The M8 will cut journey times but you could be left short by lack of services on the route, writes TIM O'BRIEN
IT IS true – Dublin to Cork in under three hours.
Okay, two hours and 58 minutes from Dublin’s Red Cow to Cork’s Dunkettle interchange and it did not match the “two hours and 20 minutes” which the National Roads Authority said should be possible.
But the journey was completed on a Friday afternoon when the sudden opening of the new Portlaoise to Cullahill section of the M8 unleashed what looked like a tidal wave of traffic which at times seems to fill the motorway ahead of us all the way to Cork.
Early in the day I set the clock to zero at the Red Cow. In two minutes we had stopped at a red light at Newlands Cross. The next 20km of triple carriageway, one of the highest specification roads in the State, is not a motorway, but a national route with a speed limit of 100 km/h.
This stretch of road, with its filling stations offering food and restrooms provides the last “at road” services between Dublin and Cork.
About 15 minutes out from the Red Cow we enter the motorway proper, the road reducing to two lanes and the permitted maximum increasing to 120km/h.
Traffic is light and the journey uneventful as the motorway passes Kildare, the Curragh and Newbridge.
At junction 17 for Portlaoise we have travelled about 79km in 45 minutes and past the “old” Cork junction through Abbeyleix and Durrow.
As it is early and the new road is not open we stop the clock.
At the opening ceremony Taoiseach Brian Cowen praised Mary White of the Abbeyleix Tidy Towns Committee who he says managed in just four minutes on television “to name every business in Abbeyleix”.
There is a wait after the speeches while the road is cleared by gardaÍ and at about 3.30pm we are back at junction 17. We restart the clock and at the toll plaza cars are queuing five deep.
The electronic tag allows us to use the express lane and NRA spokesman Seán ONeill later explains that that “level of service” agreements with operator the Celtic Roads Group mean that if queues build up, the barriers must be opened letting cars through free.
We arrive at the M7/M8 junction. We calculate this is 55 minutes from the Red Cow if we had travelled continuously.
From here for another 14 kilometres crowds line the overbridges to see the traffic on the new road, after three years of construction.
We pass the Goul river and traffic slows considerably, the first of a number of seemingly inexplicable slows on the remainder of the journey.
The new road including the toll plaza has taken 28 minutes to traverse, from the Portlaoise junction 17 to the tie-in with the existing motorway at Cullahill. We calculate it is 73 minutes from the Red Cow.
South of Cullahill the traffic increases, perhaps because we are now on motorway which has been open since 2008 and we have been joined by the “old” Cork road.
As we cross the river Blackwater we calculate it is 160 minutes from the Red Cow. Fourteen kilometres later we pass the Fermoy toll which deducts €1.90 and about 13 kilometres on we are at the Dunkettle interchange.
By the clock we have travelled for 178 minutes. We could do better on a different day.