Kill's prominence through its history stems from its situation on the
main road from Dublin to the south and south-west. The village was a staging post on the old toll road to Kilcullen, the first
turnpike to be built (1729). It was here that horses were changed on the three-hour mail coach journey from Dublin to
Kilcullen. The Old House, a turnpike inn, was originally built in 1794 and then rebuilt in 1943. Traffic increased dramatically on the road, (designated the
T5 in 1926 and the
N7 in 1977) in the middle years of the 20th century (2,000 a day in 1948, 3,800 in 1954, 4,500 in 1956, and 6,900 in 1962). Proposals to bypass the village, first published in 1952, were contested by the population, but Kill was the first of the three villages on the Dublin-Naas road to be by-passed when a single carriageway road, 28 feet wide, through the fields of the Old Glebe House to the north of the town, was opened by
Gerard Sweetman on 15 June 1956. The road claimed its first casualty,
Straffan resident Margaret Hanafin, even before its official opening on 1 June 1956, and four people died in the first major collision on the newly constructed bypass on 31 July. The
Irish Times motoring correspondent described the road as:"...the most modern piece of road engineering in the country. The criticism had been made that the bypass was crossed by a local road, running from Kill to Straffan, about which the only warning on the main road was one small sign". The accident rate was a factor in the postponement of the entire Naas road scheme by the
Fine Gael led coalition government in August 1956, leaving both the
Johnstown and
Rathcoole sections of the road in a semi-finished state until the re-election of a
Fianna Fáil government. The single carriageway by-pass was eventually replaced by a dual carriageway, opened by
Neil Blaney on 25 June 1963, the first section of the Dublin-Naas road to be increased to four lanes. The local service station in Beaufort, owned by the Goosen family, became known for its "open 24½ hours daily" sign. This road was poorly designed with broadside crossings of insufficient length to accommodate even a small motor car. Kill's new dual carriageway claimed 18 lives in its first three years of operation to 1966 and a total of 57 lives in all. Even after traffic lights were installed at the Kill junction in November 1980, eleven more people died before a proper graded fly-over crossing was completed on 14 August 2006. ==Economy==