Traffic chaos has become part and parcel of Dublin life - and it's getting perceptibly worse year by year. Everybody can now see that the city is facing heart seizure, with all of its arteries clogged by cars and the Liffey quays, in particular, choked by a growing fleet of trucks heading to and from the port.
Just ask the bleary-eyed commuters who must leave their homes 15 or 20 minutes earlier in the morning than they did last year to be sure of getting to work on time. Or consider the shocking estimate that Dublin's economy is losing at least £1 billion every year because of the time being wasted sitting in traffic jams.
Ten years ago, the morning peak period extended from 8 o'clock to 10. Now it runs from 7 to 10 and the volume of traffic is also much greater. Congestion is no longer confined to the city centre and the main roads leading into it. The suburbs, too, are becoming saturated with cars, as more and more motorists join the fray.
According to the Dublin Transportation Office, 137,000 cars hit the road every morning throughout the city and its hinterland. That's 45,700 more trips than was anticipated by transport planners only five years ago; they had not bargained for a booming economy and, with it, an unprecedented surge in the sale of cars.
Car-dealers have never had it so good, with the latest models flying out of their showrooms. Many of the purchasers are young and buying a car for the first time, lured by the promise of freedom held out so tantalisingly by every TV advert, and most of them are availing of cheap loan packages from banks and even building societies.
An EU-funded study by the sociology department at Trinity College concluded that the right to own a car has become almost synonymous with citizenship, quite apart from its value as a status symbol and, for many, a social necessity. "Passing a driving test is a far more important social ritual than exercising the vote for the first time," it said.
The extraordinary, almost exponential increase in car-ownership and use was not anticipated by anyone involved in drafting the DTI (Dublin Transportation Initiative) strategy in the early 1990s. Its forecasts are officially acknowledged as being "very much off target", with the current batch of transport planners now scrambling to catch up.
This failure in forecasting has been compounded by delays in delivering long-planned infrastructural projects - notably Luas, the port tunnel and the southern leg of the M50; all of these are behind schedule, in some cases by several years. Meanwhile, public transport services remain pathetically inadequate due to serious under-funding.
In fact, Dublin does not have a public transport system. Unlike most other European capitals, it is not even possible to transfer from one bus route to another without having to pay a second fare. Links between bus and rail services are also tenuous, adding to the unreliability of public transport and making car use an attractive alternative.
The rule of thumb applied by successive governments and reinforced by the Department of Finance was that public transport loses money, therefore we should not invest in public transport. How else is it possible to explain why not one extra carriage has yet been added to the DART despite a 70 per cent increase in passenger numbers since 1984?
What other explanation can be offered for the appalling conditions on the Maynooth line, for example, with its decrepit stations and trains so overcrowded trains that commuters must squeeze into the guard's van, or for the fact that Dublin Bus is forced to operate with the lowest level of public subsidy of any urban transport service in Europe?
BUT even if there were quality bus corridors running in every direction, many motorists are so attached to their cars that they would not switch to public transport. The perception that "buses are for losers" still holds sway in a society which, more than ever, seems to assign such a high premium to company cars and slimline mobile phones.
"Even if Dublin Bus was to collect these people from their houses every morning, drop the kids off to school and then serve them a champagne breakfast in club class conditions on the way into town, they still wouldn't get the bus," says Mr Owen Keegan, Dublin Corporation's director of traffic. "We're aiming for those who will make the change".
As the current controversy over the Stillorgan Road QBC amply demonstrates, motorists are becoming increasingly aggravated - about the priority being given to Dublin Bus in the allocation of road space, about all the ramps designed to deter rat-running through residential areas and even about the whole idea of "traffic calming".
Yet it is undeniable that much of Dublin's traffic congestion is caused by car commuters. A survey by the National Roads Authority on the M50, which was intended to cater primarily for national traffic, found that commuters account for nearly 70 per cent of all journeys during the morning peak, with four out of every five cars occupied by one person.
All the indications are that car ownership levels will continue to soar. Throughout the State, 1.5 million vehicles were registered at the end of 1998, up from just over one million in 1990, with a similar increase in vehicle miles per capita, yet we are still well below the European Union average of 423 cars per thousand in population.
In a 1998 paper for Earthwatch, Ms Sadhbh O'Neill said that increasing car use degrades the city and severs its communities. In Los Angeles, two-thirds of the land area is given over to road space and parking. With increasing car use, commuting distances become longer and, as congestion increases, public transport deteriorates.
"As roads become more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, more journeys are carried out by car. In response to people's increased mobility, planning decisions are made which assume most people have access to cars," she said. This represented a "terrible tyranny" for those who don't - mainly women, older people, the poor and disabled.
The environmental consequences are alarming. According to Ms O'Neill, "every piece of evidence and every study carried out in recent years points to the disturbing fact that the rise in car ownership and usage will certainly bring about a much lower quality of life, less mobility for some groups in society, and poorer health.
"The car culture advocated by car advertising tries to tell us that `my journey is more important than yours', yet the cost of everyone's journey is borne by society and the environment as a whole: the air we breathe, the streets we live on, and the fragile health of many members of society, including the one in seven children who suffer from asthma."