M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

A JR was inevitable given our dysfunctional planning appeal system but a shame nonetheless. It's a shame for the people of Galway, as this effectively freezes the Galway Transport Strategy for the coming years, and essentially eliminates any realistic chance of radical redistribution of Galway's road space. The ring road will remain just as necessary after the JR concludes, but it will only continue to increase in price, and will just be delivered instead by an SF/FF government at greater expense several years down the line.

I guess the rest of us will benefit from increased road funding though in the meantime, so maybe Galway's loss is the rest of Ireland's gain. Is olc an ghaoth...

The Galway Ring Road is a core government policy at local and national level, the lynchpin of the Galway Transport Strategy, and a key part of the National Development Strategy. A planning system that cannot give the final okay to such an important infrastructure project in reasonable time, and whose approval is then routinely suspended for years on end to allow NIMBYs to argue on points of law which are utterly irrelevant to the merits of the project is indeed dysfunctional, and denial of this simple fact is what is costing this country housing, business, and industrial development on a daily basis.

The government's reforms to the planning system can't come fast enough.

Everyone,no matter their opinion on the need for this road, knew a JR was inevitable from the day the preferred scheme was announced. The Galway Transport Strategy relying entirely on this road being built was stupidity on the part of those who prepared the strategy. The JR only freezes the Galway Transport Strategy because the strategy is so reliant on one very wobbly project. Any half decent strategy isn't based around a single point of failure with a certainty of delay and high probability of failure.

The flaws of that hospital analogy have already been pointed out to you; more hospitals don't create more sisk/injured people and there are plenty of initiatives to reduce hospital waiting lists which don't involve building hospitals by improving the general health of the population.

Some level of new road building will almost certainly have to be part of the solution for Galway. The fallacy is that the proposed road is designed entirely to accommodate commuters and with no consideration whatsoever for public/active transport. Hand-waving claims about a ring road magically solving these problems without any new public/active transport are all well and good, but they simply aren't based in reality.

It has been obvious from the beginning that this approach was going to run into difficulties (not least around government policy in relation to transport and climate change and their direction of travel). To build a transport strategy around a single road (one with limited chance of being built) was stupid in the extreme. The inevitable has happened and the ring road won't be delivered until the end the decade, if ever, and Galway is condemned to enormous congestion for many more years because, as things stand, very little can happen in the meantime. Your whinging that "some people seem so blinded by their beliefs that they cannot accept this simple fact" is truly hilarious.

And its only a 18km road project at that. This to me is the bigger hurdle rather than the JR that is been taken here.

@marno21 Sorry, but I have to call out that reasoning. You’re employing the same logical fallacy as the supporters of Brexit did in the UK, although I’m pretty sure that you’re not doing so deliberately, in the way they did.

Still, you cannot just derive support for the ring-road based on the first-preference votes given to election candidates. People have multiple reasons for voting, and candidates for major parties don’t stand on one single issue. Also, support for the project amongst those candidates ranged from “it’s better than doing nothing” to “it’s the best possible solution”.

... and on the other side of the ballot-box, voters are not so ideologically driven that they would boycott a candidate simply because of their stance on a road project. We have seen that people don’t boycott candidates even on much more emotive issues like abortion, where counties with sizeable objection to repeal still returned TDs who supported it.

As far as I can tell, there has been no well-conducted poll of Galway residents about this scheme, so there’s no justification for saying that “people in Galway” are either in favour of, or against the road.

My own, pure conjecture, opinion is that if you asked them, the majority of the people in Galway only want the traffic fixed, and don’t really care whether that would happen via M6 or via a greatly improved public-transport and cycling system that pulled more commuters off the existing roads, so long as it happened.

I also think that Galway City making their transport plan heavily dependent on M6 being built was at best ill-judged, and a worst a cynical exercise in kicking the can down the road.

True - very small % + or - would be online discussing it as can be seen here on Boards

It is surprising that Racecourse had to take this action - after all one can see the ARUP project offices for this project right from the Grandstand. Practically next door neighbors, hey didnt even need to drive, one can walk across the track to the Ring Road Project office.

How long do these reviews take on average?

Yes. The big mistake was placing this project on the critical path of the Galway transport plan, given how likely it was to be delayed (and not just by objections: tunnelling in urban areas is not without its own risks).

I don't think that was by mistake, the intention was to have everything else predicated on the ring road; "you'll get a few quid towards public/active transport right after I get me billion euro bypass, shure the bypass frees up the space".