It will be a “few years” before construction works on the Dublin MetroLink rail line are at “full tilt”, the Oireachtas transport committee has heard. Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) chief executive Lorcan O’Connor said he did not see significant works on the underground rail line happening next year, but there would be an increasing amount of preparatory work commencing. O’Connor said TII was “close to assuming invitation to tender” for core civil and tunnelling works. “We will actually see some initial enabling works, movement of utilities and so on, by the end of the year and there’s potential acceleration of work on site-specific areas such as Dublin Airport soon as well,” he said. “Before you’re at full tilt it will be a few years, but you will see a gradual build up over the next while.”O’Connor said TII, the State agency responsible for roads and public transport infrastructure, was working with the Government around recruiting a replacement for Seán Sweeney, the former MetroLink programme director, but did not have a “precise timeline”. The New Zealander resigned from the €550,000-a-year job in April, citing family reasons. Separately, the committee heard traffic volumes on the M50 have increased by 10 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic with the motorway “largely operating at capacity”. Traffic volumes rose across the national road network last year, with the M50 seeing an increase of about 2 per cent, according to O’Connor. He said the level of funding available for maintaining and improving the national road network was “challenging”. “Currently, as we approach the 20th anniversary of the completion of the major interurban motorway network, funding levels are insufficient to undertake essential life cycle asset renewals for ageing infrastructure assets and to maintain the asset value of approximately €31 billion,” said O’Connor. “Additional funding is required to continue to effectively maintain the network and address the challenges of resilience and climate change.” In relation to tolls on the M50, O’Connor said there were issues around “equality” in that “you could be using a good portion of the M50 and not paying a toll and [using] a short portion and you’re paying the full toll”.The National Transport Authority (NTA) is working on a broader demand management strategy while a working group has been established to look at “tolling more generally”.“That is being looked at over the next while,” said O’Connor, who added he was conscious that various PPP (public-private partnership) tolling contracts, of which the M50 is not one, were coming to the end of their duration over the next decade. O’Connor said it was important to bring clarity to demand management strategy over the “next year or two”. He said it was “certainly an option” to consider infrastructural modifications in terms of where tolls are placed by the end of the decade, but this would be informed by the NTA’s strategy.