Next Service Station: Abort/Retry/Ignore/Fail

Irish road transport policy today saw a head-on collision between its two inconsistent elements -- a hugely expensive motorway network for a small and not densely populated country (outside Dublin). As we said in a previous tirade:

The government is emphasising tolled motorways for an island of about 5 million people with virtually no international transit traffic.

Hence today's news (ireland.com, subs. req'd), met with incredulity, especially by the government that specialises in sounding like the opposition:

The Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen has urged the National Roads Authority (NRA) to reconsider its decision to block plans for service stations on motorways.

Now, the NRA's defence of this particular policy makes sense -- if one takes as given the lunacy of their overall policy:

Mr Egan [spokesman] said the State's motorway and dual carriageway network involves frequent interchanges to access towns and local communities - providing access to existing facilities ... Although the NRA has been criticised for ignoring international best practice, the organisation has pointed out that the Irish road network was small by European terms.

In other words, we already had to build a lot of interchanges for each small town on the routes, and we don't want to add more for service stations in between. But then of course the question -- if a functional motorway is going to require too many interchanges, why build a motorway at all? France's tolled autoroutes work because the distances are big, so you can serve the big towns and have service stations and toll plazas, all without turning the autoroute into a stop-start procession.

But the NRA's vision requires that you'll be willing to pay a toll to save time -- and then burn much of that time with entry and exit for services en route. Upgraded dual carriageways would have met all the NRA's newly discovered constraints for a fraction of the cost. And without the destruction of national heritage.