Robert Moses is a name synonymous for Americans with the arterial Highway, just as the automobile recalls Henry Ford. Around the turn of the 20th century, Moses was appointed as New York City Parks Commissioner, the first of many municipal positions he would exploit as a means of building autonomous power. In the course of a long and contentious career, Moses achieved almost legendary status as peddler of an automotive dream that was so defining of urban America. In its initial form, Moses’ main legacy to the world was the Parkways. Designed as fast, high capacity escape routes from the city, these corridors took the form of linear parks with wide grassy medians, featuring verdant margins and lots of trees. Engineered with multiple lanes, traffic separation and easy access interchanges, the early Parkways later evolved into the dense network of highways and expressways that crossed the continent in every direction and literally gave shape and form to modern Motown America.
Decades later, on its European home ground, the auto was mobilised for the masses in the course of extensive post war reconstruction. Ireland of course was very late to the party and it wasn’t until the 1970’s that the Nation embraced all that was modern in the automotive sphere, with the adoption of a Dublin orbital plan, designated from that time as the M50.
It’s one of the ironies of history that Dublin’s first dalliance with the orbital form, entailing a necklace of outer road, edging the suburbs and transiting fields, was delivered with an almost casual efficiency of design and despatch. This, a congestion-relieving plan for the North and South Circular Roads, was an 18th century invention of Grattan’s Parliament. A public wonder of the age, it went from conception to delivery in the space of a dozen or so years. The early NCR was even funded by tolls.
In performance terms, today’s M50 stands in sharp contrast against the achievement of that pre-technological age. Not so much expedited as ground out, it stands as a monument to heroic underachievement, an anti-paragon of infrastructure. And think of the €150m to be taken in tolls this year as the price for this parasitic underperformance; revenue climbs as a function of runaway traffic growth, while simultaneously performance declines. This is without question a monumental taxpayer scam, a sustained monetary extraction that verges on embezzlement. The final insult lies in the consideration that the sorry mess is actually exacerbated by the only €1bn price tag tunnel anywhere with a toll designed to keep cars out. Yet, as a full orbital corridor, this mid 20th century conception remains unfinished. Planned to run across the Liffey and under Sandymount strand, the orbital M50’s final link still features prominently in our traffic plans. From Western Parkway to Eastern Bypass, it’s a sorry saga spanning fifty years. It could run for fifty more…..
Words: Reg McCabe
This concludes our What If….series. The full collection is available on our website totallydublin.ie Many thanks to Reg and all our contributors.
