M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

Absolutely, capacity has to come primarily in the form of public transport.

However, it's not unreasonable to assume a new road, as well as PT, is simultaneously needed.

More roads and a river crossing, for all forms of transport (active travel, buses, cars, commercial vehicles) is necessary for a city growing as fast as Galway.

One way or another, can we please move on from this. It's not getting us anywhere.

At the end of the day, what will determine the need for a road and PT requirements will be driven by facts and figures. Not to mention a sound planning application that ticks all the environmental boxes and doesn't fall at such an early hurdle

It's not so much about one off housing as people using cars to commute to work.

You could entirely ban one off housing and build 30story apartment blocks in Bearna and Spiddal. The same issues would still persist... if you make it easier to drive (more roads), then people will drive.

Can you at least accept the genuine concern that building more roads might be a short term solution before congestion returns to previous levels?..

I'd generally be an advocate of bypasses/ring roads and for me Galway is no different. It can/should be a win win when you take any form of traffic that doesn't want or need to be in the city out of the streets where space is most valuable.

In all the back and forth on pros and cons I'm surprised the impact on PT/AT doesn’t come up more often. As a basic factor it must surely be accepted that the PT/AT solutions for Galway are far more constrained without a Ring Road. Without it the starting point for any PT/AT scheme has to be facilitating the transport of every person/good/vehicle etc. across the Corrib using the existing bridges before any PT/AT positive change is made. The benefit of moving a significant portion of that calualtion off the board has to be a very significant benefit. It won't be possible to obtain the same level of pedestrianisation/cycling segregation/PT prioritisation and journey times where the GCRR is not in place.

You could argue that it's a prioritisiation issue and that funding the road means less for PT, which is fair enough. In the current environment given focus on climate change mitigating actions I don't see it as an issue, its the shortage of even medium term PT projects suitable to fund that's the problem as opposed to funds themselves, but yes that may not last forever. But even with lots of funds I think its difficult to use money to improve PT in the city centre that will have anything like the impact of moving traffic and in particular HGVs out altogether.

Maybe there's something Gawlay specific I'm missing but as a walker/cyclist/PT user I can only see benefits and better options to further improve with the GCRR in place.

I'm confused about all of this. From my admittedly limited time in Galway, or indeed from just looking at the place on a map, it seems to be that the problems in the region all stem from the fact that the main East-West route shares a section with the main North-South route along the Headford Road, and that as such this is a key bottleneck for more or less anyone trying to do anything from their daily commute to literally all the other reasons that people travel at various times of the day, including long distance travel from the majority of Ireland to the entire city and county West of the Corrib river. And it seems to me that the anti-motorist brigade consider it acceptable that most journeys in the region regardless of direction have to go up or down this key choke point which is a de-facto city street.

And I perceive this as being bad for everyone - the people who are the victims of this mess and the entire West county that is to some extent disconnected from most of the rest of Ireland.

Correct me if I am wrong but there is precisely zero possibility here for a "win win" scenario as suggested by a poster just above, that the Greta Thunberg and doom-mongers fanatics want to keep everyone stuck on the Headford Road. Is it the case that any solution will be viewed as bad by some if it gives people any alternative whatsoever to being on a street they don't want to be and have no business being on, no matter what else is included in the plan e.g. cycle lanes, buses etc?

If the planners had included some simultaneous public transport plans or even a very simple legal commitment to reduce car access across inner city bridges upon opening, there wouldn't be half as much objection.

But they didn't. They keep reaffirming that "we'll build the road first and then consider those things".

Yeah, you won’t find a more pro-road group of people anywhere than the posters on this forum, so it says a lot that the majority think that this Ring Road is a bad idea, even though it would be a very interesting project from an engineering point of view.

Galway needs some kind of a ring-road for traffic that does not need to enter the city. That is not a big amount of traffic, so a 2+2 road would be adequate, and could be located away from expensive solutions like the racecourse tunnel. The big problem I had with this plan is that it has multiple closely-spaced junctions, that will effectively turn it into a massive urban collector-distributor that will just generate more suburban traffic.

You cannot fix the traffic problems of Galway without reducing the amount of traffic. The cost of this project shows that there’s really not enough space to try build out of the problem (leaving aside that every single city that tried to road-build its way out of its traffic problems had them come back within 10 years).

Give a third of of the commuters a better option than driving through the city, and there’s no traffic problems anymore. A “better option” means not driving, not taking a longer trip on a ring-road that will soon be as congested as the city was.