Sir, – Having just returned from France and Germany, and having good first-hand experience over the years of both their road and rail systems, I do not find Frank McDonald’s claim (Opinion Analysis, September 15th) that we should have built high-speed rail instead of a national motorway network very convincing or realistic.
France and Germany are large populated countries with major urban centres often many hundreds of kilometres apart. High-speed rail was built to complement an extensive motorway system, tolled in France but not in Germany. Motorways are more heavily used in Germany as a result. The French do not impose tolls round Paris, to prevent traffic diversion onto the city streets. There is a speed limit of 130 km/h in France, but no upper speed limit on clear stretches of the German autobahn system. If we wanted, at little extra cost, to obtain more return for our motorway investment, we could raise our limit to the French level outside the urban periphery.
Frank McDonald is absolutely right that the Fianna Fáil government, and in particular then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, in the context of overflowing revenues, brushed aside the piecemeal approach to road improvements in 1999 in favour of a full-scale, mainly radial, motorway system, completed on target by the NRA in 2010. Many economists agreed with using the window of opportunity to do that. All international competitiveness surveys showed that Ireland had a very poor reputation in respect of transport infrastructure, and if we wanted to remain attractive for investment we had to improve this, even though in a smaller country a lot of things, including newspapers, can be less economic.
Frank McDonald gives no recognition or credit in his article for the simultaneous heavy investment in rail safety, additional rolling stock, increased train frequencies and capacity, and the construction of a mostly very successful Dublin light rail system in part modelled on that of Bordeaux. Bertie Ahern and Mary O’Rourke and her successors were clear that there was no further mainly road-based solution to Dublin’s traffic congestion.
While it is true that at quiet off-peak times most long-distance journeys to Dublin by motorway from other cities can be done in not much more than a couple of hours, at busy times it takes an additional half an hour to three-quarters to reach the city centre from the periphery. That, together with the high cost of parking, will continue to keep mainline rail travel attractive and competitive for a lot of people living outside Dublin, apart altogether from the better use of time that train travel allows.
Overall, the transport investments of the last decade will stand to this country for a long time to come, but obviously there is a lot more that can be done as and when the public finances allow. – Yours, etc,