Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan has said the Green Party is committed to improving safety on the Cork-Limerick N20 but declined to confirm if the road would be upgraded to motorway status under the National Development Plan.
Mr Ryan said he was very conscious of safety issues on the N20, especially after analysis published in May found road traffic collisions on the road are four times more likely than the national average to be fatal.
“Yes, safety first but we have to be careful and that’s why we are looking at all options and ruling no options out,” Mr Ryan said at a press briefing in Cork on Monday morning.
Mr Ryan said commitments have already been given to upgrade several roads and funding is finite.
“To be honest, there are so many road projects already committed to, if we spent on all of them ,we wouldn’t have money for everything but we are not ruling them out ,we are not saying definitely ‘no’,” he said.
The proposed M20 was expected in 2010 to cost €850-€900 million but the most recent estimates suggest upgrading about 80km of road to motorway would cost almost three times that estimate, he said.
“The estimate now is that if we were to do it to full motorway status, it could be about €3 billion and we need to look at that in the limited budget situation we are in,” he said.
The money might be better spent on other projects, Mr Ryan suggested.
Last May, Limerick City and County Council, which is co-ordinating the M20/N20 project reported that an analysis had found that while nationally fatal road traffic accidents account for 2 per cent of all collisions in which personal injuries are recorded, the figure on the Cork-Limerick Road is 8 per cent.
According to the analysis, the high number of access points, 625 roads, or seven per kilometre on the N20, are a major cause of accidents because vehicles must take dangerous right-hand turns into traffic on a route with high volumes of vehicles travelling at speed leaving minimal gaps.
Mr Ryan said he was very much in favour of introducing by-passes on towns such as Mallow, Charleville and Buttevant on the N20 as a first step in an upgrade as has successfully happened at Adare on the N21 and as is happening in Macroom on the N22.
"Take Tipperary town – Tipp town is smothered with traffic going through it and 30 per cent dereliction in the centre – do a bypass of Tipp town first, like we did in Cashel and then the road is upgraded and connected into the bypass – every TD in Tipperary is in favour of by-passing Tipp town."
Mr Ryan said that Ireland had some beautiful 19th century market towns and building by-passes to channel heavy goods vehicle and other traffic away from them would allow town centres with attractive squares such as Macroom and Listowel to develop attractive public realms that people could enjoy.
