N8/N25/N40 - Dunkettle Interchange [open to traffic]

Well it's also providing an opportunity to pass slower moving vehicles. For tunnel-bound traffic on the N25W, it's 1.1km from the initial diverge from the mainline to the merge point immediately before the tunnel.

Often thought there should be a visable barrier of sorts in the tunnel , wether its aheavy duty rumble strip, or a flexible bollard that emergency services can ignore and drive over when in need,

As someone else said we're not great at merging in this country , but it can happen , used to happen seamlessly on western road ,by ucc gate ,many years back ,

But if they give one lane priority then it'll be carnage , i've already seen vans and car being the lane police, blocking the right hand lane ,to stop others "skipping the que" its 2 lanes for a reason

You won't get zip merging to work with lane markings which indicate one of the two lanes has priority and the other is required to join the priority lane.

For zip merging to work neither lane should have priority over the other and the lane markings should change into a sort of upside-down Y where the merge is required.

like in Finland?

Inviting graffiti.

How are people expecting the Slip roads to eventually tie into the M8?

My thoughts:

• Both the N25 to M8 and City to M8 slips will feed into the left lane.
• Slip from tunnel will continue in the right lane.
• Solid white line between both lanes until well beyond the junction.

Are the extra lanes helping the flow from n25w into the tunnel? Know its early days but it had been backed up to tunnel, now appears to be good bit shorter (solely anecdotal based in looking when walking over the flayover and looking at Maps).

Not much work done on Link K this week and per today's newsletter they will still be concentrating on Link C over the coming weeks.

Finishing link K and the slip to town seems like an easy win for 2 of the biggest tailbacks.

Link K right hand lane is still blocked off with cones and has tailbacks to little island exit at peak times.

You can see this in the east facing camera.

Yeah, for the life of me I can’t figure out why they’re taking so many links to 99% completeness but then leaving cones and speed restrictions in place. Is it some sort of intentional traffic calming strategy?

That tallies with my experience. I left Fitzpatrick’s in Glounthane at 5:10pm, intending to take N40 as far as the Mahon exit. The queue from the tunnel went back along the N25W as far as MSL Mercedes. I said “fcuk that!” and went through town. But I wasn’t alone. Traffic was backed up the entire length of the quay. Finally got home to Ballinlough at 6:15pm. There were no accidents or incidents that I’m aware of. I am starting to wonder if we’ve been sold a pup with the DKI, at least for southbound traffic.

zip merging is basically where people arent cnts to each other and by magic you work out where every second car should be and with everyone playing along it works really well.

Any where I see it abroad theres 1 main lane and 1 lane thats being discontinued - and the important thing is that everyone goes in both lanes right to the bitter end.

I can see where in Ireland where people are pure btards to each other when merging (end of Ballincollig bypass being a nice example and even the parents in law proactively block anyone from merging) you may need a different approach (and have both lanes given equal status so theres no proactive blocking of people in the "other" lane)

Without being familar the area, have traffic patterns changed since the design modelling was done. Or is it just the passage of time and increased vehicle trips.

From latest newsletter all work is still stopped on Link K (N25W to tunnel) and Tunnel to City slip. Traffic chaos from East Cork to continue with free lanes coned off back to the Little Island flyover for no apparent reason.

Looks like we may need to wait until February 2024 for these to fully open.

As an outsider looking at this, it seems to me that the extra (and IMO unnecessary) junction at Little Island (presumably demanded by the businesses there) has really bollixed up this whole project. They already had a junction (junction 2). That was enough for them. Had that junction not been built, you could have had a single lane slip from N25W to N40W.

Travel from the east on this every morning and its fecken joke, opening all the lanes into the tunnel will help a little bit, but the merge jam in peak times will just move further up that link.

I didnt pay much attention to the design, as to be honest I couldnt make much sense of it, but surely you dont need to be an engineer to figure out that amount of merging was going to cause problems of a) being a significant bottleneck and b) creating opportunities for more accidents and therefore more significant delays.

Surely the point of any engineering exercise is to engineer out as much human error (Accidents) as possible and engineer in efficiency.

Yes, we have gotten rid of lights but some mornings its as bad if not worse than it was before it opened. Not as bad as during construction but that would be fairly damning if it was.

Looks like its been badly designed for traffic coming from east cork or has been built too late due to volumes.