Light rail for Galway

Raisins

[Deleted User] wrote: »

pedestrianise most of the city center

What more do you want pedestrianised? Dominic Street? That's a terrible idea.

xckjoo

Raisins wrote: »

What more do you want pedestrianised? Dominic Street? That's a terrible idea.

Why would that be a terrible idea?

Raisins

Night Falls wrote: »

I see catherine connolly is still talking about petitions as evidence of demand for this. That isn't the sort of demand that wins arguments on public transport provision, it's how many trips would actually use the service and as it stands the numbers don't add up. Isn't it something like the project demand being only a third of the capacity of a light rail system?

I think it's the other way around, the total capacity of the rail system would only cater for a third of demand.

Catherine Connolly is too silly to accept that we might need a bus or a road. She'll be preaching the gluas for years. This is the same woman who personally blocked the Bish move up to a greenfield site in Daingean at the height of the boom because a developer wanted to give them a fortune to put apartments there and Catherine wanted a music school or something instead. High density apartment development near the college and city centre made. sense. A huge school on a greenfield site made sense. 13 years on 700 kids are still playing soccer on tiny piece of tarnac and cars still going in and out to nuns island but now they're now moving after all.

Mrs OBumble

xckjoo wrote: »

Why would that be a terrible idea?

Passive surveylance provided by passing cars keeps streets safe(r) late at night when there are not so many pedestrians around. Remove that, and you make the neighbourhood very unattractive for residents.

what_traffic wrote: »

I would disagree with your point about who made these changes happen, if an outside organisation has to step, it says alot about the culture within City Hall but also the funding of it and where that limited funding goes.

But local government in Ireland is not responsible for providing public transport. All they are responsible for is planning permission (IMHO we should not be approving new estates without commitment from the NTA to provide public transport there .. by my opinion ain't the law ), providing roads and on-street infrastructure, eg bus shelters.

what_traffic

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

But local government in Ireland is not responsible for providing public transport. All they are responsible for is planning permission (IMHO we should not be approving new estates without commitment from the NTA to provide public transport there .. by my opinion ain't the law ), providing roads and on-street infrastructure, eg bus shelters.

Would agree with that, Galway City Council are responsible for putting in the bus stops, however one main problem is permability in NEW estates to get to a bus route. KnocknaCarra is really poor for this, especially the WDR. Galway City Council should be active in this area, does not cost much money at all, just need to convince residents on the benefits of it.

Pretty sure the GTU have an NTA rep based in Galway, hopefull will see more people based here from the NTA. Would ya believe, back in the day Bus Eireann did, but then Galway City Council took over that task as Bus Eireann were not really bothered providing shelters.

xckjoo

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

Passive surveylance provided by passing cars keeps streets safe(r) late at night when there are not so many pedestrians around. Remove that, and you make the neighbourhood very unattractive for residents.

On Dominick Street? What are you smoking?

what_traffic

xckjoo wrote: »

On Dominick Street? What are you smoking?

No its a fair point from Mrs OBumble, however you could still have certain roads like "Cross Street" closed from 08h00 -> 24h00 and open during the night hours

xckjoo

what_traffic wrote: »

No its a fair point from Mrs OBumble, however you could still have certain roads like "Cross Street" closed from 08h00 -> 24h00 and open during the night hours

Nah it's boll**ks. It's population primarily overlook the street, it has a large number of pubs and other late night venues and is right around the corner from the cop shop. If it can't be pedestrianized, where can? Should we roll back on Shop Street too? Surely the same logic can apply there.

Night Falls

Raisins wrote: »

I think it's the other way around, the total capacity of the rail system would only cater for a third of demand.

No, the tribune incorrectly reported it, it's that projected demand is only about a third of the capacity of a typical light rail system. If it was the other way around then you'd be needing to build three GLUASes.

Mrs OBumble

xckjoo wrote: »

Nah it's boll**ks. It's population primarily overlook the street, it has a large number of pubs and other late night venues and is right around the corner from the cop shop. If it can't be pedestrianized, where can? Should we roll back on Shop Street too? Surely the same logic can apply there.

The problem time is after the pubs haved closed and most people gone. Houses may be at the kerb but very few residents actually look out to the street or take notice of street noise. Especially late at night.

Shop St has people around most of the night.
But Dominic St woild be a lot quieter.

xckjoo

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

The problem time is after the pubs haved closed and most people gone. Houses may be at the kerb but very few residents actually look out to the street or take notice of street noise. Especially late at night.

Shop St has people around most of the night.
But Dominic St woild be a lot quieter.

So we should keep car access to areas on the off chance that someone might drive down that road at the same time a crime might be occurring? Stack a few assumptions about peoples behavior, pass them off as fact and and off we go.

You make it sound like the only thing stopping waves of criminals descending on the area and running off all the residents is the occasional car passing in the middle of the night. There's simultaneously nobody around and enough people to commit crimes, be victims of crimes and a steady enough stream of people driving through the area to dissuade any of this from happening.

Crime management and transport infrastructure management aren't interchangeable.

what_traffic

xckjoo wrote: »

Nah it's boll**ks. It's population primarily overlook the street, it has a large number of pubs and other late night venues and is right around the corner from the cop shop. If it can't be pedestrianized, where can? Should we roll back on Shop Street too? Surely the same logic can apply there.

Just for clarification, I dont think Domnick Street is a good example. There is a lot of passive survillence on the Street, the nature of business on the street lends itself to it, it would be streets further away that would be impacted by the removal of this through car traffic at night. Like Henry St or Sea Road. However no reason that certain streets in the City Centre could not be closed for 12h or 16h per day.

GLUAS campaigners claim light rail cheaper than bus network

http://connachttribune.ie/gluas-campaigners-claim-light-rail-cheaper-than-bus-network-304/

Summary, it'll cost 18 million less to provide GLUAS than the bus changes and it can be done 7 years faster

I'm reserving the harsh comments until I see the analysis they did. Anyone got a copy of it?

GerardKeating

Deleted User wrote: »

GLUAS campaigners claim light rail cheaper than bus network

http://connachttribune.ie/gluas-campaigners-claim-light-rail-cheaper-than-bus-network-304/

Summary, it'll cost 18 million less to provide GLUAS than the bus changes and it can be done 7 years faster

I'm reserving the harsh comments until I see the analysis they did. Anyone got a copy of it?

It might just be badly worded, but the article states that 21km of light rail can be build for €282 million.

But "extending 14km of bus routes along with upgrading and increasing the fleet would cost in the region of €300 million"

Does the €282 million for the light rail just the physical track, or does it include the actual trams, the figures for the Bus network specifically state that it includes route and vehicles.

Also, it says "extending 14km of bus routes". Does this mean 14km in addition to the existing network of bus routes, so what is the total eventual lenght of the new expanded bus network.

what_traffic

http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/103112/public-meeting-on-gluas-light-rail-system
"
A public meeting to build support for an integrated public transport system for the city, including GLUAS, a proposed light rail system similar to the LUAS in Dublin, takes place on Monday September 24 at 8pm in the Harbour Hotel.
"

what_traffic

City public meeting this evening to continue discussion on light rail system for Galway
https://connachttribune.ie/city-public-meeting-this-evening-to-continue-discussion-on-light-rail-system-for-galway/

gugsy

I thought it was an interesting meeting with some good ideas. Pity it's gonna take thousands of hoops to get through but I for one am in favour of it from what I heard last nite. First meeting for me definitely not the last.

Bobeagleburger

While a rail system would be great, how realistic is it? I'd say 100/1 odds on it being implemented.

So imo, it's a time wasting excercise. Fair enough if they were actually doing something meaningful to allievate traffic at the same time. Complete chancers.

djPSB

gugsy wrote: »

I thought it was an interesting meeting with some good ideas. Pity it's gonna take thousands of hoops to get through but I for one am in favour of it from what I heard last nite. First meeting for me definitely not the last.

Was there many there?

gugsy

RoboKlopp wrote:

While a rail system would be great, how realistic is it? I'd say 100/1 odds on it being implemented.

So imo, it's a time wasting excercise. Fair enough if they were actually doing something meaningful to allievate traffic at the same time. Complete chancers.

Where you there? Just curious.

djPSB wrote:

Was there many there?

I would say there were around 100. All the seats were taking up and a few standing so I would say more than they planned had gone.

Bobeagleburger

gugsy wrote: »

Where you there? Just curious.

.

No.

Imo, Galway isn't big enough for light rail. Even if it is viable, how long we talking? 10-15 years? The issues are happening now. They need to do something now.

Some people are stealing a living

gugsy

RoboKlopp wrote: »

No.

Imo, Galway isn't big enough for light rail. Even if it is viable, how long we talking? 10-15 years? The issues are happening now. They need to do something now.

Some people are stealing a living

They said from start of construction to completion would be 140 weeks with minimal traffic disruption as possible. Yes the issues are happening now and whats been done? We may have a ring road by 2024 if were lucky, planning still not complete. BE are trying new things like joining the 401 with 403 to get you from salthill to parkmore imo is a good idea but flawed as peak hours traffic will strangle the timetable which its already doing to some routes leaving people stranded at bus stops by not sending buses from what ive heard on here. Improving times will help but all BE routes go through town which is gridlocked at the best of times and no one with a bit of cop on there seems to see the real problem which is people need to get from west side of city to east and visa verse and the only way is over the QTB. The light rail campaigners are all Galwegians who care and would like to help in trying to ease congestion in the city and with what they have proposed with the help of the n6 bypass and better BE routes this city will move again.

remfan

Galway does not come close population wise to support a light rail system. A report produced in 2010 by a transport planning consultancy firm for Cork City Council looked at how feasible it would be to implement a light-rail system there and concluded that Cork didn’t have the population to justify building a light-rail system and found that introducing a rapid-transit bus network would be much cheaper and more flexible. Galway needs to be bypassed in addition to having improved bus services, cycle lanes etc. We could also benefit from timed pedestrian crossings, more yellow boxes at key junctions, removal of the roundabouts on the dual carriageway from Corrib Park to the Tuam road, and at cemetery cross to be replaced with modern signalized junctions that monitor traffic flow, are coordinated across the route and which can be managed centrally. It is not by coincidence that once you reach the roundabout at the top of Bishop O'Donnell road that the traffic jam ends, we have too many antiquated and artificial blockages on the main arteries that could easily be remedied. Folks please also don't be fooled by the politicians, there is an election coming up so they are jumping on the usual bandwagons of health, homelessness, traffic and in our case Capital of Culture 2020, they have ZERO solutions and are raising the drumbeat now because there is an election coming and in many cases both Councillors and TDs know that they are unlikely to get reelected. They do nothing for 3-4 years and then run around with crazy populist waffle come election time, and we keep getting fooled by them.

xckjoo

gugsy wrote: »

They said from start of construction to completion would be 140 weeks with minimal traffic disruption as possible. Yes the issues are happening now and whats been done? We may have a ring road by 2024 if were lucky, planning still not complete. BE are trying new things like joining the 401 with 403 to get you from salthill to parkmore imo is a good idea but flawed as peak hours traffic will strangle the timetable which its already doing to some routes leaving people stranded at bus stops by not sending buses from what ive heard on here. Improving times will help but all BE routes go through town which is gridlocked at the best of times and no one with a bit of cop on there seems to see the real problem which is people need to get from west side of city to east and visa verse and the only way is over the QTB. The light rail campaigners are all Galwegians who care and would like to help in trying to ease congestion in the city and with what they have proposed with the help of the n6 bypass and better BE routes this city will move again.

I wasn't at the meeting but have heard her talk about it in the past. There was a few issues I couldn't get passed.
1) Cost. She claims it will be cheaper than converting existing roads to bus lanes. How could that ever be possible? A road could become a bus lane with a few signs and some paint. A rail line would need both of these, the the actual line put in, stations/stops, control signals, etc.. I also have my doubts about the costings they're proposing. Their numbers are based on the cost of similar projects that have been done in other European cities in recent years, but I'm not sure how directly transferable they are. We've a lot of subsidence in the roads so I don't think they'd get away with just plonking the lines down on top. Plus when has anything ever come in on-budget in this country?

2) Availability/routes. A train/tram can only go where the rail lines are. Everywhere mm the tram travels will have to be created new. We already have a huge network of roads that buses can travel on today. If something happens with one road, they can take another. If they need to modify routes to cater for new developments, etc. they can do it (comparatively) easily.

3) It would be another unintegrated system to add to the mess. This one might be easily addressable, but based on historic experience, it probably wouldn't be.


I'd love to see a light rail system in Galway, but it just seems to pie-in-the-sky. Slap down a network of bus lanes first and light rail can be added in the future if that works.

West On Track Ver 2.0

jjpep

I have an a open mind on this but I do find it hard to believe that it would be more expensive to create more bus lanes than build a railway.

Even if a railway was built, there should still be a proper network of bus lanes in the city anyway so I don't think its a good idea to make it an either or proposition.

ceatharloch

See attached (especially Appendix C) where the case is made for a single line tram in Galway.

flazio

ceatharloch wrote: »

See attached (especially Appendix C) where the case is made for a single line tram in Galway.

WTF? ???

Whereisgalway

A lot of people wasting their time but if that’s what floats your boat

dave 27

Theres plans for over half a billion to be spent on a stupid ring road due to the horrifically bad planning which resulted in this, now before the road is even started they want a tram system too? Theres no way this would happen, far too much money being spent in too small an urban area with next to no density.