In just a decade, bus lanes, population growth, rising car sales and poor public transport have doomed Operation Freeflow, writes Karl Tsigdinos
There is a great buzz to travelling through traffic with a garda escort, a boyish pleasure in watching the motorcycle gardaí halt traffic and wave your car through red lights and busy junctions. (Perhaps the only more puerile fun is running the lights and sirens on a garda car or fire engine.)
But unless you travel everywhere with such an escort, then you're doomed to be stuck in traffic with the rest of us.
That's exactly what happened to the then Taoiseach, John Bruton, back in 1996. He almost missed an important meeting while he was stuck in a pre-Christmas traffic jam. So angry was Mr Bruton at having to suffer the slings and arrows (just slings, really) of Dublin traffic, he immediately ordered a fix.
The result was Operation Freeflow. Despite its self-serving origins, Freeflow was an effective cure to Dublin's annual holiday season gridlock because beneath its slogan-like name, Operation Freeflow was simply the enforcement of existing traffic laws.
This meant no parking on yellow lines, clearways were kept clear, box junctions kept open, and so on. The result was startling: traffic actually moved - freely.
But as anyone who has driven in Dublin lately will tell you, Freeflow has turned into No Go. How has that happened in just one decade?
Let's start with the addition of bus lanes (I'd scarcely dignify them with the nomenclature "Quality Bus Corridors").
Freeflow worked so well that many queried the need for bus lanes at all, yet they were pushed through in the late 1990s, reducing road space available to cars by between 33 and 50 per cent, even on roads where few buses ran and (in some cases) at times when no buses ran at all.
Then there was the five-fold rise in car sales, from an all-time low of 53,000 units in the mid-1980s to an astonishing quarter of a million units in 2000.
Even in their wildest fantasies, no one in the car industry would have predicted that car ownership levels would double. There was no way that city planners could have done so either.
The building boom played its part too. Housing estates are springing up in once far-flung rural outposts, every one of those houses adding two cars to our roads, since there is no other way to get into Dublin.
The fact that Dublin's population will have doubled within the next decade from its 1980s levels will further exacerbate our woes.
Top all of that with a seasonal jump in traffic of at least X per cent in Dublin and Freeflow was doomed almost from the start.
Evidence of that can be seen daily on the streets of Dublin, while internet discussion groups are positively blue with motorists' complaints.
It's not just the online mavens complaining either: a recent survey of 600 senior business people revealed that nearly three-quarters of businesses have suffered as a direct result of traffic congestion, with an average of six hours per month lost per respondent.
That means that each employee loses nearly one working day a month stuck in traffic. Fine Gael chief Enda Kenny estimates that gridlock costs business more than €600 million annually.
Despite these very real consequences, Dublin's traffic planners have been steadily legislating the automobile off of Dublin's streets. Yet public transportation remains woefully inadequate. Dublin's former Director of Traffic, Owen Keegan, has been quite overt in his feelings about cars, saying two years ago, "We have given up trying to cater for the private car and if people haven't worked that out yet, then there is a serious problem with IQ."
It doesn't take a very high IQ to work out that even where public transportation does exist, it's often difficult (if not impossible) for people to access.
"Park and Ride" has been the cri de coeur of successive government ministers, yet in 2005, after a decade of promises, there are only five Park & Ride facilities for the entire greater Dublin area - offering just 2,700 parking spaces between them. These must cater not only to the regular commuter but to the seasonal shopper too. Worse, the vertiginous increase in land value means that Park and Ride will become ancient history, as will car parks in other parts of the city, further reducing the alternatives for motorists.
So is there any point in pressing on with Operation Freeflow?
In a pure cost-benefit assessment, it must be worthwhile. The Gardai didn't respond to a query on the true cost in terms of personnel, overtime, resources and so on, but in 1998, the AA's Conor Faughnan claimed continuous application of Freeflow would cost £5 million (€6.3 million) per annum. Even allowing for inflation, it's still worthwhile when measured against reported losses to business.
Instead, such a simple solution is being buried under another catchy slogan-like name: Transport 21. This is the programme that promises €34 billion over the next decade to upgrade our transportation network nationwide.
Yet though we are assured that every element of Transport 21 has been costed accurately and will be delivered on time and on budget, figures aren't available for most of the proposed programmes.
The figures that are available were already set in place by the Dublin Transport Office report of 2000, the National Road Authority's 2004 road-building plan and the 1999 National Development Plan.
So, nothing really new then, a fact acknowledged by Dublin's new traffic tsar (or tsarina) Dr Margaret O'Mahony. She said, "[ TRANSPORT 21] is about building on previous plans." Meanwhile, the Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen, is seriously considering a London-style congestion charge for Dublin.
But when London launched its congestion charge, 87 percent of its commuters were already using public transport. In Dublin, 70 per cent of commuters must travel to work by car, as they have no alternative.
As we face into this grim and gridlocked future, we can only look back with rose-tinted nostalgia at a time when Operation Freeflow actually worked and traffic flowed.
We can also wonder at the promises made by Transport 21. It is a shell game in which we are assured that there really is a pea, we just never get to see it. Nor can we move to check it out ourselves - we're stuck in traffic.