M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning approved]

Should we have a little raffle/sweepstake on how many JRs will be lodged?

My guess is three.

I think you're optimistic. All the land around Dunkettle was effectively available for use before scheme start and they started clearance early if I remember correctly. But I'm not involved in road construction so I'm not well informed here. I just feel 2034 sounds very soon, looking at progress of projects like M28.

I'm thinking 2 JR's Chris!

I'm talking about purely financials for the project.

Are funds being taken from public transport projects to pay for it?

we can expect a flurry of JRs over the long weekend then ;-)

I'm just thinking of 2 previous objectors, I've no idea what to expect!

Nobody can possibly say: just like nobody can tell you the cost of the road project. People can give you best-guess hand-wavey answers on both only I'm afraid. We don't even know if the project will move forward or what amount of time it will take at present unfortunately.

It's not unreasonable for you to want specifics about related sustainable transport projects, but there are currently none in this space. When looking for detail, we can only look at this road as an isolated project unfortunately, please bear in mind that it is you that has been asking people about other theoretical "sustainable" projects which could theoretcally progress in parallel!

As I have said before (for too many posts now, sorry!) they should have just linked this road project to the other specific projects like the M20 team did. It would have really helped to progress the road project. They didn't do it. I don't know why. It's baffling. They essentially did the same hand-wavy thing you're already complaining about and said "some projects in the GTS will mean this road is a success".

For more "holistic" view of the Galway transport system it might perhaps be better for us to reference the GTS (I'm not sure if there's an associated thread?) rather than trying to discuss it within the thread for this specific project.

Edit: I'm genuinely not trying to deflect here. You keep asking "why can't we have sustainable transport at the same time as they progress this road". A reasonable question. But the answer is "We don't know why. But that's what you're getting". We have a situation where significant political capital has been expended over time on this project while others are shelved. Think of the stupidly long timeline of this project to-date. In a logical world you'd have had cycle infrastructure delivered quickly and cheaply in Galway but it's apparently been impossible. Oranmore would have had the urgency and ambition that Cork Area Commuter Rail has. Bus connects would have delivered higher frequency and segregation. Trams… Work on the existing "ring road" to make it a distributor…there's so many schemes in GTS that could have been done by now. It was a 2016 publication.

According to GTS Galway was supposed to have (by now): Radial bus priority, Core bus network, Core cycle network, Walking network, P&R Phase 1. The road we're discussing was supposed to be one of the final things completed.

So maybe let's turn this on its head slightly: what do you think is the reason we apparently can't have both?

I went to university of limerick 1989-1993. Limerick was a gloomy dirty city. Roads were shite like Galway and most Irish cities and suburbs. The galway student bus used to have come through the city to get to UL, it took forever, and they didnt have the car traffic of today.

Fast forward to today, when I go to Limerick shopping centres maybe once a year, go to Cork again maybe once a year and bypass Limerick city, I see the massive changes, improvements to local roads, new roads linking Dublin rd to Cork/tipp/kerry road and a Limerick by-pass that seem to be built without delays or years of planning appeals. In fact I never heard about that by-pass till I saw it on the news being opened. Galway ring rd is on the national news for the past 20+ years. Also, in Limerick city massive regeneration projects to replace rough social housing estates and upgrade them. It might not be perfect to the Limerick locals, but to me, I see the progress by Limerick local authorities a million miles ahead of Galway city and suburbs. I say hats off to them.

When I drive through Galway, no new roads bar the motorway, which was NTA not galway councils. No significant changes other than demolished Rahoon flats and the rest is private ventures eg. new Knocknacarra shopping area, Briarhill shopping, oranmore shopping and private housing estates east and west of the city.

We need external bodies to take over Galway city and county councils badly.

The only defence of this project seems to be wanting it because other places built thing so we should build things. No defence of the design. Which isn't surprising because it's a bad design. Building bad things is not better than doing nothing as it locks us into something that'll make things worse

A huge suburb west of Galway city, the busiest Regiinal rd in Ireland R366 and gateway to Connemara, Wild Atlantic Way and the Gaeltacht - areas the tourist boards and government gaeltacht bodies are constantly trying to promote to visitors at home and abroad.

I am not sure if the 3% an end to end figure and again don't know how this was calculated, I have seen that graphic before also but the percentages don't match with the data from the reports that I can access. Who did the graphic/visualisation and what is the source data for it (from seth brundle post)?

While it was always a heavily disputed figure based on an arbitrary endpoint, its now also dangerously outdated. That report is from pre-covid times

The idea that the ring road wouldn't promote heavy future development west of the city is also nonsensical