The Dublin Port Tunnel was a qualified success on its first day of operation, if the road test carried out yesterday by The Irish Timesis anything to go by.
For a trip from Dublin Port to Ballyfermot in West Dublin, via the tunnel and the M50, between 15 and 30 minutes in journey time was saved over the cross-town route, according to the truckdrivers with whom I travelled.
Mind you, there were just five trucks in the tunnel as we made the journey yesterday afternoon - four car transporters in our convey and a northern-bound lorry. On emerging from the tunnel, the lorry took off towards Belfast on an empty road while we turned into the car park that is the M50.
But even with the stop-go traffic on the ring road, the drivers were pleasantly surprised. One hour to get from the port to the Toyota depot on the Killeen Road was as good as it gets through town, they said, and the ride was considerably smoother and more stress-free than the alternative.
"Not bad at all, even if it's facing the wrong way," was the reaction from my driver, Deco Nolan. "Better than I expected. That trip would have taken 90 minutes across town," said another driver, Ian Tinkler.
David Delaney, operations director at Green Tiger Express, was impressed. "Absolutely unbelievable. If that was the norm for every day I would take our trucks away from the city immediately.
"However, the real test starts tomorrow, when all the trucks coming from the port are in the tunnel."
Delaney's car transporters will suffer less wear and tear using the tunnel and the M50, but against that he'll have to fork out €5.80 per truck each time it crosses the West-Link. Another problem is that the tunnel is not big enough to take a fully laden transporter, so there is a productivity loss of about 15 per cent.
However, the real determinant will be time, a commodity in short supply for the company since Dublin's traffic problem worsened.
Drivers used to manage four round trips a day but this has been cut to three because of lengthening journey times. "I used to start around 7am but now you're going nowhere unless you're driving before 6am," says Tinkler. "The rush hour keeps getting earlier and earlier."
The hardest part yesterday was getting into the tunnel. We were waiting for hours before it opened for trucks at 3.30pm. The delay was caused by a last-minute decision to put down traffic cones restricting traffic to one lane, we were told.
Having left Dublin Port at 3.45pm, we arrived at the toll booths nine minutes later. These were manned, even though there was no traffic and HGVs and coaches, which are the only vehicles allowed to use the tunnel for now, travel toll-free.
We were in and out of the tunnel's yellowed interior in five minutes, a minute shorter than the official journey time, even though Deco stuck rigidly to the 50 km/hour speed limit. The journey under Dublin's streets was unremarkable, apart from the fog that seemed to hang under its ceiling.
The chaos forecast by some on the short stretch of the M1 did not materialise, though traffic was very light. We had no difficulty switching lanes to the left-hand sliproad on to the M50. "So far, so good," said Deco, losing some of his earlier scepticism.
By the turnoff for Ballymun, however, the traffic was down to a crawl, so it took us half an hour to reach the West-Link toll. Ten minutes further on and we were at the Red Cow roundabout, the departure point for drivers heading to Cork and Limerick.
Our sliproad into town was completely empty and we arrived at our destination at 4.46pm.
A straw poll of the drivers afterwards was inconclusive. Some felt going through the city was the best option for their first, early morning load, while the tunnel might work well for later journeys.
Overall, though, they would wait and see and were likely to continue going through the city until forced to stop doing so by Dublin City Council.
