There has been a sea-change in the whole philosophy of Dublin's transport planners within the past decade. Ten years ago, the corporation was pursuing destructive road-widening schemes to increase traffic capacity; now, many of its engineers are involved in road-narrowing schemes to constrict it.
From the late 1950s, transport planning was based on a simple rule of thumb - "predict and provide". The principal job of transport planners was to forecast how much traffic there would be and then build enough road space to cater for it; they didn't realise at the time that building more roads would simply generate more traffic.
In Britain, "predict and provide" became so entrenched that traffic forecasts could not even be challenged by objectors at public inquiries into major road schemes. It reached its apotheosis in 1989 in the Tory government's policy document, Roads for Prosperity, with Mrs Thatcher raving about the "great car economy".
The thesis has since been turned on its head. In 1997, the British government's trunk road assessment group explicitly recognised that the volume of traffic was not inexorable and could be influenced by policy choices; "different policies will result in different forecasts". And so, "predict and provide" has become "predict and prevent".
The need now, says Prof Phil Goodwin, the Government's transport policy adviser, is to reinvent safe, attractive streets for children to walk or cycle to school, to reinvent the old custom of home delivery of shopping, to rediscover the role of land use planning to reduce journey distances and to promote activities that generate less traffic.
Though mass car ownership offered us "control over time and space which no previous generation ever had", Prof Goodwin believes it has become self-defeating. "Liberating our minds from the assumption that solving congestion depends on building more roads has been an important step in allowing us to consider alternatives," he says. This message has not yet got through to the National Roads Authority. Its 1998 Road Needs Study was still informed by outdated "predict and provide" thinking on traffic; left to its own devices, the NRA would build flyovers at the roundabout interchanges on the M50, thus making it easier for car commuters to gain access to the city.
There is also a major push for the Eastern Bypass, that Holy Grail of Dublin's road engineers for 30 years. Apparently, provision is being made for it in the National Development Plan, but the whole project - which could cost £500 million - will need careful assessment to ensure that it does not become a fast-track commuter route.
The real challenge is to improve accessibility to the city centre by public transport so that it can sustain its economic vitality. Otherwise, there is a danger that the core of Dublin could lose out to "edge city" developments along the curved spine of the M50 - the "doughnut effect" that destroyed so many US cities.
In theory, of course, everyone could be conveyed into the city centre by car - but only at the cost of massive urban blight and the wholesale demolition of buildings. It is surely ironic that the widening of almost every arterial road in the past to cater for private cars is now being used to provide additional road space for public transport.
Exorbitant property prices in Dublin are turning more and more people into reluctant migrants to provincial towns, such as Carlow, Gorey and Longford, where newly-built houses are considerably cheaper - even though they are consigning themselves to years of long-distance commuting, mostly by car on newly-improved national roads. Higher housing densities, particularly along public transport routes, should help to change this picture over time, in line with the Strategic Planning Guidelines for the greater Dublin area. So would a coherent regional development strategy, if it succeeded in taking some of the pressure off an already disproportionately large capital city.
Astonishingly, however, official figures show that 25 per cent of all journeys during the morning peak are less than one mile. Even more telling is the fact that 46 per cent of all journeys within three miles are undertaken in a car. That's a measure of how devoted we are to the cult of personal mobility, whatever about the congestion it creates.
What the figures suggest is that many Dubliners are within walking or cycling distance of their destinations. But even though they could easily do so, most commuters living in such inner suburbs as Glasnevin or Rathmines wouldn't stop using their cars; the only bikes some of them are likely to come in contact with are the stationary ones in a gym.
The Dublin Transportation Office has calculated that there are 7,500 commuters with access to cars living in the immediate catchment area (500 metres on either side) of the new Stillorgan Road bus corridor whose destinations are actually served by it. In other words, they could easily walk to the nearest bus stop rather than hop into their cars.
For years, car ownership levels in the State were artificially depressed by heavy excise duty and VAT on cars, parts and petrol as well as road taxation running ahead of inflation and a high-cost insurance regime skewed against the under-30s; these factors created the pent-up demand which has now been released by the booming economy.
As part of an EU-wide opinion survey, Forfas, the State's industrial policy agency, recently asked people what they considered to be the most useful invention of the 20th century. Top of the list here was not television, hi-fi stereos, microwave ovens, dishwashers, passenger jets or even mobile phones, but the car; we still believe its promise. It is clear that we are going through the adolescent phase of car ownership. Unlike in other European countries, motorists in Dublin and other urban areas have not yet made a distinction between ownership and use; they seem to believe that they have a right to use their cars for any journey, even when alternatives are available.
SO how can the car, that ultimate symbol of the "Me Generation", be tamed to make transport in Dublin and other cities more manageable? How can we, the wild and untameable people that we are, learn to accept a bit of regimentation in the public interest? The answer to both is with difficulty, and pain, particularly over the next five years.
"Travel is a derived need," says Mr John Henry, the DTO's director. "We do it because we have to, not because we want to, except for a few motorists who actually like to drive. People say `I love to travel'. But they don't really mean that. What they mean is that they love to get to where they want to go and enjoy the benefits at the other end".
With travel demand in the State increasing at 7 per cent per annum, and car ownership levels rising relentlessly, we simply cannot go on the way we're going. "We should be moving into the adult phase now," Mr Henry says, adding that every 1 per cent of commuters leaving their cars at home would save £25 million a year in congestion costs. Another striking statistic from the DTO relates to the distances that can be travelled in congested peak-time conditions on foot, by car and by bicycle from the city centre within 30 minutes. A pedestrian would reach the canal cordon at ordinary walking pace, a motorist would make it to the middle suburbs and a cyclist would travel as far as the M50.
Not even the most avid motorist could argue that the present situation works or, with any credibility, that the chaos on our streets can be sorted out by building more roads. As this series has attempted to demonstrate, there are solutions that work which have been implemented elsewhere; what we need to do is to learn from them.
The public also appears to be in favour of change. Forty-eight per cent of Irish respondents to an EU-wide opinion survey by the International Union of Public Transport said traffic management here was "too favourable to cars" while only 15.5 per cent said the opposite. And 80 per cent believed access to town centres should be "severely restricted".
Fundamentally, we all need to stand back and examine what we ourselves, individually, are doing to contribute to the problem - to have an "out of body experience", as it were. We need to ask ourselves the question: "Is this journey really necessary?" and, if it is, can it be done some other way - on foot, by bike or by public transport?
For unless a large number of Dubliners change their current habits, the city will quite literally be strangled by its traffic.
