This site was founded out of a number of interests I have:
• urban change, particulary old photos of how areas have been altered
• traffic flow and how different layouts affect it
• the engineering of road structures
• history
I also wanted to see if there was anyone else out there as interested in Northern Ireland's roads as I am! (The answer, incidentally, is yes.)
Every road is built because sufficiently large numbers of people need or will need to make that journey. Roads in Ireland go back for centuries and, since only a few roads disappear, our patchwork road network is a living history of the movements of people over the centuries. Although motorways are my main interest, these are only the most recent in many phases of this process which include the first tracks, the turnpikes of the 19th century, railways, trunk roads, motorways and modern systems such as eWays and cycle lanes.
This site is not a protest site. It is a site about roads, and I do enjoy watching roads being built. However this site does not advocate unrestricted road building, nor does it deny that public transport needs to be drastically improved. Road building alone will not solve transport problems.
I owe particular credit to Chris Marshall, founder of CBRD, for the inspiration for the format of this site and the UK Motorway Archive for their meticulous research that I have been able to draw on. See the links page for more information.
Wesley Johnston
Fame!
Over the years, the Northern Ireland Roads Site has been cited or mentioned various times. Here are some of those times, starting in November 2009:
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