Sir, - The call by Conor Faughnan of the Automobile Association for the lifting of the West Link toll facility's barriers at peak times represents a belated recognition of an unpalatable fact.
The West Link toll facility has, since its opening, stood as a monument to poor infrastructural planning and maladministration in Ireland. It is only now, at a very late stage, that observers are beginning to realise just how anti-social the continued operation of this poorly conceived structure really is.
The principle of tolling this particular stretch of publicly-funded motorway at this site has always represented the worst possible example of public private partnership in action.
The operating company, NTR, has made as much profit from those who have already funded, through direct and indirect taxation, the entire M50 project as can be tolerated. It is time for the State to resume public operation of this facility and to suspend any further private involvement in the second West Link facility presently under construction.
The traffic situation which now pertains at West Link is at emergency levels, especially once the added flows from the Port Access Tunnel diversions are factored in.
It is indefensible that any private corporate entity should be allowed to make extra revenues for its shareholders simply because it has a stranglehold on a purposely-built motorway bottleneck.
There are worrying questions surrounding the entire methodology which saw the West Link facility constructed in the first place and a prudent administrator should be casting a very withering gaze indeed at the mechanisms which have been put in place to allow a carbon copy to be constructed alongside it.
Sadly those such as myself who work in public transport are having it confirmed on a daily basis that there is no overall plan or indeed administration who will even attempt to put things to rights. The sole criteria is profit above all, and we are witnessing the end results of decades of this dominating principle. - Yours, etc.,
Billy Fleming', Tallaght, Dublin 24.