ANYONE WHO HAS tried to get around Dublin recently doesn’t need convincing that stress levels on the roads are rising. The M50 has become a daily choke point, with an 11% increase of cars on this route since 2019, delays feel longer and more unpredictable, and what used to be a frustrating commute is now, for many people, a genuine source of anxiety.

The disruption caused by Storm Chandra only sharpened that reality. Flooding brought parts of the road network to a standstill, but the real takeaway wasn’t just about extreme weather. As transport academic Professor Brian Caulfield argued in a recent Irish Times column, the chaos exposed a deeper problem: a transport system that lacks resilience and struggles to cope when anything out of the ordinary happens. Even areas that weren’t directly affected quickly seized up, showing how little slack there is in the system.

That observation matters, because at the same time motorists are being warned that further measures are coming to push people out of cars and into other modes of transport. The objective — reducing emissions and congestion — is understandable. The sequencing is not.

More cars are on the road now than at any point since before Covid. One of the reasons is rarely acknowledged in transport debates: the large-scale working-from-home experiment that Ireland ran during the pandemic has quietly been rolled back. Offices have refilled as bosses either feel the pressure of justifying expensive office leases or just prefer to have their eyes on employees – the thinking being if they can’t see you, you aren’t working.

Commutes have returned, and many journeys that once disappeared have been........

© TheJournal