M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

It shows that the local council are willing to approve housing away from the existing built up urban area without provision for public/transport. The residents there would obviously be very car dependent and contribute to further traffic congestion around Galway. So on one hand they are happy for development patterns which contribute to traffic, while at the same time promoting a road as their main solution to congestion (there are no sustainable transport considerations as part of the GCRR).

It's all about providing more space for cars while allowing development patterns which will result in more cars which eat up the space provided. No considerationfor disincentivising cars or providingviable alternatives (apart from vague notions about "freeing up space" which may or may not happened). It's all so backwards.

Makes sense, housing crisis, climate crisis, transport crisis, so scale down a central housing development right next to the city's station. So much stupidity and failure.

Hit the nail on the head here, same goes for the Headford Road and they are one of the big property owners there with the Dyke Road car park. Sometimes I think they are afraid of there own shadow at times, Council zone the land for the usage but that is about it, no detail.

The original tweet above attempts to draw a causative link between the GCRR and the housing estate, implying clearly that one lead to the other.

I'm not sure how developing this small estate nearly a decade before the GCRR is likely to open supports your argument about the GCRR and planning developments. To be honest, it's hard to see how anything other than a complete and total ban on development of any kind outside the centre of Galway could refute your claim that the GCRR will lead to sprawl, as any development outside Galway's current contours will be blamed on the road.

The GCRR is not the solution proposed for Galway's traffic. The Galway Transport Strategy, which includes extensive investment in active and public transport in Galway as well as taking road space away from cars, is the solution proposed for Galway's traffic. It includes the GCRR as one part of a much larger strategy. This has been pointed out so many times.

While I would prefer denser housing that is better connected to PT, a few houses aren't going to make any significant difference to Galway's traffic, but will make a huge difference to the lives of people who are able to buy their own home.

@KrisW1001, can you elaborate on this point you made?

If you’ve driven in Waterford, Limerick or Cork, you'll see the big difference in road provision within the city limits: Galway has clearly used an American model of wide collector-distrubutors that slice through the inner suburbs, while both Limerick and Waterford* have followed a more European model of orbital relief routes and primary streets (not roads).

@FreedomOfSpeechAndChoice As it happens, I won't be affected by the construction in any way, but I visit Galway, and suffer the traffic every time I do; I'd like to see it properly addressed.

@Geuze my point is that Galway's road development is characterised by multilane collector/distributor roads that don't really bypass parts of the city, but instead draw neighbourhood and long-distance traffic onto them, and then redistribute that to other neighbourhoods. This is how suburban traffic design is done in the USA, particularly in the Western states where land is cheap, housing density is low, and cars the only available transport mode. This model fits well with Galway's outer suburbs, but breaks down when you approach the very compact core of the city: the core cannot absorb the traffic volumes that are being rammed into it. Western US cities do not have compact cores (San Francisco excepted, but to be honest, even SF is sparse by European standards), so the design pattern doesn't have to consider this; the people who decided to apply it to Galway really should have considered this fact, but hindsight is cheap, etc.

The other cities I mention took a different approach, based more on British, rather than American, practice: no high-capacity routes into the core, instead traffic is drawn out onto orbital routes. It's not ideal either, but it's a better model for urban centres that are a maze of relatively narrow streets (as every Irish city is).

I've spent a lot of time in California, and that means a lot of time driving in California, and Galway always reminds me of a Californian city in the way its road network is designed. Limerick's road network feels more British, and Waterford's more like an Italian or French town, with its concentric ring-roads, and the clearly zoned development.

Yes, those are the ones.

Waterford's Inner Ring is not much more than a single-carriageway relief road around the inner city; the Outer Ring is a (mostly) an urban 2+2 with at-grade roundabout junctions that orbits the city between the Waterford Bypass's single Waterford exit and the city's hospital (the N25 Waterford Bypass exit to the north of the River Suir is really not useful for accessing Waterford city itself - its main purpose is as an interchange with N24 and M9). The approach roads from the Outer Ring into Waterford itself are all single carriageways.

Was amazed to see that Galway Racecourse took this action after all the years of "planning".

As I said, objections to the high court are now seen as a normal part of the planning process. There must be something wrong if 95% of projects like this go before a High Court for review compared to 20% in Europe.

Another stat I saw in the SBP was that 11 out of 40 High Court judges are fully occupied by these planning reviews, which is nuts. The government are going to set up a special planning court.

SDHs are a good thing IMO, because every crank and malcontent would be trying to put pressure on their councillors to stop building anything anywhere.

There is a very good reason why David McWilliams call use the BANANA

Not at all. Big Infrastructure projects in places like Spain are just done, with little concern for those on the ground. Ireland has a big thing about private property, which much of the rest of continental Europe doesn't have.

Engagement is fine and welcome, but often locals think engagement is actually stopping the project or, rerouting entire roads, railways or housing away from their area. i.e. dump the problem elsewhere.

See M28 or Dublin Bus Connects as examples.

Correlation does not mean causation.

You should be aware of that given you were hopping mad over the Strand Road injunction.

You cannot launch a Judicial Review of a planning decision on the basis of what was granted, it has to be on how that approval was decided. There is a definite causal relationship here: if a large share of judicial challenges are successful it means that the planning process is not thorough enough in complying with the various laws that govern planning in this country.

That lack of thoroughness is due to a lack of resources at An Bord Pleanála. If we gave them more people to double- and triple- check their work, then the opportunities for Judicial Review will drop dramatically. It would also get projects through planning quicker.

But Judicial Review itself is the planning equivalent of smashing shop windows - makes the complainants feel like they’ve had their revenge, but achieves nothing much in the end. Most projects that are bounced back to APB by a JR eventually get built as planned, because the JR process can do nothing to address the concerns with what was given planning approval; all it does is stop the whole project going ahead while the planning returns to APB to have the correct i’s dotted and t’s crossed. It adds only a delay which serves nobody - a classic example of letting perfection be the enemy of good. And I say this as someone who is mostly against the N6 Ring Road project: it's a crap project, but given that it has become the de-facto gating project for the necessary public transport improvements in Galway, delaying it further is making Galwegians the pawns in someone else’s righteous wars.

There is indeed something wrong with the planning process and that's exactly what was being addressed in the article that you mention.

Planning system overhaul will see High Court judges asked to vet judicial reviews more strictly | Business Post

"High Court judges will be asked to vet judicial reviews more strictly to prevent spurious cases as part of a major overhaul of Ireland’s planning system, the Business Post can reveal.

Other changes proposed as part of the planning reforms include the establishment of a new climate and maritime unit for renewable energy applications in An Bord Pleanála, while a court dedicated to planning and environmental issues will also be set up in 2023."