UK vs. Ireland

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The only country that the UK can claim to have a land border with can often claim to look just like the UK at first glance. The same applies to its roads - if we're being pedantic, Ireland's road infrastructure owes quite a bit to British signing and design policy. Colin Dalton wrote the following article to outline the similarities and differences between the UK and his native Ireland.

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Introduction

The geographic closeness and large cultural influence of Britain has meant that Ireland has adopted many of the same conventions for its roads. This has given us roads that are very similar to those of the UK, but with some local variations detailed below.

Speed limits

At the time of writing, Ireland's speed limits are set using Imperial units. In September 2004 these will be changed over to metric ones. Current and proposed limits are given in the table below:

Road type Old limit mph (km/h) New limit mph (km/h)
Motorway 70 (112) 74 (120)
National roads 60 (96) 62 (100)
Non-national roads 60 (96) 50 (80)
Built-up areas 30 (48) 31 (50)

The non-national roads category is a new one, designed to cut the speed limit on Ireland's many narrow, winding rural roads currently subject to the national speed limit of 60 mph. There will also be a special 30 km/h limit that can be applied near schools. Local authorities will be able to set special limits of 60, 80, and 100 km/h on roads within their jurisdiction if conditions allow.

Note that for the last 20 years all distance signage has been in km, so we've had the ludicrous situation of having speed limits in mph and distances and everything else in km and metres! More information about the proposed changes and how speed limits are set in Ireland can be found at gometric.ie.

Road classification

There are five categories of roads in Ireland:

Motorways

Ireland does not as yet have a very well developed motorway network. That said, the largest road building programme in the history of the State is currently underway, and the road atlases just can't keep up!

As per the UK, destination signage is white-on-blue, the speed limit is 70 mph (for now anyway!), and similar restrictions concerning slow vehicles, animals, and cyclists apply. Motorway routes are designated with an M prefix, followed by the number of the primary route the motorway has replaced. So when the Kildare bypass opens later this year it will have replaced a section of the N7 Dublin - Limerick route, so the motorway is designated part of the M7.

So far in 2003, a total of 38 km of new motorway has opened, with a further 12 km of motorway due to open by the end of the year. Stretches of motorway tend to be short, as they're built piecemeal to bypass towns considered bottlenecks (and to keep projects small enough for local construction firms to be able to bid on). The longest continuous section of motorway open is the M1: 72 km from Dublin to just south of Dundalk. The final section, from Dundalk to the border with Northern Ireland will shortly go to tender as a Public Private Partnership initiative.

National Primary Routes

The major routes linking Ireland's largest cities and towns are classified National Primary routes, designated by the letter N and a number between 1 and 33. All national primary routes are trunk routes - there isn't the UK concept of the same A road having primary and non-primary portions.

The original national primary routes were numbered from 1 to 25. Numbers 1 to 11 radiated from Dublin in an anti-clockwise fashion, with the N1 heading north from Dublin to the border with Northern Ireland, all the way around to the N11 with follows the coastline south of Dublin to Wexford. Numbers 12 to 25 were allocated to main routes not converging to Dublin in a roughly north - south pattern. For example, the N13 is in Donegal in the far northwest, with the N25 in the far southeast.

In the early 1990s, eight new national primary routes were designated. These do not fit a geographical pattern and were used mainly to give roads leading to major ports national primary status. The benefit of it is that national routes are funded by the central government under the auspices of the National Roads Authority.

National Primary routes are signed with a white-on-green colour scheme (with Guildford Rules-style patching) for destination signage, complete with yellow text for road numbers. The bulk of route mileage is 2-lane plus hard shoulders, which are being replaced by dual carriageways and/or motorways on the main radial routes from Dublin. The plan is to have the following routes in their entirety upgraded to motorway or high-quality dual carriageway:

To date in 2003, 28 km of national primary routes have been upgraded to dual carriageway. When a section is bypassed with a motorway section, the original route is "downgraded" to regional road status (see below).

National Secondary Routes

As the name implies, National Secondary routes link towns of secondary importance. They are designated by the letter N and a number between 51 and 82. I haven't been able to figure out any pattern to the allocation of numbers - maybe there isn't any!

National Secondary routes are overwhelmingly single carriageway. In fact, the only national secondary route with a dual carriageway section (that I can think of) is at the Dublin end of the N81. The colour scheme for destination signs is identical to national primary routes.

Regional routes

Similar to B routes in the UK, Regional routes link smaller towns within an area of the country. They are designated by the letter R and a number greater than 100. Destination signage is black-on-white, as per non-trunk roads in the UK. With the exception of a few short sections of dual carriageway near Dublin, all regional roads are single carriageway.

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