Blind bureaucracy keeps Ireland in the slow lane

How stupid is this? They’re going to put speed cameras in the Port Tunnel.

For those who have been asleep, the tunnel takes traffic from Dublin port, just past The O2 (formerly The Point) out to the M1, close to Dublin Airport. There is a speed limit in operation in the tunnel of 80 kilometres per hour. Apparently drivers have been breaking that limit, more or less with impunity. The authorities now intend to ‘clamp down’! Welcome to the new Ireland...
The port tunnel may not be the busiest stretch of road in Ireland, but in terms of what it has achieved in cutting journey times, it is a huge success and a credit to the NRA which runs it..
I know. The Hot Press football team – Hot Press Munchengladbach – has its home games in Clonshaugh, off the M50 close to the airport. Early summer evening games there used to be a nightmare to get to. One day it’d take 50 minutes to negotiate your way from the centre of the city to the grounds. Another it might take half as long again. Over the past two years, using the Port Tunnel, the journey time has been reduced to somewhere in the region of 25 to 30 minutes.
In taking the tunnel, you bypass all of the unpredictable areas that are jammed up by heavy traffic, bus lanes, crazy traffic lights that allow for pedestrians crossing where there are none – and so on.
Going smoothly, you cover a distance in a maximum of four minutes that can otherwise take 40 or 50. The stress is lowered dramatically. So is the fuel consumption. It is a win-win situation. Hot Press Munchengladbach spent all season trying to replicate it on the pitch, but it couldn’t be matched for sheer excellence.
Apparently, however, people have been breaking the speed limit, going quicker, and shortening journey times even more. There are observational cameras in place, and they have measured the times from entry to exit. Some have been averaging 100 kpm. Others have been faster again. How terrible. We’ll have to put a stop to that, than, eh?
The tunnel is 4.5 kilometres in length. Averaging 80 kilometres per hour, from entrance to exit it takes 3 mins and 30 secs – including an allowance of 8 seconds for the driver to get from nought to 80kph.
(To digress for a moment: a report in the Irish Times last week was unintentionally illuminating. It gave the correct distance for the tunnel at 4.5km, and then claimed that the journey should take 6 minutes – anyone with even rudimetary skills in mental arithmetic will tell you straight away that the driver who took that length would be averaging a mere 45kph – you use a multiplier of 10. In the report, the estimation of ‘journey time’ was to contrast with the information gleaned from a briefing from either the Gardai or the NRA that some drivers were covering the distance in 2 minutes. The reporter failed to deduce that if the correct journey time was 6 minutes at 80kph, and people were doing it in 2 minutes, they’d have to be averaging 240kph. Who feeds these ridiculous, inaccurate figures out? And why?).
But here’s the rub. Over the past two years, this has been the safest stretch of road in Ireland. There have been no vehicle-on-vehicle accidents there. So what, really, is the issue?
It offers a perfect paradigm of the modern bureaucratic mindset in Ireland. The authorities are approaching this in entirely the wrong way. Instead of looking at the facts and realising that the speed limit is lower than it needs to be, and raising it – and I can tell you, it requires a real force of will to stay at 80kph when the road inside the tunnel stretches clean and clear in front of you – they are peeved that common sense is prevailing.
And what do they intend to do? They intend to spend money unnecessarily on a system that will cost a hefty chunk of cash to install; that will almost certainly disrupt the traffic, to one degree or another, while it is being put in place; that will slow journey times considerably for many; that will result in another administrative burden the State needs right now like a hole in the head; and that will probably further clog up an already creaking court system.
The money could be spent instead on repairing a banjaxed school. But no. They’re more interested in messing up a good thing.
On the subject of courts, I got a reminder to pay a parking fine about a year ago. I hadn’t ever got a ticket, but apparently that’s the norm now. They don’t have to give you one – presumably it’s so you’ll think it’s ok and make a habit of parking illegally, so that they can whack you with ten at a time?
The non-ticket was for parking on a (most peculiar) double yellow line on the road where I live. It’s one of those mad ones: there is no purpose to the line(s), they were not part of the original scheme approved by Dublin City Council but appeared nonetheless, parking on them is incapable of creating any disruption or hold-up and anyway I did it, on this one occasion, only from when I arrived home in the evening until leaving in the morning when there was nowhere else to park.
A short while after getting the ‘reminder’, I tried to pay it. I was told it was too late. Seven months later there was a summons, the hearing to take place on one of the busiest days of the year for me. Someone else – who could barely afford the time any better – volunteered to go to the court in my stead. At least it took me out of the loop.
So what happened? She went down. Sat in the court with a whole bunch of other saps. Nothing doing. Things dragged on, till it was a full 40 minutes after the start-time. She happened to overhear a group of cops talking among themselves. “Maybe we should tell some of these people,” one of them said. Tell them what? The court had been adjourned until December! Because of a shortage of judges! The cop said there was a notice on the door.
Indeed there was, giving the court rules. At the bottom, in small type, it stated that the court had been adjourned. But there was no headline, or nothing to tell the average neophyte that this was a notice of any import to them. In fact, there was no reason for the average Jane or Joe to read it at all.
They could have sat there all day for all anyone cared. That they might have been allowed to reflects the contempt in which ordinary citizens are held by the State. No effort had been made to tell people in advance. The notice on the door was completely inadequate to the purpose for which it was intended. No one had been instructed to inform the citizenry. Even the cops only talked about it as an afterthought – and they mightn’t have bothered to follow through if my stand-in hadn’t been alert enough to overhear them.
The whole exercise took over three hours of my friend’s vital working time and cost two taxi fares. Doubtless there were others travelling far greater distances. And now, people are being called back sometime in December?
Again, the whole thing is colossally stupid. Where something as insignificant as parking on a double yellow line is concerned, rather than anything sinister it is usually an oversight if someone doesn't pay. Why not, therefore, create a system where the fine escalates at a sensible rate, but can still be paid on the week of the court case? That can’t be hard to do. If half the fines were paid, it would mean a huge saving in police time, in court time – and of course for the person who has parked illegally.
All very easily managed. But somehow you get the impression that no one cares enough to bother even thinking about it. The powers that be in the Gardai would prefer to be working on important things like speed cameras that no one needs...