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

Sounds like the final design is going to be published. We could be going to ABP soon!

Will this just be a further narrowing of the route corridor or preliminary fenceline with road layouts prior to a finalised design in late 2024?

So, its going to be a motorway, with 100km of active travel infrastructure built.

It is also going to be tolled.

https://corklimerick.ie/n-m20-cork-to-limerick-project-update-24-06-2024/

They're after the commuters money just as much as anyone else's. The M50 is tolled and the majority of users are commuters.

Looks like an M3 multi toll based on distance travelled.

You'll save nothing by skipping one or two junctions. The staged tolling is very different to a single point toll of, say, €3.

Anyone have any info on what happened to the Blarney Transport hub? It was supposed to be a major P&R with the train station but now there are multiple small bus based park and rides.

From what Irish rail came out with a few weeks back the train station is still planned so it seems stupid to not leverage it as much as possible. Also think car users would be more willing to jump onto a train than a bus since the buses will still hit congestion from Blackpool into the city

Motorway with cycle lanes lol.

Full details of the update are available on the following link including a summary map showing the entire route on one page, a file containing 50no. 1:2,500 maps showing the details of the road and a third file showing the details of the Active travel proposal. Far more info than expected at this stage.

https://corklimerick.ie/june-2024-update/

Overall it looks like an excellent proposal. Active travel now fully detailed, transport hubs and freight hub detailed, junctions detailed and toll strategy clarified. It ticks all the boxes for me, in particular the approach to tolling.

Only fly in the ointment I can see is the absence of a Charleville North junction - so it will either be an early exit at Bruree or a late exit at Charleville South. Doesn’t bother me but will concern some. May also become a political issue. The success of the Buttevant junction will depend on the upgrading of the link road.

The following is the one page summary of the full route. The other two PDF files are too large to upload to boards.ie, but are available for download from the link above.

The road will remain as is and presumably the N20 designation will not change. It was out of scope for the current project. This was clarified last year.

Pretty pleased with this. It fixes the pressing issue with N20, without encouraging ever more car commuting into Cork City. I'm happy that Blarney southward is out of scope, because it's there that the temptation to widen the existing road to "support new development" (i.e., more cars every morning and evening, worse traffic for everyone) was strongest. Northern tie-in is well done. At the other end, the three-roundabout-dumbbell solution to the mess of junctions around the Blarney business park looks odd, but should work in practice.

I really like the Travel Hubs; I'm glad they were added, and I would like to see these rolled out to the rest of the motorway network. There's already unofficial carpooling parking on the hard shoulders of the approaches to Dublin, so wouldn't it be better to do it right? (And as an EV driver, I can't overstate how great it is to have charging sites available every 10~12 km). My only concern is security, especially at night in the fairly remote stretches through South Co. Limerick .

The tolling is interesting, and I wonder if this will be the first implementation of Road User Charging in Ireland, but M50 is likely to happen first. Basically, you pay per kilometre as in France/Italy, but instead of payment gates on entry and exits, the operators use ANPR cameras and/or tolling tags and/or a mobile app to bill you as you travel.

Of the big pay-by-km networks, France charges €0.10 per km and Italy €0.07, so if you use that as a measure, travelling the full length of this road could mean €5 to €8 in tolls. But depending on how the tolling is implemented, there's also scope for giving discounts for off-peak or higher-occupancy vehicles, though.

What we've all been waiting for, for far, far, far too long. The travel hubs etc will be interesting, definitely having Park and Rides, etc should be promoted - that after all is one of the advantages of roads is that they do allow for fast and reliable bus services. The tolling will be interesting as well, there is a danger that they might make it too expensive, at the end of the day, no matter what car people are driving, most people have to drive anyway, so if it's too expensive people will either use the old road, or go for the via Mitchelstown approach.

I would rather they just got on with building the road (no doubt it would have been an awful lot less than €2 billion if that was the case) but in a country as wealthy as ours, it makes sense to do the active travel as well. I am also very glad it's a proper full blown motorway with the proper 120 km/h speed limits (of course, this is a very low limit by European standards for such roads, but far, far better than what we have right now).

Electioneering Waffle - the whole lot of it.

The largest 2 cities outside of the east coast are not connected by even a direct road.

More tolls and a big missed opportunity to provide a motorway once and for all between the 2 cities.

For myself I'm sick of driving between the 2 cities especially during Christmas with bumper to bumper traffic the whole way.

I'ts so bad that I now go via Mitchlestown and then over via Hospital in Co. Limerick.