The Dundrum bypass - planned "since old God's time", according to one of its engineers - will finally open this week, bringing some relief to the south Co Dublin village's long-congested main street.
Held up for years by arguments over its alignment and later by lack of funds, the new bypass is expected to carry 30,500 vehicles a day. Though only 1.2 km long, it has cost a staggering €44.4 million.
Mr. John McDaid, senior engineer with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, explained that the cost of acquiring its linear strip of land at the height of the property boom accounted for the bulk of this expense.
However, he said some of it had been recouped from a substantial contribution in land and construction work from Alice Developments Ltd., which is building a shopping centre on the Pye site, south of Dundrum.
Two years after the bypass was approved in 1997 by the then Minister for the Environment, Mr. Brendan Howlin (Labour), it became clear that the £10.4 million (€13.2 million) being offered in State funding would go nowhere near paying for it.
Because the Dundrum bypass was not a "national" road scheme, it did not qualify for funding from the National Roads Authority, unlike the Wyckham bypass and Balliinteer Road improvement scheme, which received funding as feeders for the M50.
It was only after the Department of The Environment agreed to contribute £23.5 million (€29.8 million) that the county council could proceed to buy the land it needed for the bypass and to advertise the contract for public tender.
According to Mr. McDaid, the construction cost worked out at £9 million (€11.4 million), or just over a quarter of the total.
"It ended up costing more than three times as much because of the huge increase in property values in the Dublin area," he said."
When he started working for the then Dublin County Council in 1983, the Dundrum bypass had already been "round the circuits a few times". The aim then, as now, is to provide an alternative route to relieve the main street's bottleneck.
The street has been saturated by traffic for years, carrying 16,500 vehicles a day in 1996. That was the year the environmental impact study was done for the Dundrum bypass, the Wyckham bypass and the Ballinteer Road improvement scheme.
It was forecast that the bypass would reduce traffic on the main street to 4,000 vehicles a day. However, this figure was based on the assumption that the Sandyford Luas light rail line and the final leg of the M50 would both be operating.
With Luas now unlikely to start running through Dundrum until autumn nest year and the south eastern motorway scheduled for completion in 2005, Mr. McDaid said the forecast reduction of traffic on the main street would take longer to achieve.
It was also contingent on implementation of a traffic-management scheme, which would reduce the street space available for cars by dedicating it to bus lanes, loading bays and wider footpaths.
However, this is merely "an aspiration" at present. "We're not offering a panacea [with the bypass]," Mr. McDaid said.
There was also still a lot of landscaping to be done on both sides of its route from the Wyckham bypass to the new Taney Road junction, but he expected it would be open later this year.
