Increased tolls on the M50 motorway did nothing to reduce congestion with average travel times actually having increased since the new toll regime began, according to new data
Tolls for the M50 increased at the start of January, alongside those on the Dublin Port Tunnel and some other motorways.
All vehicles on the M50, except for those without a tag or registered account, saw a 10 cent rise in the toll on January 1st. Heavy goods vehicles exceeding 10,000kg saw a larger increase of 20 cent per toll. Those without a tag or video account already pay a higher fee which didn’t increase.
Despite the increases in tolls, M50 drivers are actually spending more time per journey in January 2026 against the same period last year, data from fleet management company, Geotab shows.
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The company analysed data from thousands of anonymised commercial journeys and found that average journey times on the M50 were at least 3.5 minutes slower year-on-year.
Even with the same or lower overall traffic volumes, high-congestion journey times were more than three minutes longer. The data even shows that drivers spend an additional eight minutes stationary on average, suggesting there are “widespread stop-start conditions across the entire route”.
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As congestion has worsened, more drivers are trying to travel during off-peak hours, which now account for three-quarters of traffic in January 2026, instead of two-thirds of journeys in the same period of 2025.
As a result, these off-peak periods are now operating less efficiently than a year ago. Despite a shift towards off-peak hours, high-congestion conditions have got worse on every day of the week, the data suggests.
The longest travel times during peak times in the morning, from 7am to 9.30am, was on Wednesdays, when journeys typically took 69.2 minutes, registering an increase of 18.4 minutes year on year.
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The worst time to travel on the motorway overall was on Thursdays between 4pm and 7pm, when journeys were 72.8 minutes on average. This was despite it being the only day in which peak time journeys got faster, and only by 2.7 minutes.
At peak hours, Tuesday evenings saw the worst increase overall, getting 23.8 minutes longer to reach an average journey time of 69.7 minutes.
“If the policy is not delivering congestion relief, it is simply adding cost,” said Phil Barnes, Geotab’s business development manager for Ireland and the UK. The company’s data suggests that the increased tolls are not causing a reduction in demand, but instead demand is “being compressed”.
He said “the M50 is not an optional route” for commercial operators but that “any inefficiency, incident, or increase in congestion has a direct and significant knock-on effect on supply chains across the entire country”.
Barnes said the three-minute increase in average travel time “may sound minor at first, but multiple journeys each day quickly translate into significant lost time for fleet operators”.
He said the increased cost is a “significant” burden with logistics operators running at high efficiency and having tight margins: “A viable solution is urgently needed.”
