M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

Apart from a couple of edge cases you never had to go though the city if you wanted to travel north/south or vice versa……the road that it took the majority of traffic off (the N17) went via Tuam/Claregalway/Skirted around Oranmore and through Clarinbridge and Kilcolgan.

I don't see how moving it further West would have done anything much differently apart from potentially been more difficult to build (orders of magnitude) were it west of Claregalway, while at the same time not really taking much more traffic off of it (bearing in mind it's intersection with the M6) and where that is.

At least it got built and we haven't been tied up for decades naval gazing about it. It's a brilliant piece of infrastructure and has opened up that entire portion of the country.

No doubt if it were reliant on the engineers of Galway City (as it would probably be if built closer to the city, it would never be done.

The City already has a "Ring" road to a point that negate people going into the City from Oranmore, Roscam, Doughiska and out towards Tirellan via the N6 - granted it's busy at peak times but it's there. The biggest issues creep up with the lack of decent crossings over the Corrib and the fact that a lot of development over the years has meant that most people live West of the river while most of the employment is east of the River.

That's slowly changing (in that more development has happened and is happening East of the river over the last while, Doughiska, Roscam, Oranmore and more recently Claregalway and Athenry. These areas are much closer to the core employment on the east of the city.

Leaving aside the need for a bypass (let's say we agree on the need for one)…There's surely something to be said for some extremely simple small changes like removing all but blue badge parking from Woodquay street and riverside. Those two tiny spaces generate traffic doing laps which clog up the surrounding roads and block the Salmon Weir Bridge. I've seen it and I've done those laps. Scheduling buses through that mess must be a nightmare. Same with parking at the cathedral.

Similar with Headford road: massive FREE surface car parks here are surely bringing lots of traffic TO what is an arterial (through) route. There are literally many hundreds (maybe thousands?) of cars driving on Headford Road every day just to get to these car parks. Everyone who wants to cross East or West of Galway is being actively slowed down by these cars, simply by virtue of them needing to share the same junction space. You might not perceive it, but people going to these surface car parks are stopping you from crossing the city. It would seem like an obvious quick win to state that all parking in these needs to be paid: "no more free public car parking within the N6".

West of the Corrib, Seamus Quirke road seems to be the one with the most traffic issues. Luckily that doesn't have massive amounts of free parking butted up against the…..oh wait…

I'm no expert but surely having massive amounts of surface parking (a destination) right up against the few "through" routes in an urban area like this is just a basic obvious mistake. And just more generally, the idea that you can have free parking within a city area and somehow hope to entice people NOT to drive seems….optimistic…"please pay to use the bus rather than getting in your car (sunk cost) and parking for free"….

None of what I've written above would have ANY impact on transport infrastructure plans whatsoever. There would be very little need for construction or investment and they would have material effect on Galway traffic and transport. And yet we're all discussing a major new road instead, as though it will have an impact.

The lack of attention to very simple details like the free surface parking kinda imply that the city has no serious interest in dealing with traffic issues. The ring road project is just a distraction from all the difficult boring day to day current work they ought to be getting through tbh.

Following on from that, if I'm no expert but realise that these are simple issues that are causing significant traffic problems, what on earth are the Council staff doing exactly?

Sorry for the long rant, it just seems incredible to me that they're effectively downing tools and telling people a new magic road will solve everything. I mean by all means build the road, but write a clause into it that you can then sack the whole lot of the city council staff right afterwards, when traffic is still crap.

100% on Woodquay. Bus Gate on Salmon Weir (and College Road) would greatly help. Would greatly improve BUS journey times as well (all the City Services buses go via Eyre Square)

Some of this surface car park is going. City Council Dyke Road Car Park is the big one, 1/3 of the Westside shopping Centre car park is been built on currently, still a huge amount of car parking in the City Centre though

Did you just recommend charging people for parking in the rare spots that its free?

As if the country isn't enough of a ripoff. Take a bow

And the big cost in Galway City is congestion, all these car commuters which are in the way and creating obstructions for everybody else

Im pretty sure that even with a Gluas, Busconnects and (feckit why not) helicopters for all, people would still require parking in the city. And the roads would still be clogged. The odd free car parking space, a brisk 20 minute walk from the city centre should not be a5seraped with charges. Even those who do the right thing by takign the bus or train have to put up with ripoff charges. You really cant win.

Require??? We create blue badge spaces for people who "require". We currently have taxi ranks and bus lanes which don't function correctly because we stack them behind the many people who do NOT "require". So apparently people with "requirements" are currently not nearly as high a priority as those able bodied persons' "maximum comfort" needs.

Then it's always the same argument: "we NEED to facilitate cars everywhere in the city centre" and "we must not deter people". But look at Shop street, Grafton Street, Oliver Plunkett Street and all its side streets? It is not a "requirement" to have cars everywhere in the city centre, rather we CHOOSE to have cars in the city centre and we choose where. We should facilitate wherever we can and we provide space where requirements exist, but we don't need to encourage car driving. Providing large pockets of free parking right on the busiest cross-city corridors is not a requirement, it is a choice.

Your next straw-man argument about costs actually fails to identify the money lost in providing maximum convenience for those people. It fails to identify the money lost due to the lower rent-roll of the city centre in providing vast surface space for storage of private property. It fails to identify the money lost paying bus drivers to sit in traffic. It fails to identify the money lost to the city through employees sitting in traffic when they could be making profit and paying tax. It fails to identify money not earned in the city through that lost investment which is deterred by traffic and dysfunctional transportation. That list goes on and on, including less measurable things like the health costs of additional combustion engines in the city centre, societal costs of only providing reliable transport for those who can drive, etc. How many people are locked out of employment or education opportunities due to transportation issues?

So in a way we all subsidising (via general taxation) the comfort of the few who choose to drive and park for free. But you're describing THEM as being victims when they're asked to contribute :D that's quite funny, in fairness to you!

The one thing in your post that I agree with is that you really can't win: we're on here discussing a major new piece of transport to allow traffic to flow but apparently a higher priority seems to be maintaining congestion and maximising convenience for the most inefficient transport users!

What's the point in us even discussing a bypass on here, if the desired end-state includes encouraging city centre driving??? Why would we not take this to its logical conclusion and provide MORE free parking in the city centre?

Well if it's not of much BENEFIT to the city centre (fair call, I agree it's not well situated for city centre shopping), and we can see that it clearly causes problems for the N6, surely we can agree that it's a no-brainer to just stop encouraging cars directly to the N6 and especially the Headford road? Every one car going to those shops is preventing a car from going across the city East to West. For the sake of a few big-box stores whose business model is dying because of online shopping, and a few high-street stores whose business model is to syphon customers out of the city centre proper.

It's like Mahon Point on the N40, it causes clear traffic problems and it's a really bad use of what's supposed to be national infrastructure, and it's hollowing out the proper city centre. Contrast with the M50 with Liffey Valley and even the Red Cow which are not free: we should absolutely be using parking charges to reduce congestion and encourage public transport use on what we know are congested national corridors.

Free urban parking attracting cars to the N road which is already oversubscribed…where also trying to engineer a physical solution…is crazy stuff. Refusing to take obvious small incremental steps towards resolving issues, and pinning all hopes on a large complex project as a silver-bullet solution (which we know from the modelling will not resolve the issues) is not sensible at all.

Note that I am not proposing anything like banning cars, btw, I'm talking about really tiny steps towards discouraging "circulating" traffic on the oversubscribed sections of road. But these steps are apparently near-impossible for the city. We MUST build major new infrastructure which our own investigation shows won't resolve the issues.

We laugh at the yanks with their weird gun obsession, but we're every bit as bad here, when it comes to cars. Terrified to take almost any action that will inconvenience a single driver, even if it makes things better for the majority of other drivers! We prefer mad mental gymnastics and spending billions of euros, over discouraging even a tiny minority of drivers.

You're grand. Ill store it somewhere free and walk the few minutes.

Could this be a small sign?
https://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/150074/bus-ireann-to-increase-galway-city-fleet-to-60-buses

"
The National Transport Authority has confirmed that the Bus Éireann fleet in the city will increase to at least 60 double-deck electric buses by early 2027, representing “an increase in fleet size of c42% compared to today”.

"

That's a good point about the by election. Presumably if it's going ahead, FF and FG will want it announced beforehand so their candidates can potential benefit.

A balancing act will be involved too. Far enough before the election so they can benefit from the approval, but close enough that the inevitable judicial review doesn’t become official until after the election.

Does ACP really play politics like this?

Agreed, but experts disagree on whether this project will be a via circularis or a via evitans. ;^)

Apparently the ACP made a decision on Friday, and posted out the relevant paperwork to the parties involved, but we need to wait until sometime receives it and relays what it says…..