To get traffic out of the city centre, it’s time to abolish tolls on the M50, councillor says

Féilim Mac Críosta, who lives in Martin’s Row in Chapelizod, says that at night he hears trailers bouncing along the road.

They’re big lorries taking the route through this riverside west Dublin village, presumably to avoid the toll on the M50, he says.

Local Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham says it’s common for drivers to divert from the motorway to avoid tolls between junctions 6 and 7, and drive through town.

So Cunningham’s proposing to eliminate the tolls. “What we have at the moment is kind of the opposite of congestion charging,” he says.

“Instead of it being free to drive around the city and cost to drive into the city, it’s free to drive into the city, and costs one to drive around it, and so that it’s just telling people to drive into the city,” Cunningham says.

“So, you know, we’re pushing traffic off the motorway, off the ring road, and into residential streets,” he says.

This proposal dovetails with the aim of Dublin City Council’s City Centre Transport Plan, which it began to implement last year: to reroute drivers who aren’t bound for the city centre around it, rather than through it.

Would Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), which runs the M50 and the toll, agree to get rid of it?

The money from the toll goes towards maintenance and operation of the M50, a spokesperson for TII said Tuesday.

“The M50 is a user-paid road,” he said. “If tolling was to be reduced state would need to reduce funding in other areas of the national budget.”

In 2023, TII says it collected €190 million via the tolls on the M50 and the Dublin Port Tunnel. Going into the autumn national budget before the election last year, the last government said it was looking at a record €25 billion surplus.

Rerouting drivers around the city

The M50 loops around Dublin like a C on the map, circling the outer corridor bordered with more suburban areas, and nearing the Irish Sea on both ends.

Dubliner Joey Hyde-Sloan lives in Sligo these days, and says he drives it regularly when he comes back to the city.

Because of his route, he doesn’t usually hit the toll, Hyde-Sloan says. But he doesn’t worry about them too much. “I mean, it’s no Berlin Wall.”

He says he reckons those most affected are people who use the M50 all the time, and especially drivers hauling cargo across the country.

The tolls on the M50 start from €2.50 for a car with an eFlow tag, to €7.70 for an unregistered heavy goods vehicle exceeding 10,000kg.

That’s enough to push some drivers who are not going to the city to drive through it, to save the money, says Cunningham, the Green Party councillor.

That the tolls encourage cars to divert from the ringroad through neighbourhoods was also raised by Phibsboro residents as an issue in their area, in a submission to the council during the drafting of the current city development plan.

“The defining feature of Phibsborough is the sheer volume of traffic it is subjected to which prevents the village from thriving,” said the submission from the Beyond the Junction group.

“Many drivers passing through the area are choosing to do so to avoid the M50 toll charge,” it said.

Between 7am and 7pm, 68 percent of vehicles crossing the canals – mostly private cars – were not heading to a destination in the core city centre, council transport head Brendan O’Brien said told the council’s transport committee, in the lead-in to the announcement of the City Centre Transport Plan, back in 2023.

O’Brien didn’t say this was because of the tolls, but he did say the council planned to make changes to encourage these drivers to go around the city instead – presumably on the M50, the major route around the city.

The plan called for closing two short stretches of the quays to private cars while also improving public transport links, cycling and walking routes and adding greening.

“What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get to a point where you’ve got low-traffic streets, so the traffic there has a reason to be there, it’s not going through,” O’Brien said.

Cunningham, the Green Party councillor, said he thought this approach was better than an alternative – introducing congestion charges to make it more expensive to drive in the city centre.

“I think at the moment, what we’re trying to do in the city is trying to make more space for public transport to make us faster, make more space for active transport to make us safer,” Cunningham said. “I think if we just keep doing that, that’s better than introducing congestion charging.”

O’Brien, the council’s transport chief, has also said he doesn’t support congestion pricing for Dublin city centre – at least not yet.

The council doesn’t have the legal authority to institute it, he said. And even if it did, there are about 42 ways into the city centre across the canals, and to make a congestion-pricing system work, the council would have to install equipment at each of them to record cars.

But even beyond those logistical challenges, a low-emissions zone for the city centre might be better, or maybe a pay-by-mile scheme for the greater Dublin area, O’Brien said. “Why do we want to do it just in the city centre?”

A system like that might impose a charge per mile or kilometre a person drives, to disincentivise them from driving, and push them towards public transport, or cycling, or walking.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.