ROAD TRANSPORT
With the advent of the Celtic Tiger and European Union funding, most national routes in the Republic continue to be upgraded. In the 1990s the Republic went from having only a few short stretches of motorway in the country, to partly expanding the motorways on most major routes. This is part of the National Development Plan. Road construction in Northern Ireland has proceeded at a slower pace in recent years, although a number of important bypasses and upgrades to dual carriageways have recently been completed or are about to begin.
The Republic’s motorway network is focused on Dublin, and is currently being extended to other major cities as part of the National Development Plan. Dublin has also been the focus of other major projects, such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin port tunnel which was completed in 2006.
There are now continuous lengths of motorway and high quality dual carriageways on many of the major routes. Most of the longstanding traffic bottlenecks on the national primary routes have been eliminated. Transport 21 provides for investment of a further €18.6 billion in national roads (€16.6bn by the government and €2bn in private finance through PPP’s) over the period 2006-2015.
In 2008 there were 5,433 kilometres of National Roads. Of this 85% was single carriageway, 7% was dual carriageway and 8% was motorway. In the period from 2005 to 2008 the length of motorways increased from 247km to 423km, an increase of 71%.
Concerning Road Freight transport in 2008, Irish registered goods vehicles transported a total of almost 246 million tonnes of goods by road. This represents a decrease of 18% on the previous year and an increase of 73% since 1998.