M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

No, that was on the “Galway Traffic” thread in Regional>Galway forum, which has also devolved into the usual edition of “alternative commuting manifesto & gazzete” that discussing the ringroads gets dragged into by green activists. We are in the Infrastructure forum where it is a more general matter.

I bring my circumstances up A: to negate the tendency to think of this as a pencil pushing exercise beloved of politicos where no one gets hurt, and B: to underline that for the anti road lobby’s aims to be met, more drastic actions such as car ownership licencing & population control would be needed.

My reply to this question of yours is not for polite conversation, nor would be any opinion of you I had for asking it.

You want sources? Sure, there's loads, many have been posted here in this very thread and others over the years. Feel free to go through any number of them. They've been done all over the world and the result is always the same i.e. there has never been an instance where more roads has fixed congestion with congestion always getting worse.

There is also Reduced demand (the inverse effect also known as disappearing traffic, traffic evaporation, traffic suppression or dissuaded demand ) where if roads are removed, or private car access is restricted, congestion improves as it results in dissuaded demand where people turn to more efficient or convenient modes. There have also been numerous studies done on this too, again, feel free to have a look at any of then.

All of these studies, from all over the world, all say the same thing, if you build more roads, you get more congestion.

Indeed, one of the major criticisms of the M6 is that its design is, in a large part, to allow for land further from the city to be opened up for development, further locking in car dependence

Ok

Lads.

You’re on about me, whatabouting about England, faffing about my question.

I opened it out to ask about all the others in my position who’s prevented from building rural by Big Green. My own answer is to emigrate, but what about them? Are they doing the same? Are they doing the desired cookie cutter house in an estate or better, the shoebox apartment?

Because funding

Did you happen to review the GTS documents by any chance?

It's basically the GCRR and a handful of very basic bus, bike and walking measures. It works out to be about 600 mil for the GCRR and about 25 million for everything else. It should also be noted that not all of the "everything else" will be done either.

Building the GCRR means crumbs from the table for everything else.

Whereas spend 100 million on the everything else would free up far more capacity on the city roads than the GCRR ever will and see the city being a far better place to live in.

What Galway got in the GTS is basically the absolute bare minimum they could feasibly get away with.....and a ring road.

In a nutshell Galway will not see serious levels of investment in any form of sustainable transport for the next 10-20 years as long as the GCRR is on the table.

The GTS is scheduled for review this year but as the GCRR was approved by ABP, any modifications to it will be minimal.

Only when the ring road becomes a fustercluck with traffic jams will they look at resolving that by which time the population will be 50% larger and dispersed over a far larger area which will mean the likes of walking and cycling will not be a convenient option for a lot of people and it'll be a nightmare to try implement bus infrastructure.

The next few weeks will see who is bringing JR's and what they will entail and personally I really hope they succeed in getting it canned as that's the best hope to transform Galway.

Where’s the M45 thread on here? Did I miss it?

Also re the link between population & infrastructure: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0974930619879573

literally the second Google result