What is being done to address the M50 problem?

Two things:

The problems of the M50 are almost all caused by the confluence of the N7 and M50.

Lane segregation on the N7 needs to happen WAY earlier than it does now, ideally west of the Newlands flyover. And once on the M50, traffic needs to be confined to its joining lane until it is up to speed, at least a two kilometer long solid divider on the merge and auxiliary lanes.

Secondly, a new Government without any green tail wagging the dog, needs to restore to the national transport strategy, the so-called 'M45' Leinster Orbital Motorway linking the N7 west of Kildare northeast and across via Enfield and south of the Navan, Slane, Drogheda corridor and via a link with the M1 into the new container port at Bremore.

The M50 must be reduced in priority as a national route, where everyone going from places like Dublin to Galway and Dundalk to Cork all pass through the same bottleneck.

And far from a new M45 adding to emissions, it will see more vehicles running more efficiently, more of the time, with its arrival coinciding with greater and more endurant EVs and HGVs switching to CNG and hybrid electrification and fuel cells.

It will be a vital link in Ireland's increasing bonded freight and break-of-bulk sector.

All of these problems are mirrored fairly precisely on the N40 down in Cork. Junction design lacking, generally too much traffic wanting to use it no matter the number of lanes, alternative routes not available, lack of public transport, shocking driving, shocking merging, and any further capacity on unbuilt roads likely to never happen.

There are some plans to build more transport (public and road) in Cork but none of them will address the fundamental problem that there are too many people needing to travel at the same time for what has been built, and for what has been planned. It also takes an inordinate amount of time and a simply silly amount of public discussion and political posturing to build anything. And whats usually built is just not powerful enough.

They can't have them I'm afraid.

The economy of this Country will continue to boom, in non-transport dependent sectors, as well as transport dependent ones. The population continues to increase ~1% per year, skewed towards the cities.

If the planning authorities want "living cities", then they must provide efficient alternatives for people and freight alike, on asphalt and rails alike.

The justification for 'M45' is even greater than the Galway City Ring-Road, and we know at this stage that that will be proceeding.

The Leinster Orbital conversation needs to begin again afresh.

There's no justification for M45, but there may be for an N45, a single-carriageway similar to N33, to allow long-distance traffic to bypass Dublin, but there really isn't much of that: the old DOOR plan was a stalking-horse for allowing the neighbouring counties to re-zone land to develop car-dependent exurbs. If it stuck to its remit of connecting the primary routes, you could build the Leinster Orbital as an eight-lane highway, and it would have almost zero effect on M50.

M50's problems are pretty much all due to commuter traffic, and you don't need a traffic study to see that - just drive on it outside of peak times - everything moves just fine. The only people who have to use M50 at peak times are commuters: freight and through-traffic is not required to be on M50 between 0730 and 0900, and so drivers avoid those times - burining fuel to go slowly affects their bottom line; out-of-Dublin visitors also consciously avoid the period.

Back in 2020/2021, TII were putting out feelers about a road-use-charging pilot for M50 (I heard about it as at that time, I worked at a company that would have been able to provide a solution). It's possibly too early to say what happened about that, but there was definitely an understanding that the toll generates problems on the neighbouring junctions, as traffic exits earlier to avoid it. The other argument was one of fairness: commuters using the western cross segment of M50 pay for the maintenance of all of the road.

I’m sure you can point to examples of urban motorways where road widening successfully reduced congestion after the initial bump then?

Whatever about the bridges, the junctions were difficult to widen last time and would be next to impossible to do again. The N3 junction in particular would need the removal of multiple houses and businesses and a tennis club. Or you could shift the entire thing north slightly and only have to CPO a golf club.

Historic traffic data is available on the TII website. Irishmotorwayinfo.com, maintained by @spacetweek of this parish, also has graphs. Search "M50 Traffic Counts" and follow the results...

Dublin City Council also counts traffic in and out of the core inner city (between the canals). Search "Dublin City Traffic Counts"

There's piles of data there if you look.

The motorway traffic figures are rising, but the city core figures are falling, so where are the "missing" cars going? Still within Dublin city, but outside the canals.

The key point of my post was this: When a system is close to its limit, even a tiny increase can cause catastrophic breakdown in throughput. That's what we're seeing in Dublin. But the good news is that this means even a modest reduction in car numbers would really improve service levels.

You could have just linked me:

In any case the traffic figures have not changed on those counts by any meaningful amount since 2017. Some are very slightly up some are very slightly down.

And its not Dublin City Traffic, its the canal cordon count and the 2023 report (on 2022) is here:

https://www.nationaltransport.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NTA-Canal-Cordon-Report-2022-Final.pdf

And it too shows the number of cars entering the city between 7am and 10am continues to fall and has done since 2006.

It will be interesting to see the 2024 report on 2023 (we'll need to wait until may though)

The junctions should have been designed with bus interchanges from day 1, to allow quick transfer from city bound buses to orbital buses.

Any discussion of reducing traffic is pie in the sky when public transport largely ignores orbital trips. They need to offer travel times on orbital journeys that are not 3 or 4 times the time taken to drive.

I'm all for improving public transport in Dublin, starting with a full Metro network, Dart Underground, more Luas etc. But the simple fact is that these alone will not work for everyone, as public transport tends to work best if masses of people are doing roughly similar journeys. Great if you happen to live AND work within a very short distance of a station along the same line, but if your home or work is far from public transport or if a journey involves multiple mode changes it gets dicey really fast. Or if you are travelling for any reason other than commuting, PT might not necessarily be the solution.

Roads will thus continue to be the solution for many, those who live far from work and those who are travelling for reasons other than commuting, not to mention road hauled freight.

For that reason, I too would like to see improvements made to the M50 and/or an outer orbital motorway further away from Dublin - but only after a lot of investment has been made into public transport in Dublin. The full Metrolink from Swords to Bray and Dart Underground being the absolute bare minimum in this regard.

Nice straw man argument.