20 south", ie: Cork - north of Buttevant being done first, and then after that Buttevant to Croom as "M20 north". The stupidity of finishing a motorway at Buttevant and having all that traffic then onto the dreadful section north of Charleville was not lost. I would hope it doesn't get phased... we did the M3 at ~60km in one scheme, maybe lets do the same for the M20.

And in my dreamland, bundle the N40 North Ring into it as well to stop this crashing to a halt at Blackpool.

@marno21 “It's very rare I disagree with one of your posts but I think this has the potential to be phased if required.”

I don’t think we are at loggerheads on this, more like at cross purposes.

The project could certainly be phased as you suggest, however there is absolutely no reason to do so. It will cost the same, if not more, if done on a phased basis. So why wait. This isn’t paid for from the Government’s current account. It is capital expenditure and the cost will be spread over 50 or more years. However Irish politicians just do not seem to understand the concept of productive Capital Expenditure. I had a discussion on this with three senior politicians some time back and they didn’t have any grasp at all of the concept. To them, a billion euro project was impossible because the only way to fund it was to take the money out of the current budget and either increase taxes or cut social welfare or education. They just could not grasp that productive CapEx could and should be written down over the long term. So in the case of a project like this the cost to the exchequer would be a fraction of the Capital Cost per annum plus interest. Put simply, for a country with Ireland’s resources, economic scale and borrowing capacity funding is not an issue when it comes to capital expenditure.

There may be an argument for splitting the project into two projects/contracts for tendering/contract management purposes, to de-risk the project and/or to make it more manageable. I am neither a construction economist nor construction contracts specialist so I don’t know how you determine the optimum size for a construction contract. But nothing that I have seen in relation to this project suggests a level of complexity that would appear to justify splitting it. And even if it were split for this reason, the two projects could run concurrently.

Apart from budget and contract complexity I cannot think of any other reason to split the project.

Unless you are Eamon Ryan. And want to build three little C-ring bypasses around Mallow, Buttevant and Charleville. With roundabouts at both ends. And a few in the middle. Like the old Swords bypass. Or the Clonmel bypass. Or the Mitchelstown bypass. None of which would make an iota of sense in this instance.

The Cashel bypass which Ryan likes to refer to was a very different case. It is actually a section of the M8 that was built early. It started and ended at points on the N8 very close to the proposed M8. The bypass was prioritised, it served a purpose as a bottleneck bypass for a number of years, and when the M8 came along it connected to the bypass at both ends and absorbed it. No waste. No redundancy. No duplication. A sensible pragmatic decision.

Based on the drawings published today, this would absolutely not work for the proposed M/N20. You could build 10km of the proposed route beside each of Mallow, Buttevant and Charleville and these stretches would interconnect with nothing in most cases, unless you built miles of connecting road, which would ultimately be redundant.

The one bright spot in all of this appears to be Jari Howard. Watching the way this is progressing, and listening to him today, he appears to be pretty shrewd, appears to have good political antenna and appears to be focussed on delivery. Hopefully he can steer it through the next two phases.

Happy Big Birthday. Have a good one.

Will be interesting to see what form of road this now takes. I really don’t understand what is the point in having 2+2 in the middle for 15 miles linking 2 stretches of motorway. People may consider me one of the blue line brigade, but that would just be insane future planning. We’ve had enough of it in the past, let’s not start with it again.

irrespective, politics will play a lot with this road. Sinn Fein are likely to lead the next government. It could wel be a Jack lynch style one too.

The contractor is of course paid as and when the work is done. The point is that this is not charged to the government’s current account, and so does not have a major impact on day to day income and expenditure. Rather the government borrows to fund the project and repays over a long period. Think of it as if you were buying a house for €500k. Yes, you have to have the funds available to pay the seller, but you do it with borrowed money in the form of a mortgage which you repay over 20/30 years. You don’t have to find the €500k from your own funds on day 1. That’s the basic difference between current and capital expenditure.

That makes no sense to be honest, but I don’t want to derail the thread. It’s actually as simple as the difference between the government’s current and capital accounts. This is for the capital account.

Going back to my original point, the availability of funds is not a reason to split this project. The government could easily borrow the money to fund the entire project in full.

Selection of media reports, linked for the record. Generallly positive, with the exception of the sensationalist search for a story stuff from the Examiner. As Micheál Martin said: ”This is good news. We have an awful habit in this country of turning good news into bad news very fast, and into the next controversy. The routes have now been selected.”

That CLAG (Cork-Limerick Alliance Group) are starting to sound like a reincarnation of the M28 Steering Crowd.

Yes, that would make sense, the flood plain on the west is very wide as its so flat.

East side valley is much narrower as you correctly say.

Fair enough. The route selection took so long that I thought they'd have done some of the above already

There is also the factor that any improved road to Waterford or Rosslare could go via Mallow. Rather than upgrading the M28 and the last of the Cork Waterford road a new high quality road might be an option.