N5 - Westport to Turlough [open to traffic]

To be honest Westport to Castlebar will only be reduced by three or four minutes I'd say. Westport to east of Castlebar (i.e. Dublin, Belfast, Sligo etc.) should be reduced by 10 to 15 minutes though, maybe more at peak times. It will also pull a lot of the traffic away from the inner ring road in Castlebar and make getting around the town during the day time much easier.

They did a trial pedestrian weekend on a bank holiday about 15 years ago.

The chamber of commerce hated it as they wouldn't stop in for stuff on the way home! Not realising that the busy road puts people off.

It also caused huge amounts of traffic. If they get a bypass out to the Louisburgh road they should try it again.

how much passing traffic stops in Castlebar anyway, the only place it's on the way to is Westport which is only 15 mins up the road. We've gone to Westport and Achill (from Wicklow) in the last couple of years and it never even occurred to me to go into Castlebar.

The argument doesn't make sense in Castlebar's case anyway, because the passing traffic hasn't gone through the the town centre since the original bypass was built around 1990. Passing through Castlebar to go from Dublin to Westport you pretty much just pass four petrol stations, the football stadium, the back of the hospital and a few housing estates on Westport road and you're out of the town again. You had to turn off to go anywhere useful anyway.

I'm just about old enough to remember the same arguments being made when the first bypass was built, and there was nothing in it then either. In fact it almost doesn't bear thinking about what the traffic would be like in the town of the first bypass had never been done.

Would have come in the old turlough road, in by the Welcome Inn, left down Lininhall street and up main st, past the TF and the hospital and out the Westport road then. Used to take about 35/40 mins that time to get from Swinford to Castlebar (apart from the time I had my appendix out, the father got me over to the hospital in a record breaking 25mins!!!)

I was coming back from Castlebar last week and there was roadworks again in Ballyvary, traffic that side of the road was diverted in at the petrol station and on that real old Castlebar main road and came out at the side of the Wishing Well. Boy does that bring back memories of travelling that road in the 70's and 80's! How far we have come (in some ways).

is it single or dual carriageway at that point?

I see reports of october 2022 finish date for this.