M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

There is already a West-East dual carriageway; the existing N6 and SQD, also linking to the WDR.

"Galway city is at the heart of the county and you CAN'T cross side to the other without going into the heart of the city or sitting on a bridge in traffic. It's a joke."

That's what you'll get with the proposed ring road, queueing to exist/enter to travel to/from your preferred part of the city (for 97% of morning traffic).

If promises hold true, you'll have lower priority on the roads in those parts of the city you're accessing.

Thank you @[Deleted User] for your service to this thread in reading through all that and summarising. Your analysis seems spot-on, if sadly, unsurprising.

But even before we get to building P&Rs, a simple example of how absolutely glacial the whole approach is, is to ask about the Tuam Road Bus Lanes. Where are we with that? Or the Parkmore Road improvements?

What you have described are not the two factions here. There are other options and other options were available but the promoters of this project were determined to build a full bypass from Coolagh to Barna. They ignored the findings of the studies they had commissioned (particularly the nature of travel in and around the city) and necessitated ridiculously elaborate and expensive structures (viaduct and tunnel). This is one extreme of the spectrum here and those that subscribe to that look down on everybody with a different opinion with nonsense like "bikes and buses are everything".

The current plan was never going to happen, this was obvious for the beginning. It was always going to be too expensive and unnecessarily complex which brought in other issues (environmental, landowner resistance (eg. Galway Racecourse), etc.). And to make things worse, any other changes were predicated on this bypass meaning nothing else has happened in the intervening years. How many more years do we need to waste on this bypass?

My opinion is, and I have been saying in this thread for several years, is that a new bridge is needed but that does not mean a Coolagh to Barna bypass. On the eastern side, a new link from M6 to Parkmore Road (with bus priority) could take a lot of traffic away from Coolagh roundabout. On the western side, any new road should only connect to the N59. That frees up the QCB for hugely improved bus services, along with improvements either side.

There are other options which need to be considered, sticking belligerently to this bypass is only going to result in nothing happening for many more years.

I was intentionally low on detail because the solution should be guided by assessments and feasibility. This does not seem to have happened with the current bypass proposal where the starting point seems to have been a motorway between Coolagh and Barna and flesh out the detail from there.

Getting more detailed for a minute, I thought Ardaun was south of the M6. In any case, something would need to be done to facilitate the new development so this could be part of that solution. On the western side, come off the N6 west of the N83, past Ballindoyle and use the current bridge proposal and N59 connection.

But my point really was that there were and are other options to consider. It seems supporters of the current bypass plan presented it as the only possible option to avoid any real assessment of it. We can see this throughout this thread, the "it's either this or you expect everyone to cycle to work" narrative. And of course "the bypass frees up space, so I get what I want now and you might get what you want at some undefined point in the future", so public/active transport is only a sweetener after all drivers have been accommodated.

I am not a massive supporter or opposer of the GCRR.

But I do like the idea of another bridge.

So I am drawn to Pete_Cavan suggestion, and had been thinking the same myself.

However, I realise people are going to say, that just sends the traffic into the Menlo Park junction.............

Great to see alternative approaches to solving the problem. Doesn't help those that have pinned their pension investment on future development land out by Barna and Furbo though. ;-)

If the Irish Doctors are so concerned about the environment, they might have a word with their colleagues who park their pollution-spewing Range Rover tanks outside Barna school ...

Typical Doctors - great at prescribing what everyone else should be doing - not so good at doing it themselves ...

Where is Galways' first bypass?

Ya people on this thread are struggling with this one. Restricting through traffic is what its about not cars.

One will still be able to drive into the City Centre and park up within 100m of Shop Street. It will be more expensive that parking at the P&R but that's the model that is followed all over Europe. Its not re-inventing the wheel.

Look what Ghent did (https://www.eltis.org/discover/case-studies/gents-traffic-circulation-plan-belgium)

waiting for the - but Ghent has x,y,z...... one apply's the principles, one is NOT going to get an exact copy and paste geographical map of a City and population distribution

If you're an elderly person living in the Claddagh, and your grandchild wants to take you to the hairdresser in Middle Street - then sure, they can do it, but they will have to go a huge distance out of their way.

That's just crapping on residents for ideological reasons, with measures that will do NOTHING to address the actual traffic issues, which are all around the edges, not in the city centre.