M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

Also transport can come on a road. What do you think buses do?

The councils in question MIGHT progress other stuff after they get this road. They MIGHT be telling the truth there and might genuinely really want to do projects other than this road… but Galway County Council completed absolutely no pedestrian or cycle infrastructure in 2024.

They are one of very few (3 of the 31?) Local Authorities which did not complete any. This was at a time when particularly large amounts of funding were available. Everyone else (including those local authorities with major roads schemes progressing) managed to do this stuff.

Let's be fair also and point out the Galway City Council are not on the "naughty" list!

But anyone who believes the line that "we'll progress the other stuff that's needed after we get this road" really ought to consider that with historical context in mind. The people who are telling us they intend to progress unspecified sustainable transport infrastructure at an unspecified point in the future have literally no recent experience of doing any similar projects. It takes time to get the experience necessary to do infrastructure projects and it would be a struggle for them to upskill and do a good job when the time comes. That's if we were to take what they are saying to be truthful.

I know others on here might not really deal much with the inner workings of local authorities etc, but not drawing down the available active travel funding, not finishing schemes or upskilling their teams using same really looks like an abdication of responsibility to a fair degree. It really does look like there's a culture of "if it's not roads, we're not interested".

Edit: and that goes back to what it looks like might have happened with this project: a solution was proposed (and designed!) without fully considering the problem that needed to be solved, and all other work that followed after that was compromised by that flawed process/methodology.

I can't really speak for the City Council, they do seem to have progressed some bits recently. Some on here claim that they're very poor but I wouldn't know, I haven't dealt with them directly so am not in a position to give any detail. But with the County Council, those stats seem to be damning enough.

Even the bits they do are not great from a walking and cycling perspective - recent Millars Lane "resurfacing" project is a case in point. They didn't grasp the nettle by the hand on this one and take the initial pain for the greater good. Additional permeability was given up - but the youths can still jump the walls. Go figure

M6 to Dublin and M17 are on par with your examples.

We are bypassed in the directions of other major population centres (i.e. North-South). Which is again on-par with the other examples. West of Galway is very sparsely populated, which is part of the reason they started calling this a ring road instead of a bypass.

I agree that the M17 isnt a great design or use of space but so is this proposal. Building something for the sake of it isn't great planning.

Would have built the Claregalway Bypass before it TBH.

Well the M17 was part of the ambitious plan for the entire west and south of the country called the Atlantic Corridor which was supposed to ensure roads of dual carraigeway standard all the way from Letterkenny to Waterford (via Sligo, Galway, Limerick and Cork). It and the M18 were just the first part to go ahead and then the 2008 collapse just scuppered the rest of the plan and we're still slowly picking up the pieces almost 20 years later.

This was supposed to balance out all the recently built Dublin based inter-urban motorways.

If you don't mind me saying, that's a reasonably woolly response. We have serial objectors to projects everywhere. The Green Party are not in government, a new set of parties and independents are now in Government. The road has not progressed. Many of us here think it might not progress.

As a thought exercise could you perhaps consider the fact that many of us here have been discussing in good faith all along when we've been saying the project has been poorly thought out and executed to-date? Most of us are not anti-roads at all. I mean, I'm sure there's bound to be some on here who might just be anti-roads, but that would be a tiny minority at most.

Galway person here and I think 'hans aus dtschl' is showing much more understanding of the situation than you are. S/he has clearly at least taken the time to familiarise themselves with the details of the project and understands that a big part of the reason why it has failed to get to the start line is the project team's own numbers show that it isn't going to make things better.

If the project team had done something similar to the team working on the M20 Limerick to Cork project then much of the objections would disappear. The M20 project incorporates freight hubs, transport hubs, and active travel facilities along the entire length. Whereas in Galway we are being offered a ring road whose chief purpose is to make a few people, who have bought up land around the proposed route, even richer than they already are while leaving traffic as bad as today, just on a much larger scale. They are proposing to build a new bridge over the Corrib but not allow people to walk or cycle over it. They tell us that once the ring road is built space will be freed up for public transport, walking and cycling elsewhere but they attach so little importance to walking and cycling that they are going to deliberately block people from being able to walk 15 minutes from Menlo to the new Bish secondary school location, or from cycling 15 minutes from home in Bushypark to work in an office in Liosban.

It's ironic, but also quite sad, that those who take the overly simplistic view that all objections can be boiled down to 'the green agenda', and mistakenly accuse The Green Party and Pauline O'Reilly of being behind the objections when the Judicial Reviews that scuppered it were actually taken by the (FF & FG linked) Galway Races Committee, Brooks Timber and Friends of the Irish Environment, are generally throwing these accusations against people with a more nuanced position and a deeper understanding of what is at stake in terms of successfully providing the transport infrastructure a growing city needs. They seem to think a ring road is a magic wand which will provide a 100km/h experience similar to travelling the M6 around Ballinasloe on a Wednesday afternoon, whereas the reality is that it will take just a few short years and a few new housing around estates Boleybeg and Drum with no transport options other than their cars, for the ring road to start looking like the Coolagh Roundabout on a Monday morning across it's entire length.

Yes they don't care is correct, but what is galling is that for nigh on 40 years nothing has been done in the form of public transport, ring road, bypasses, you name it, Galway has got nothing. When someone mentioned a LUAS for Galway recently, you can guarantee that the majority of people threw their eyes up to heaven, they have been taking about a Metro in Dublin for as long as the Galway ring road, so most of us on here will be very lucky to ever see a LUAS in Galway. I do not know the ins and out of the actual design of the ring road and yes there are much more knowledgeable people on here than me who see the obvious flaws in it. Rightly or wrongly I suppose my point is and I do understand Green Peter's frustration as well, some of us are just sick to death of this entire fiasco, and our attitude would be just build the bloody thing, and to hell with the detractors, environmentalists, naysayers etc.