Comment: One way traffic against commuters

To commute to work on a daily basis, month after month, year after year, is a lonely hell suffered by thousands.

Most who do it, especially by car, have built up reserves of steel that keeps them going and accepting that there simply is no other or better way to provide for their family.

As a commuter you lock away the hours you spend behind a steering wheel daring not to think about the hours of your life lost staring at other cars' brake lights. You don't talk about it with colleagues when you get to work for fear of being seen as a 'moan' or illiciting the 'Sure, that's what you get for living out in the sticks' refrain.

You accept that you live this dual life, one that exists in Dublin or wherever work lies, and one that exists at home and you also accept the guilt that your living neither of those lives to their fullest potential.

You're arriving at work drained and wired, you arrive home the same way, rinse and repeat.

Between an eight/nine hour shift and an often 90-120 minute commute each way you're living this split existence.

You're too early for the school runs, too late to help the U9s out with training. You're up and gone before breakfast, you're only back in time to see the youngest down for bed. And on it goes.

And then there's the cost. You're commuting from north Meath to south Dublin, (yes, people are doing this!)

First toll is €1.50 at Kells, second toll at Clonee is €1.50 and then the whopper on the M50, €2.10. Do the same on return. Do it five days a week. There's €51 per week, there's €2,040 a year allowing for a 40-week year. Don't forget fuel which remains stubbornly attached to the €2 per litre mark with no sign of shifting any time soon. It's on top of insurance, tax, tyres and the wear and tear of clocking up 22,400 kms per year.*

So it's understandable, that plans announced in recent days to hike tolls further have been met with derision and outcry. Lumping another 10c/20c on the cost passing through a toll booth just as the country is gripped by a cost of living crisis, have been greeted with deserved contempt by drivers and commuters with no choice but to use our motorway infrastructure on a daily basis.

In October it was revealed that the M3 Motorway recorded €11.42m in operating profits for its private operator, Eurolink Motorway Operations (M3) Ltd last year.

The 51km M3 that runs from Clonee to north of Kells was built at a cost of almost €1bn and came with State backed guarantees that mean payments to the company are made if sufficient volumes of motorists don’t use the tolled route under a deal made by a Fianna Fáil government in 2006.

So on top of the average commuter's annual costs to use the motorway, their taxes are also being used to prop up the operator's profits which showed a slight decrease by 2% from €5.86m to €5.73m last year.

Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan has said he is 'reluctant' to intervene in the matter as compensation would need to be paid over to the motorway operators if the flagged rises don't take effect, while Tanaiste Leo Varadkar, who will be Taoiseach when the planned rises are implemented said he didn't want to take spending from critical projects to offset motorway price hikes.

There seems there is little to be done when it comes to offsetting the ongoing financial misery for Meath's commuters, the only commuter county remember, without a rail line to its main towns.

The issue of PPP (Public Private Partnership) deals that see complete control of tolling in the hands of private operators needs to be tackled. Commuters need a break. It can't be all one-way traffic.

*Based on Navan/Dublin City Centre commute 40 weeks of the year.