There is one page in the draft development plan for Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown that carries a price tag of £400 million. Page 108 of the 225-page document does not spell this out, of course; all it contains is a list of road plans to be initiated over the next five years.
The list starts with two motorway schemes - the Southern Cross Route and the South Eastern Motorway. These alone, with their associated slip and feeder roads, are currently estimated at £184 million. And that is just for the first three lines of the page.
Then there are three schemes involving national routes - the long-delayed widening of the N11 Stillorgan/Bray road between White's Cross and Foxrock Church, another N11 widening between Kilbogget and Loughlinstown, and a minor improvement to the N31.
The last involves widening the junction between Seapoint Avenue and Newtown Avenue, just south of Blackrock, which will almost inevitably entail the demolition of existing property boundaries, at the very least. Conservationists argue that the junction is already wide enough.
The list also includes 13 regional road schemes, such as the much-debated Dundrum bypass and the completion of the Monkstown Ring Road, as well as "improvements" to seven local roads, all of which will involve setting back boundaries to gain more space for traffic.
But the biggest schemes by far are the two motorways, which will complete the C-Ring around Dublin from Malahide Road right down to the Shankill-Bray bypass. These major schemes are integral parts of the Dublin Transportation Initiative strategy, adopted in 1994.
At present, the C-ring ends when the Western Parkway runs into a roundabout at Balrothery, near Tallaght. Work on its continuation, the Southern Cross Route, should have started after the motorway order was confirmed in August 1992, but it was held up by court actions.
The first of these involved two landowners in Kilmashogue - Major T.B. McDowell, chairman of the Irish Times Trust, and Mr Edward Fitzachary - who claimed that the Minister had acted illegally by failing to take into account all the matters raised at the public inquiry.
The Select Vestry of White church also challenged the Minister's order on the grounds that it would have the effect of severing College Road, thereby cutting off most of the parish from its church and school, and the vestry was seriously concerned about losing its congregation.
Both actions were settled out of court in December 1995, with the vestry receiving an assurance from the county council that College Road would not be severed after all. This followed lengthy negotiations with Grange Golf Club to cede some land for a new slip road.
By this stage, the motorway scheme had been held up for more than three years. However, it was delayed for a further 12 months by a separate legal action on behalf of a petrol filling station on Sandyford Road, which claimed that the motorway would damage its business.
It was not until last December that the county council had in its possession a confirmed motorway order that it could act upon. In terms of lost time in completing the C-Ring, the legal challenges had cost nearly 4 1/2 years, with a corresponding increase in the estimate.
The council has now decided to break the project into two phases. It plans to build the stretch from Balrothery to Kellystown Road first and expects to have contract documents ready within the next three weeks. But it will take another three years to finish the project.
The rest of the Southern Cross, from Kellystown Road to Sandyford, is being redesigned and will become part of the South Eastern Motorway. The county council expects to make a separate motorway order for it in September, to be followed by another public inquiry early next year.
The scheme will require a massive "land take" for major interchanges at Ballinteer, Sandyford, Carrickmines and Laughanstown, as well as for various feeder and slip roads. The Sandyford interchange will be by far the most complex on the C-Ring, like a junction in Los Angeles.
The interchanges have to be so large, according to the county council, not only to make connections to and from the motorway but also to retain the local road network as far as possible, so that motorists will be able to continue using established routes such as Leopardstown Road.
Among the main environmental impacts will be the loss of the six-furlong straight at Leopardstown Racecourse. Thousands of mature trees will have to be felled to make room for the motorway and its associated roads. The southern edge of Marlay Park will also vanish.
Assuming ministerial approval and no further legal challenges, work on the South Eastern Motorway could start early in 1999 and the road would then be open to traffic in the year 2002. Finally, Dublin will have its C-Ring, three decades after the bypass was first mooted.
What was proposed by the Dublin Transportation Study in 1971 was a "motorway box" around the city - an "O-Ring", in other words. The missing piece is the Eastern Bypass, linking the M1 Airport Motorway at Whitehall with Booterstown, via Sandymount Strand.
The £150 million-plus Dublin Port Tunnel may be regarded as the first phase of the Eastern Bypass, so all that would be required to complete the "box" is a link between the north port and the South Eastern Motorway, by extending the latter northwards to Booterstown.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council had commissioned Ove Arup - coincidentally the consulting engineers on the port tunnel project - to examine the feasibility of adding a "northern leg" to the South Eastern Motorway.
Conveniently, a reservation for such a route, the "Sandyford to Drummartin Link", has been preserved by the road engineers for many years. It runs through sports grounds just east of Balally and then crosses Kilmacud Road, both Upper and Lower, to reach Goatstown.
The stated reason for commissioning the latest study is that some certainty is required about the extent of the "land take", particularly in the council-owned Sandyford Industrial Estate where there is a demand for more development sites. Housebuilders also want the line defined.
The consultants, Ove Arup, have been told to assume that the route could just as easily be motorway as an ordinary road. If so, the next logical step would be to connect it up with the motorway reservation through St Helen's to create a southern leg for the Eastern Bypass.
Certainly, the sheer scale and complexity of the proposed Sandyford interchange would suggest that it has been designed to serve as a pivotal junction between the South Eastern Motorway and a future Eastern Bypass. It would not need to be quite so large otherwise.
The Wyattville junction on the N11, which will also be improved along this "sub-standard" stretch, is destined to become very busy as the roads leading to it from Dun Laoghaire (such as Church Road) are widened and extended to cater for traffic heading for the C-Ring.
When the full motorway bypass is completed in 2002, it will bring obvious benefits. People living in Dalkey or Killiney, for example, will be able to drive to Dublin Airport or get to their holiday homes in the west without having to go through the traffic-choked city centre.
However, all the evidence suggests that much of the traffic on the C-Ring will be short trips and this may necessitate tolling to protect its primary purpose of linking up the main national routes. One way or another, it is likely that traffic will spill over into surrounding areas.
Other major roads in the pipeline include the Dundrum and Wyckham bypass schemes, which were the subject of separate public inquiries last December; all they need is a ministerial decision. Leopardstown Road will be finished next April while Church Road should start next month.
A lot of the "improvement" schemes involve narrow, winding roads, with granite boundary walls and densely planted mature trees on each side, which are very characteristic of the south county. But nearly all are about to be obliterated to cater for increasing volumes of traffic. Impatient motorists complain about having to drive to work down "bloody boreens". The councillors respond to this, as do the senior officials and the road engineers; nobody seems to accept the thesis that the more road space they create, the more it will fill up with cars.
Mr Des Taylor, deputy county manager in charge of the roads department, is aware of this philosophy and of the conflict between continued road building and the concept of sustainable development. But he insists they have to "get on with the job" of improving traffic.
"Here's the draft development plan. There's all the road schemes we intend to do within the next five years. If the public feels that this won't do any good, that it won't help to solve the problem, let them say so. But they're not saying that, they're saying the opposite," he declared.
But the draft does have something for non-motorists; it proposes the most extensive cycleway network ever included in any local authority's development plan. Cycling, it says, is an "environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient and healthy" mode of transport which needs to be encouraged.