How could they get it so wrong?

Dublin City Council’s HGV traffic management plan came into force on February 19 to a chorus of complaints from the road haulage industry and other stakeholders. John Loughran reports.

No sooner had the first few trucks powered through Dublin Port Tunnel and out on to the M50 motorway on a wet and dank Monday morning on February 19, did the folly of Dublin City Council’s HGV traffic management plan for the city centre, become apparent.
To calls of “we told you so” the M50 and its interchanges ground to a halt with the volume of peak morning traffic, exasperated by the estimated 1,500 HGVs that were forced out onto the motorway.
Delays of up to two hours were experienced on the motorway between 7.00am and 9.00am, while Dublin city centre was reported as being free of HGVs with peak hour traffic running smoothly.

For months the Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA) had voiced its criticism, ahead of the truck ban. However, despite the association’s protestations Dublin City Council pushed ahead with it plan to introduce the controversial ban.
IRHA press officer Jimmy Quinn argued on behalf of the association that the journey that trucks would have to make to get to south Dublin and the south-east, would be equivalent to the time it would take to get just north of Drogheda in Louth.
Prior to the introduction of the ban about 500 trucks used Sean Moore Road to access the south side of the city daily.
‘‘The report on goods vehicles management strategy by Declan Consultants [commissioned by Dublin City Council] recommended that an artery be left open for HGVs heading south and south-east, but this was overruled by the city council,” said Quinn.
‘‘Research we have carried out ourselves shows that the extra journey time, M50 congestion, toll charges and trade permits will cost haulage companies €29 million this year.

‘‘The Port Tunnel is useful to many HGVs, but not all. At the moment, the industrial estates from Coolock to the airport have benefited from the tunnel, but those on the Naas Road, Tallaght and Sandyford will now be the losers, as it will take longer to get to them.
The IRHA says that it agrees with the general principle of removing HGVs from Dublin city centre, but claims the plan has been ill-conceived and should not have been launched until the upgrade of the M50 is completed in about two years time.
"The notion that vehicles coming up the N11 from Arklow, Wicklow, Bray and Leopardstown have to do the entire loop of the M50 and cross the toll-bridge twice to access the container depot in south bank quay is just plainly asinine,” Quinn commented.
He continued: "We have no problem with the general principle that there should be no vehicles in the city unless they have business in there but we've gone about this in a very ham-fisted way.”
Hauliers received considerable support for its position on the truck ban from business. The Small Firms’ Association (SFA) claims the ban will significantly add to costs.

SFA Chairman, Pat Crotty, condemned the commencement of the new HGV Management Strategy, as badly thought out and administratively inoperable.
Crotty commented “to force trucks to take a journey of 25km right around the M50, to a destination that may only be a short distance away is an unbalanced approach. With the introduction of the HGV Strategy, we are forcing further traffic onto the M50, which is already overly congested. Transport costs are currently estimated at 7% of production costs. Extra time spent on the road costs money and makes Irish business uncompetitive!”
Crotty continued: “This is yet another regulatory and cost burden on small firms and the SFA believes that Dublin City Council have not recognised the impact that increased regulations and costs have on Irish competitiveness.”
Under the strategy, a permit is only valid for one day, and can only be applied for 14 days in advance – “this is simply bureaucracy gone mad”, commented Crotty.

The Small Firms Association believes that forcing trucks to use the port tunnel and restricting access on the city’s streets is an unwarranted restriction of the free movement of goods and will exacerbate the bottlenecks in the movements of goods through our ports and erode the competitive edge of businesses from all over the country.
“In fact, we believe that the new Strategy in cordoning off the traffic in the area around the port is actually contrary to EU Internal Market rules,” commented Crotty. “Our prosperity depends on business; business depends on its ability to produce competitively priced goods and services and to get them to the right market at the right time”.
He added: “From just a ten-minute delay each day in traffic, a company with six employees can lose up to nine weeks productivity a year! Traffic is now responsible for millions of hours being lost each year as people and goods sit in an ever-spiralling traffic problem.”

To its credit the National Roads Authority (NRA) warned Dublin City Council more than a year ago that the truck ban was based on poor research and could lead to chaos for commuters on the M50.
The NRA wrote to the council in February 2006 and said there was a ‘‘significant knowledge gap in the decision-making process’’ in relation to the council’s HGV policy. It asked for the ban on trucks to be implemented on a phased basis over a number of years.
The NRA said the ban was ill advised and would lead to a greater number of HGVs than expected using the M50, already one of the busiest roads in the country. The authority added that it was not aware of any research or traffic-modelling that had been done to predict truck flow in the tunnel.

Furthermore, the state agency said that no assessments had been carried out on the impact that the corridor would have on M50 traffic.
Dublin City Council says the HGV traffic management plan is up for review, in August and the plan can be amended at that time, if isn’t working.
However, the IRHA has other ideas. The association says it will be speaking to Dublin City Council “in a matter of weeks” not months, if the plan isn’t working. Demonstrations are in the offing!