Plans drawn up to ease city’s bottleneck route

PLANS have been drawn up to replace the Dunkettle roundabout with signalised dual carriageway and create a new slip road which will allow Dublin-bound traffic to avoid the congested junction at the Jack Lynch Tunnel interchange.

Members of Cork County Council voted yesterday to proceed with the €10 million plan.

County engineer Noel O’Keeffe said it was necessary to replace the Dunkettle roundabout because traffic was backing up at it during peak times, to such an extent that it would soon come to a standstill.

“We are going to replace the roundabout with dual carriageway and put traffic lights on it so motorists can access and leave Glanmire. Currently the existing traffic flows there are huge at peak periods. We have huge queues coming into it from the city and east Cork,” Mr O’Keeffe said.

His department took into account predicted traffic flows for 2018 and decided that it had no choice but to remove the roundabout.

“It will dramatically improve the situation there,” the county engineer said.

In tandem with that the local authority have also drawn up plans to create a slip road from Dunkettle off to the M8 (Cork-Dublin road).

By doing this traffic can avoid another bottleneck at the signalised roundabout adjacent to the Jack Lynch Tunnel.

Many of those in the queue are heading north and avoiding that junction will ease gridlock considerably.

Mr O’Keeffe said the slip road will run to the north of the Cork-Midleton railway line and close to the southern entrance to Dunkettle House.

The county engineer said that road improvements are planned for the back road into Glanmire, from the near the former Ibis Hotel towards the AIB bank.

Mr O’Keeffe said the planned project will be part funded by O’Flynn Construction.

That company’s plans to build more than 1,000 homes at Dunkettle and Ballinglanna were knocked on the head because the road infrastructure serving the proposed sites was inadequate for the volume of traffic which it would generate.

An Bord Pleanála is to conduct an oral hearing into the O’Flynn Construction plans on September 8.

The county engineer said that Compulsory Purchase Orders would have to made in order to provide for road widening in that area.

The overall plan for the new dual carriageway, slip road and upgrading of the back road into Glanmire have gone to the detailed design stage.

It is expected they will go to tender within the next six months.