Seán Keyes

This is the key chart. If you keep slamming cars into the M50, throughput drops a little bit but average speed drops a lot. In a couple of years the whole thing could move at 30kph

We have less orbital motorway around Dublin than almost everywhere else. For cities of between 1.8 and 3.7 million in Europe, we have around half as much as the average. Only Copenhagen and Stockholm have as little or less than we do. In North America and Australasia, it's three times as much.

Dublin Airport is busiest at the start of the day, before the rush hour. The busiest hour on the M50 now starts 15 minutes after the first wave of traffic arriving at the airport. In seven or eight years, rush hour will overlap with the airport peak.

The Red Cow (m50 between the N4 and N7) can take around 6,100 vehicles per hour at its busiest. It currently operates at close to that limit for most of the working day. On our trajectory, in five years rush hour will soon last from before 6am till about 7pm.

The start of rush hour on the M50 is 46 minutes earlier than in 2014. Now it starts at 6.14am. People are getting up earlier to beat the rush.

The Red Cow is the centre of Ireland. It’s where Ireland’s most populous regions meet its biggest city. And it’s full up.

Congrats @Sam__Enright, finalist in the Foundation for Fiscal Studies’ Miriam Hederman O’Brien prize. Link to his award-nominated piece below

Thanks @ConorSheehan93 and the Limerick Labour Party for hosting a red-hot conversation around infrastructure policy with Ailish Drake and myself.

While greater Dublin grew 35% since 2006, orning trips into the city centre fell. Every German city over 2 million keeps its centre with a rail tunnel underneath. That infrastructure is what makes the difference. A strong centre has to be chosen!

The buses are filling up too. On the NTA's forecasts, five of the 12 BusConnects corridors are at or over 3,600 passengers an hour, the most a bus-only corridor can carry.