How many exits on m50

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The strategy to increase the ease of access of the car to the areas was certainly successful, as they are now flooded with vehicles. In September , two light rail lines were opened in Dublin. The system was known as the Luas. The Red Line originated in the centre of Dublin and ran as far out as Tallaght town centre.

Needless to say, this made congestion at the junction even worse, as well as delay the Luas's crossing by several minutes at peak times. Coming relatively quickly after the previous section, construction of the final long section of the M50 began as soon as possible.

Straight away the project ran into major difficulty. The remains of the long lost Carrickmines castle, which appears on ancient maps of Dublin but whose exact location was unknown, were discovered when the bulldozers moved in. Immediately a protest group of green activists moved in and occupied the site.

Finally, a decision was made to excavate the remains, preserve as much as possible, and bury the rest. The site is in the centre of a roundabout and can be seen here. The largest part of the extension project was the pair of very complex junctions 13 and 14 , which were braided together.

Junctions 13 and 14 are connected with parallel services lanes, while 14 provides access to Sandyford westbound and Leopardstown eastbound, with overlapping ramps. It's difficult to envisage, but the Dublin Eastern Bypass, a motorway connection to complete the ring around the city running from Sandyford to Dublin Port underground, is planned to join up with this junction too. How this would be fitted in to the spaghetti is anyone's guess.

The rest of the stretch Jct was opened in June - minus the Carrickmines junction, on which work was late due to the protest. This one finally opened to traffic later that year in October. A chronic problem the centre of Dublin suffered from was the very large amount of truck traffic attempting to access Dublin Port. Not only was this a great hazard to the safety and health of pedestrians and cyclists, it was also tearing up the road surface.

The trucks utilised the Quays in the middle of town as an access route to the port which was to the east out in the bay. There had been a plan since the s to arrange for an alternative access route that would allow a connection to the motorway network without using city streets.

The road could not be built on the surface due to the destruction and expense that this would have incurred. The twin tunnels were 4. A total of m was built using cut-and-cover, with the rest drilled through solid rock.

Work finally wrapped up in December , a full year late. At this time, the tunnel was re-signed as a new part of the M The Eastern Bypass is a plan to complete the full M50 ring by extending the Port Tunnel from Dublin Port underground to Blackrock and inland, where it would surface and use a road reservation to get to Sandyford.

This reservation can easily be seen in aerial photos such as this , here running northeast-southwest. Such a project, though increasing the utility of the Port Tunnel greatly by allowing access to and from the south as well the north, would not only be phenomenally expensive, it would also greatly disrupt existing communities in south Dublin, as well as the road network in the Sandyford area.

Part of the road network would be subsumed into the road, and considering it is already saturated with traffic, it is hard to picture how this traffic could successfully be rerouted. As mentioned above, the road would join the existing M50 at Junction 14 Sandyford. This junction would be to be considerably redesigned in order to accommodate the new traffic movement.

It would be much easier to just have the whole thing in a multi-billion euro tunnel, and it would be very surprising if any progress was made on this before The only part of this confirmed to be taking place soon is a short 1.

It has not been confirmed if this road will be done as a motorway extension of the M50, or to a lower standard and different route number. In summer of , it was time to begin the long, disruptive process of upgrading the whole M Plans were made to fully freeflow the junctions with the M1, N4 and N7, partially freeflow the N2 and N3, double up the diamond interchanges at Ballymun, Ballymount, Firhouse, and add some left-turn ramps to the N81 and Sandyford junctions.

Alone on the whole M1-Sandyford section, the Ballinteer junction required no upgrading, as it had already been designed to a high enough standard. In addition, the much maligned toll booths would be removed and replaced with an electronic tolling system.

As well as this, the road would be minimum 3 lanes each way, with an auxiliary lane between junctions - for a total of 8 lanes. There wouldn't be auxiliary lanes along the Firhouse-Sandyford Jct section however, since the road is constructed in a cutting. Priority was given to upgrading the N3-N4-N7-Ballymount Jcts section, which was completed in , though the N7 Red Cow junction wasn't completely finished until the very end of the year.

Between and , the remainder of the route upgrade occurred, which comprised widening from the M1 to the N3 and from Ballymount to Sandyford and the rest of the junction upgrades. On September 1st, , the project was officially completed four months ahead of schedule. The M1, N2, N4 and N7 junctions received full upgrades to freeflowing status, while the N3 junction became partially freeflowing. The rest of the junctions had some left-turn slips added.

Those junctions that consisted of a single overbridge had the overbridge duplicated. The decision to fully freeflow the N2 , instead of a partial treatment, was apparently taken immediately prior to start of work, as no announcement was made.

In fact it only became clear that the junction had been upscaled once it took its final shape. The junction design could be called a partially-unrolled cloverleaf , or parclo for short. The junction also provides access to the N32, but this is still subject to traffic light control. The important thing, though, is that the motorway to motorway movements are no longer so. The canal and railway running through the middle meant that a normal reconfiguration of the rotary and slips could not be achieved.

Instead the designers attempted to bypass the entire junction with a new N3 mainline. This meant that the old junction was now mainly just for local movements and access to properties abutting the junction. All M50 to N3 and vice versa movements were transferred to the new mainline to the north, as well as the new N3 inbound to Dublin mainline. The only notable exception was that the N3 outbound mainline still required negotiation of the roundabout, and its attendant sets of traffic lights.

This prevented the junction from claiming full freeflow status. A centrepiece of the upgrade was the removal of the toll booths on the Liffey crossing and implementation of an electronic toll system. A gantry was installed which could read license plate numbers and read in-car electronic tags. The camera would read the tag and the plate, and charge the motorist if there was a match. If there was no match, the owner of the car with those plates was considered not to have paid.

For motorists who did not wish to avail of a tag, they could register their license plate with the system. Finally there was the case of an unregistered, untagged car or any car that suffered a misread. Although the system suffered teething problems , with many thousands of misreads a day, the situation improved greatly over the years. The N4 junction upgrade was a simple case of reconstruction to parclo. There was ample room to construct the necessary loops, but it meant that the left-turn slips of were obliterated.

The improvement tied in to a 6-laning project for the N4 west of the junction that had been completed in The infamous N7 interchange received a thorough and long-overdue overhaul. There were four major issues with the junction: the traffic-light controlled roundabout, the Luas line passing at-grade over two of the ramps, the proximity to Turnpike Road to the east, and proximity to the new junction to serve the Luas Park and Ride site immediately to the west.

The Turnpike Road signal-controlled junction remains as an issue, with traffic having to come to a stop immediately to the east of the junction if the lights were against them. The Luas reconfiguration meant a complete rebuild of the nearby station and car parking areas. The old Luas bridge that used to carry the line through the junction was re-used to provide an unusual feature: a U-turn lane for N7 outbound traffic, should they wish to double back towards Dublin having not had enough of it, presumably.