The effect of the M50 toll is to divert traffic from the motorway, a road designed for cars and trucks, onto the streets where people live. This is especially obvious in Chapelizod, where a lot of the cars that fill the streets and make it dangerous for kids to walk to school, are driven by people avoiding the toll bridge. It’s also a big problem in Lucan, on the other side of the motorway. But even in the city centre, there is a substantial amount of traffic that is going from one side of the city to the other, that should be on the road that circles the city for this reason, but instead is filling the streets with noise and air pollution.
The biggest and most important fix we have to traffic, and the emissions it causes, is to improve public transport. Build the Metrolink, expand the Luas, expand the DART, put on more buses and give them dedicated space on our streets. But we should also look at where we are directing cars. The M50 is designed for traffic, the rest of our city is not. We should put cars and trucks where they belong, away from people.