The palpable sense of apprehension among Dublin motorists as the schools reopened this week after the summer holiday underlines the scale of the traffic crisis facing Dublin. As the series of articles this week by the Environment Correspondent of this newspaper has vividly illustrated, the capital city of the Republic is facing heart seizure, with its arteries increasingly choked by traffic. Average speed during the morning rush-hour has slowed to a miserable 14 kilometres per hour; it has been estimated that Dublin's economy is losing at least £1 billion a year because of the time now being wasted sitting in traffic jams.
Several factors can be cited to explain how we arrived at this sorry pass: the chronic under-investment in public transport, the development of Dublin at very low density levels, the interminable delays that appear to accompany every major transport project, the explosion in car ownership and so on. But, at root, it is the lack of strategic vision and leadership at local and national level which is primarily responsible for the current shambles in Dublin.
There has been a continuing sense that transport policy for Dublin has been formulated in an ad hoc manner with various Government departments, State agencies and interest groups adding their tuppence worth. There is no sense of leadership, vision or forward planning. The city of Dublin cannot even provide a decent taxi service for its citizens, let alone an integrated transport plan.
What can be done? The kind of measures outlined in this week's series - massive investment in public transport, the greater use of Quality Bus Corridors and, critically, a sea-change in our approach to the car - are required. It is now abundantly clear that not everyone can be conveyed by car to their workplace or their school (remarkably one-quarter of all morning journeys during the morning rush-hour involve a journey of less than a mile). Public attitudes need to change radically. We cannot continue to be, in Frank McDonald's phrase, a "wild and untameable" people and simultaneously expect an efficient transport service; we must learn to accept a degree of regimentation in the wider public good.
For all that, there is no reason why the citizens of Dublin should not be able to travel with relative ease around their city. Building more roads cannot solve the problems in the inner suburbs and the city centre, but the building of a proper ring road, the use of motorway-style flyovers in areas of chronic gridlock and the construction of major infrastructural projects like the Dublin Port Tunnel can help to alleviate them.
Traffic chaos is not inevitable. In essence, the solution involves providing a reasonable transport system for the 137,000 cars that hit the road every morning - the kind of traffic flow which is regarded as relatively modest in every other EU state. The city now desperately needs someone in Government, perhaps a dedicated Minister for Transport, to take over-arching responsibility and to frame a coherent vision for the future. It cannot continue to stumble from one short-term "solution" to another.