This is a wicked distortion of my comment, the jist of which was that there are at least two alternative approaches to achieving the link between Derry to Dublin, both of which avoid the need to upgrade the N2. Why is A5-N2 upgrade the only game in town? Were any alternatives such as Derry-Omagh-Dungannon ever evaluated?

Even if the difference were a mere 10% one ought to be allowed to question whether this extra cost is warranted. After all this is tax payers’ money, or more precisely borrowed money that has to be paid back by tax payers with hefty interest. For some people the profligate ways of the naughties seem hard to shed.

I suspect this entire thread is based on an initial false premise derived from an out of date document.

I wonder wher Edgar got his information from ? Who did he ask for an opinion ?

Construction on the A5 is not due to start until 2012 - the work that is being done is planning.

JTO again:

This is nit-picking. Like saying Sir Alec Ferguson doesn’t begin work until 3pm Saturdays. The work to construct the motorway is under way and, unlike in the south, there is no more than a derisory campaign to stop it. I have no idea at what point the work shifts from engineers doing lots of calculations in an office to workmen shifting soil with bulldozers. Its still work on the project.

@Edgar Morgenroth

By the way transport links are bi-directional and there is some international evidence that weaker regions can actually suffer from an improvement of accessibility as it makes it easier for more competitive firms from other regions to compete in these weaker regions.

JTO again:

This is exactly what the unionist government at Stormont said in the 1960s regarding why they weren’t providing any proper roads or infrastructure for counties Tyrone, Derry and Fermanagh.

AS for the suggestion by some (not Edgar) that the main highway from Donegal to Dublin should go through Belfast, give me a break. What next? That the main highway from Limerick to Dublin should go through Cork?

But:

It seems to me to be slightly disingenuous to state that a 3.5 km bypass of Slane is not required (I think it’s 3.5 km?), while quoting safety figures for the entire N2. The N2 from Dublin to Slane is a good straight stretch of road, with an excellent new road from Finglas to Ashbourne. However, it is not the entire N2 which is under discussion here; it’s Slane Bridge. If Mr Morgenroth wants to argue that the Slane bypass is not needed, then he should argue that alone, on its merits, rather than a general “other roads are more dangerous than the N2, in its entirety”. As Slaneman stated earlier, traffic through Slane is routed across a bridge which was designed for horse and carriage traffic. A large proportion of this traffic is HGV. The bridge itself is being damaged by this unsuitable traffic, and the heritage village is suffering. The road is inherently dangerous due to its topography, the steep hills leading down to it from both directions, the narrow bridge and the bends leading up to the bridge.

To state that a HGV ban is workable because traffic management is put in place for the annual concert is facetious. During the weekend of the concert, the school is closed to facilitate the large influx of Gardai from around the country required to police the traffic. Local residents are by and large confined to the village for that day. All roads to and from the village are policed. Is Mr. Morgenroth suggesting that something similar should be put in place to prevent HGVs entering the village on a daily basis, because if he isn’t, then the comparison is moot. Slane has a part-time Garda presence. Who is going to police the proposed HGV ban? (The comparison with Dublin is also a facile one; Dublin has a large number of Gardai, including traffic corps, who are available to police the ban). Dublin also the benefit of an alternative route instead of the quays - but as Slaneman asked, where does Mr. Morgenroth propose the HGVs who wish to travel through Slane divert to? The M1 is not an alternative in every case; it may run parallel to the N2, but it does not service the same towns. For HGVs to travel via the M1 to towns currently serviced by the N2, they would need to leave the M1 and travel smaller regional routes to access those towns. Hardly a solution.

“Construction has started” as most people would understand it, means “bulldozers in active service”, to use expressions near-enough to yours, and this is not due to happen until 2012, according to the ‘A5 WTC’ (a.k.a. the NI section of the Dublin-Derry dual carriageway) website as referenced below.

By the same source, decision-making as to the preferred route as currently ongoing and this will obviously employ a lot of people in surveying and deskwork.

The timetable for the above has existed for years and the fact that in that time several good upgrades to the current route have been started and finished (Ballygawley, Omagh, Newtownstewart) only to be ostensibly duplicated in a few years, tends to raise suspicions …

Ta to the RoI taxpayers for your apparently generous financial contribution to the scheme, but it may not be that far off pro-rata to the number of RoI-reg cars currently using the route. Clearly the region, on either side of the border, with most to gain is Letterkenny / North Donegal, with, as it stands, a much greater requirement for Dublin trips than the adjacent NI region.

Just don’t say the same principle in reverse should apply in relation to upgrade / maintenance of the M1, N2, N3 …

http://www.a5wtc.com

At least two alternatives are available to provide the Derry-Dublin link. One is to upgrade the A6 to M2, providing a link via Belfast (180 miles Vs 160 via N2). Second alternative would be to upgrade A5 to Omagh and create a new link from there to M1 at Dungannon and hence to Dublin. This new greenfield corridor could be tolled, providing a huge saving for the two exchequers.

Of course none of the alternatives were ever evaluated as the A5 upgraded is purely a political project.

The basic point remains - there are national roads that are not motorways/dual carriageways that are safe and others that are not, and the generalisation that most or all of the fatality reductions are due to motorways/dual carriageways is simply not true, even if such roads are on average safer than other ones (JTO prefers to ignore the evidence presented).

@JohnTheOptimist - the fact that there are 100s and perhaps 1000’s of miles of motorways through sparsely populated areas in the US proves absolutely nothing. There is every chance they wasted a lot of money (and there is some empirical evidance on this) - why should we make the same mistakes?

You refuse to accept that these roads have a cost that someone has to pay. I suppose it is easy to ignore that little detail if you expect others to pay.

As for the economic impact on the disadvantaged North-West. The benefit for the North-West of an overspecified road compared to one that is specified appropriately is zero, but it has a negative impact at the national level as it draws resources unnecessarily away from other projects (that is the key point of my post).

By the way transport links are bi-directional and there is some international evidence that weaker regions can actually suffer from an improvement of accessibility as it makes it easier for more competitive firms from other regions to compete in these weaker regions.

Construction on the A5 is not due to start until 2012 - the work that is being done is planning.

The key road design factor for preventing accidents is visibility. Wide straight flat roads, with hard shoulders all the way, are very safe for a lawfully proceeding motorist to drive on.

In areas of low population density, it doesnt matter if these roads are motorways or “N” roads. One is as safe as the other, but motorways are necessarily more expensive to build.

No, no: please don’t trouble yourself. It’s much more fun for me to continue reading your lengthy repetitions of single correlations and your dodging both counter-evidence and any discussion of cost.

bjg

I believe that we, through our Government, contributed to a refurbishment of the airport at Derry. I am not sure if Dublin-Derry flights benefit from a PSO, as do flights to Carrickfin.

I have news for you. Prepare yourself for a shock. Donegal taxpayers are southern taxpayers. Donegal motorists are southern motorists. At the moment, they get a negligible return for their taxes in terms of road development, when compared to their southern compatriots in Dublin, Galway, Cork, Limerick, Waterford etc. Prepare yourself for another shock. The only way you can drive from Donegal, or at least from most of it, to Dublin is through Strabane, Newtownstewart, Omagh, Ballygawley and Aughnacloy. That’s why the Dublin government is happily paying 40pc of the cost of it.

Work has indeed started on the Derry-Aughnacloy motorway project. I know because my cousin works as an engineer in the Northern Ireland roads department and he told me a fortnight ago that he’s working full-time on it now, as are others. Obviously, in any major project such as this, bulldozers are not put into active service on day one, but that doesn’t mean work has not commenced. The first phase in any major construction project such as this takes place in offices, with engineers resolving various planning, technical and engineering problems.

The main point I was making, however, was in relation to the amount of opposition to the project, and the contrast between north and south. There is a different mentaility in the north compared to the south. In the north, infrastructural development is generally welcomed. The unionist government in Stormont was building motorways as early as the 1960s, a time when the roads in the south were little more than dirt tracks. Almost everyone welcomed it. There were no protests against their construction. Indeed, the unionist population were at the time rather proud that the north was so far ahead of the south in this respect. The only protests came from the nationalist population, not because they objected to the motorways being built, but rather because they justifiably objected to the fact that the unionist government was only building them in unionist areas and putting the nationalist areas at an economic disadvantage as a result.

This difference will be further highlighted by the Derry-Dublin motorway. The Derry to Aughnacloy section will proceed smoothly, be completed on time, and with minimal fuss and minimal protest against it. If past experience is anything to go by, the section from the border south will be delayed for years on end, as the anti-roads anti-infrastructure-development anti-everything nutters, led no doubt by the likes of Vincent Salafia and Frank McDonald, mobilise to stop it.

Maybe the UK would like to buy Donegal? All in one piece, I mean, rather than holiday home by holiday home. Then we’d have an immediate improvement in Irish road accident statistics, Donegal and London/Derry would be reunited and Donegal factory owners wouldn’t need roads to Dublin.

JTO again:

If ever you make an at least semi-intelligent point, I will respond to it.

I travelled today from Tallahassee to New Orleans. Not sure exactly, but it must be about 300 miles. It was dual carriageway the whole way. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t through a very high-density or particularily rich part of the USA, mainly rural Alabama, Mississipi and Louisiana. So, obviously, this part of the US doesn’t agree with ESRI thinking on the matter of what roads are the safest to drive on. It is self-evident that a dual carriageway is safer than a single carriageway road, the main reason being that the danger of a head-on collision from overtaking is virtually eliminated. As dearg doom implies, looking at short stretches of road for accident statistics is often misleading as the sample is so small there is a lot of random variation.

The bottom line re road safety is as follows:

(a) There is a wealth of data worldwide showing that motorways/dual carriageways have far fewer accidents per million miles travelled than single carriageways.

(b) This is confirmed by Ireland’s recent experience. Since the construction of a large number of motorways, there has been a massive drop in the road deaths rate, with the improvement being far greater in the southern half of the country where the vast majority of the motorways are.

Road safety is only one aspect of the matter, of course. There are the economic imolications as well. Perhaps you will answer the points I made about the north-west region being at a relative disadavantage, if it is the only corner of the country not linked by a motorway (or a rail line) to Dublin.

Also the dangerous N53 is a possible alignment for the main route to Derry, a 2+2 road here would direct traffic on the M1 at Dundalk and also provide part of an East West route from Dundalk.

The Road Safety Authority produces loads of very intersting statistics - their site is well worth a visit. Their latest full report on road collisions refers to 2008. Table 51 gives details of fatal and injury collisions, which I presume everyone will agree are the most important to reduce, for each national road. Conveniently they provide a rate per 10 vehicle km i.e. they are scaled for volume and distance.

If you rank them and pick the 5 most dangerous roads you will find that they are the N29 (spur off N25 near Waterford), N74 (Tipperary to Cashel), N53 (Castleblaney to Dundalk), N54 (Clones to Belturbet), N51 (Navan - Delvin). The N2 comes 22nd worst of 68. I don’t know the N29 and have only scant recollection of the N74, but it seems to me what they all have in common is that they have moderate to low traffic volumes, but are quite twisty with some very dangerous bends. There are certainly sections where a 100km/h speed limit seems inappropriate.

Now you might say that all but one of these are National Secondary roads. If you do the same for the National Primary roads (N1-33 + M50). Do the same thing angain and you find that the most dangerous roads are the N29, N30 (Enniscorthy to New Ross), N14 (Letterkenny to Lifford), N5 (Longford to Westport) and N33 (Ardee to M1). Again one can argue whether these roads are of national road standard. I know the N33 well and it certainly is of a very good standard but here the problem is dangerous overtaking (I also saw a guy going around a roundabout in Ardee the wrong way round one morning). The N2 comes joint 8th out of 34.

What about the safest roads - taking all national road these are the N12 (Monaghan - Middletown(Armagh)), N82 (Saggart - Rathcoole, off N7), N77 (Durrow to Kilkenny), N73 (Mallow to Mitchelstown), M50. Only two primary roads of which one (N12) is more like a seconday.

What is the point to this. Firstly, it shows that there are dangerous roads in the southern half of the island. Secondly, there are many safe roads that are not dual carriageway/motorways. In other words youre generalisations are just that and the true picture is considerably more complex than simply the density of motorways or dual carriageways. On this first pass analysis it like motorway/dual-carriageway sdensity plays just a minor role (I will do some more serious analysis on this data in due course as this is a very interesting topic).

If I were to invest in national roads to improve road safety I would start with the most dangerous roads. None of these would need dual-carriageways but they need dangerous bends removed and possibly some towns/villages by-passed.

On Tuesday last, I made the following comment as part of a reponse to a thread on “The data and evidence deficit in Ireland” on the irelandafternama forum - here http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/the-data-and-evidence-deficit-in-ireland/

“The absence of up-to-date and proper data allows government, at all levels, to make decisions in whimsical and arbitrary ways ie. as there is no “evidence”, public authorities can decide what it likes.

An example is the ceasing of the compilation of Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) on national roads in 2004.
I have never heard a reason for this bizarre decision. See here
http://www.nra.ie/NetworkManagement/TrafficCounts/MeasurementofTrafficFlowonNationalRoads/

I gather that the long running AADT series (based on methods refined over years) has now been replaced by traffic counts from 120 sites and a National Traffic Model built using “synthesized” data from the 2006 Census.

Engineers routinely state that “If you cannot measure it, you cannot control it”. So for the last 5 years NRA has been planning and building with their eyes fixed firmly on a very limited view of the past. They have denied themselves and us one means in which we can have confidence in their assessments of need prior to resource allocation.

In another forum, I took a wider view on the need for information and data.
http://politicalreform.ie/2010/06/21/freedom-of-information-and-corruption/ ”

Now I wonder what kind of thing “synthesized data” is - it is new for me. I wonder is it the NRA equivalent of CDOs and other forms of financial engineering that have contributed to the current crisis?

@JohnTheOptimist - While the Good Friday Agreement does not mention roads or canals it has a provision for a border referendum which Sinn Fein could call at anytime - the fact that they have not and won’t tells the whole story. While lecturing on the all-island context they prefer to sponge off London (and Dublin) and avoid doing anything that might make a meaningful contribution towards unification.

@Donal O’Brolchain “Bertie’s governments forgot that. They were driven by having all the appearances of wealth (eg. the Bertie Bowl) without having created a sustainable base for enhancing such wealth as had been created during the 1990s.” - excellent comment - one should add that while they were busy creating monuments to themselves, they expected us and future generations to foot the bill.

For what it is worth, I offer (part of) a comment of mine on “planning” road construction.

http://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/the-data-and-evidence-deficit-in-ireland/
“The absence of up-to-date and proper data allows government, at all levels, to make decisions in whimsical and arbitrary ways ie. as there is no “evidence”, public authorities can decide what it likes.

An example is the ceasing of the compilation of Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) on national roads in 2004.
I have never heard a reason for this bizarre decision. See here
http://www.nra.ie/NetworkManagement/TrafficCounts/MeasurementofTrafficFlowonNationalRoads/

I gather that the long running AADT series (based on methods refined over years) has now been replaced by traffic counts from 120 sites and a National Traffic Model built using “synthesized” data from the 2006 Census.

Engineers routinely state that “If you cannot measure it, you cannot control it”. So for the last 5 years NRA has been planning and building with their eyes fixed firmly on a very limited view of the past. They have denied themselves and us one means in which we can have confidence in their assessments of need prior to resource allocation.”

If I may add, what is the difference between “synthesized” data now being used for planning/monitoring road building/usage and CDOs+all the other types of “financial engineering” that led to the credit crunch etc?

However it needs to be counterbalanced by the failure to bring the road access to Rosslare Harbour up to the standard you suggest for connecting the cities on this island. This harbour is a major point for international goods trade.

As one of the most heavily trade-dependent countries in the world, surely that should have some bearing on prioritising investment in roads. I remain to be convinced that such trade can be only done by aircraft (eg. people travelling as part of service industries, low-volume high-value goods) and/or telecommunications.

IMO, Bertie’s governments forgot that. They were driven by having all the appearances of wealth (eg. the Bertie Bowl) without having created a sustainable base for enhancing such wealth as had been created during the 1990s.

This is cargo-cult economics see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

We need to refocus.

Maybe the UK would like to buy Donegal? All in one piece, I mean, rather than holiday home by holiday home. Then we’d have an immediate improvement in Irish road accident statistics, Donegal and London/Derry would be reunited and Donegal factory owners wouldn’t need roads to Dublin.

bjg