During and after World War II, road-building materials like bitumen, and the money to pay for them, were scarce in Ireland and development ground to a halt. The wartime recession persisted and it was 1960 before funds became available for a resumption of road investment and renewal.

But long-range planning helped to occupy the engineers and one of the projects identified was called the Dublin Western Bypass, a C-ring inland from what was, at the time, a much smaller city. It was to be located close to the route of what eventually became the M50, commenced as mainly a two-plus-two motorway in 1983 and finally completed in 2010 when three-plus-three sections and junction upgrades were added.

It has a round-the-clock toll at a single fixed point on the bridge near the Strawberry Beds, undifferentiated by reference to traffic volumes, leaving all other sections free to users.

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The M50 is too close to the sprawling city to serve as the bypass initially intended. It is mainly just eight or nine kilometres from the centre, a little more on the southern sections. The metropolitan area has sprawled out into the outlying counties of Kildare and Meath for the last 50 years and the M50 has become ‘Dublin’s Main Street’.

A large portion of Dublin’s population now lives to the west of the route out in north Leinster, where housing shortage has consigned the reluctant Dubs.

There is a national motorway network finally nearing completion which converges on the M50 from all points and the route is used by traffic which neither originates in Dublin nor has a destination there. The AA Routeplanner even recommends the M50 as the best option for a trip from Sligo or Galway in the west to Wexford in the southeast corner of the island.

Last week, RTÉ devoted the Prime Time programme to a discussion of the extreme congestion on the route. There is a plan for a new C-ring further west, perhaps from Drogheda to Naas on the M7, which might indeed be truly a bypass, although it might have been a better idea to avoid the sprawl altogether by building more housing in the city proper.

Prime Time interviewed several frustrated commuters forced to leave home in the midlands for three-hour trips, and even longer, to various work destinations not just in Dublin city centre but around the sprawling Dublin suburbs.

Traffic volumes on the M50 now reach extraordinary levels, large multiples of the figures using any of the other Liffey bridges, and there is essentially nothing that can be done about it.

Expanding the three-plus-three design to four-plus four or greater would be phenomenally expensive, would take forever, and would be offset by new traffic currently displaced at peak by the fear of congestion and delay.

Building a new C-ring further out, arguably where it should have been in the first place, would cost hundreds of millions and any freed-up capacity on the M50 would quickly recruit new users at peak from those who avoid the chaos and delay.

It is best to think of congestion on city streets, including Dublin’s new Main Street, as a rationing device. Would-be users are aware of the likelihood of delay and choose alternatives, including more expensive housing convenient to commuting destinations, alternative routes, more accessible jobs, public transport if available or off-peak journey times. Congestion-avoidance is however a highly inefficient rationing device and there are affordable alternatives.

As a practical matter, further widening of city streets is virtually impossible due to cost, their capacity will always be over-subscribed when access is free at the point of use and congestion charging has instead been chosen in many cities around the world, including London and New York.

A recent article by Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD described the current toll on the M50 as a congestion charge and argued for its abolition. The RTÉ programme lamented the charge too, on the bizarre grounds that it was bad value given the congestion.

A charge undifferentiated at peak versus off-peak, and applying only at a single point on a multi-sector motorway (there are 15 junctions) is not a congestion charge. The charge of zero on all but one of the sections is a congestion subsidy.

Current agitation for rail-based transport solutions is 50 years too late. There will never be a comprehensive and affordable railway solution in such a low density city – the damage has been done by urban sprawl.