The M50 – the first section of which, including the West-Link Bridge, opened in March 1990 – is the most congested, most infuriating, but unfortunately most necessary road in the entire country.

From Dublin Port out to the M1 and then all the way around the city as far as the Wicklow border, it represents 45.5 kilometres of pain for hundreds of thousands of regular commuters, yet it’s the beating heart of the country’s road network.

These days, the M50 is completely enmeshed in the city, used by millions of motorists to get around Dublin, giving us direct access to huge shopping centres like Blanchardstown and Liffey Valley, and stimulating development in areas like Tallaght and Ballymount.

But that wasn’t originally the plan at all. When an orbital motorway was first proposed in 1971, it was intended to keep traffic out of the city by connecting the major national roads, so that drivers could finally travel from, for example, Dundalk to Cork without braving the city centre’s clogged-up streets.

The first section to be built was the West-Link Bridge, a highly controversial road spanning the entire Liffey valley at Strawberry Beds, which opened 30 years ago this month. At 385m long and 40m high, it was the largest bridge ever built in the state.

Initially, there was one deck with two lanes in each direction. In the early 2000s, an extra deck was added to increase capacity to four lanes each way.

Constructed at a time when public coffers were stretched, the whole thing was financed and built by the private sector, with the money recouped in the form of tolls. When it was built, it cost 60 pence for a car to use the bridge – now the price varies from €2.10 with an electronic tag to €3.10 for unregistered cars.

Speaking in 1987, Minister for the Environment Pádraig Flynn told RTÉ News that he was confident that motorists would pay to use the bridge, and that numbers would increase as the years went by.

He wasn’t wrong – the initial section was projected to carry 45,000 vehicles per day whereas now, 30 years after the bridge was open, it handles over 144,500 per day on average, according to the most recent Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) figures from 2018.

Is it any wonder the M50 has become a synonym for ‘car park’ in many people’s minds? There have been plenty of upgrades along the way – toll booths removed, lanes added, traffic lights and roundabouts removed from exits and so on – but the fact remains that in many places the M50 is operating at or beyond capacity.

So what’s to be done about it? Quite obviously, we need to get out of our cars and into public transport – for environmental reasons as well as to combat congestion and hopefully salvage a little bit of our sanity along with it. Sitting in traffic is a stressful business, after all.

That’s a slow, expensive and time-consuming process that often requires more political will than is available in the short-termist, timid world of electoral politics.

Ambitious plans have long been mooted to take the pressure off the M50 by building more roads – though as economist David McWilliams recently pointed out – traffic tends to behave like gas in a pipe, expanding to fill the available space. The more roads you build, the more cars you tend to find on them.

Land has been earmarked for a section of motorway that would tunnel underground from Dublin Port area to Blackrock and then cut a swathe through south Dublin to complete the circle at Sandyford. Understandably, this has proved unpopular with communities along the route – and it would be phenomenally expensive.

There have also been plans for a mammoth new Leinster Outer Orbital motorway that would bypass the entire Dublin region altogether, arcing from Drogheda, through Meath and Kildare to join up with the M7/M9 junction near Newbridge.

The plan looked to be on course until the financial crash, and in 2015 it was deferred until after 2035. By that point, the idea of another enormous motorway around the capital might look a lot less sensible.

In the meantime, the West-Link Bridge, and the motorway that it forms an integral part of, will carry on doing its best to ferry us all across the Liffey and beyond.