How to use the new Kirwan junction

If decisions in the city council to demolish a roundabout and build an intersection was based on an isolated incident of someone incorrectly crossing the street, there is no hope for Galwegians. I can put up a drone over any roundabout and stage any activity I want. Or I can record for 5 days and cherry pick whatever behavior I want.

Question, who is showing the city council decision makers drone videos from the current layout, where cars at speed, misjudge the lanes and end up driving into pedestrian waiting areas, cars are parked in the middle of the junction as they have entered it without hope of getting out in time for the lights to change, blocking the traffic and causing even further frustration? Or people now knowing how to proceed through counter-intuitive lanes wanting to change the lane last minute, but others not buying it and not letting them in.

For the pedestrians or cyclists to cross the roundabout was easy as piece of cake. On the Menlo side it was safe with a strip of pavement dividing the lanes, on the other side there was a light controlled traffic. If anything to improve pedestrians experience, these lights should be regulated, so one does not need to wait 3 minutes for the green light to show up. There was no need to make any green light synchronizations there, as this pedestrian crossing was isolated and did not influence any other traffic. It should be green for the pedestrians within 10 seconds 'on demand'. Nobody would then be 'dangerously crossing at the roundabout'. When the construction works have commenced, miraculously these lights were immediately setup as mentioned by me to be green within 10 seconds to ease life of the construction workers. No comment..

This might have been intentional? Direct traffic to the main arteries rather than people skipping down through Liosban and Sandy Road?

He claims I'm not being "civil", but in the preceding, he pejoratively classifies my citing the most recent peer-reviewed paper on the efficiency of roundabouts versus signalized intersections as a "rant", and still has yet to concede fabricating an assertion and attributing it to me. The engineer hoist with his own petard.

Again, you fail to grasp your own argument and how flawed it is (seemingly DaCor, too), and I hope that a self-proclaimed (!) domain expert with real-world experience and a solid grounding of common sense would revisit this. Your claiming that the peak volume per hour does not represent the peak demand. If 25 minutes was the peak delay at 6:36PM, then the 7-8PM data point would become the peak volume per hour and would more or less represent peak demand; the demand has to dissipate somewhere. Therefore, unless the duration of navigating through that particular section is more than an hour which length of time cannot encapsulate the delay, the data on the volume of vehicles per hour will be more or less equal to demand for that particular section.

You won't engage or answer the question, because the logical conclusion proceeding it defeats any argument for removing the roundabout based upon increasing the efficiency of junction. Even if there was over 8,000 vehicles, the cited paper states that roundabouts are 1/3 faster than the most efficient signalized intersections and twice as fast as the most inefficient one.

Correct, and as DaCor stated, roundabouts are anti-pedestrian: their efficiency for vehicles derives from not stopping. I think that it is the only valid reason for changing the junction, but in order to placate others i.e. those using vehicles, they had to peddle that this change would reduce traffic delays. It definitely won't, and will probably as a result of changing to a less efficient signalized intersection and a result of induced demand (wait till the council wraps their heads around that particular concept!), increase the traffic delays.

build the outer bypass.

Whatever about the roundabouts working or not, one things for sure and that is the traffic has gotten worse and worse for every roundabout they removed. It looks like they are trying to facilitate all the poor dubs coming off the motorway who couldn't navigate the roundabouts and who now have lovely streamlined intersections to take them directly to their holiday homes.

I tried to do a few bits and pieces in galway this evening and it was complete chaos! The traffic over the quincentenery was almost backed up to the hospital roundabout all people going left to the new junction. It's at the point now where ambulances coming from the N59 will be locked out of the back entrance of the hospital all because of this new idiotic junction. You also have cars coming down from bother mor roundabout getting stuck in the middle of the junction trying to turn right onto terryland. It's nuts!

There was never a problem with the kirwan roundabout, it was always a problem with the junction at the quincentenary bridge leading to cars getting backed up as far as the roundabout. The council are clearly just painting over the cracks now with this move - they just want to get rid of the image of cars getting trapped on the roundabout.

Also, as everyone knows, much of the traffic in Galway is caused by Mayo commuters of which we have now severed one of the key veins they use to go home in the evening.

As others have mentioned above, if it's this bad now, just wait for the schools to come back, heads will roll once that happens.

Yes we should all ban the demon car. That'll sort everything 🙄

You'd imagine the delays around Lough Atalia junction are more to do with higher traffic volumes and a far busier retail park and hotel there than before.

any vehicle related its the devil.

in the mean time

Build the new bridge (aka bypass)

The retail park and hotel were there before the junction was put in. The retail park opened in the early 2000s. The G opened in 2005. The people who lived in the area and drove it every day were pretty clear that the tailbacks got worse when the junction went in and it did. I was driving from Lough Atalia out to Ballybrit at the time. It turned to sh1t overnight. They spent months tweaking the timing of the lights, it improved a little but was and has remained worse than when the roundabout was in there. A big part of the problem was and continues to be the set of lights where Lough Atalia and College Road meet. It has been 12+ years and it is only this year that they are talking about addressing that set of lights.

D'ya remember some of the defenses from the council about it being slower until all the roundabouts were replaced with junctions because then they could run in sync with each other. Sounded good but little did we know it could be 15+ years until they are all replaced and by the time that happens the population of the city will probably have increased by 10s of thousands of people.

Infrequent and running late buses go into one place - Eyre Square. People need to move in other directions as well. Are e-bikes and e-scooters legal on the road? What about safety implications? Age limits? Weather? How people who live in Tirellan Heights, Ballinfoile, Scelig Ard or Castlegar can do shopping, take their kids to do activities, spent leisure time, visit friends & family, go to work or do business without commuting through the new junction?

I feel that I have two perspectives of using this as a Roundabout and now as a junction.

I could definitely see a need for something to be changed. When it was a Roundabout I lived in Tirellan and commuted back and forth to work using Bothar na dTreabh. It seemed ok going to work but coming back in the evening it was chaos. The Roundabout would be at a complete standstill, blocked up by cars on it but not moving anywhere.

Now I live out towards Headford and commute into the city using the N84 and N6 for work. Going in is worse than before but manageable but coming out is torture. The left lane leading onto the N84 is way too short and to add insult to injury I can see crashes being caused by the slip road up to Menlo. People going out the N84 will be rushing to make it past the lights.

One simple thing that would have made this junction better, at least in terms of the efficiency of through put from town to the N84 and N6BndT, would have been to route N84 northbound traffic up the Coolough link road and then back out onto the N84.

The way it is now is a bit of disaster. When the lights change to red 2-3 cars waiting to turn left onto the N84 is enough to block off the Coolough Link Rd, making it completely redundant. Then, even worse, when the lights go green the N84 filter stays red* (I presume this is to allow pedestrians to cross). All it takes if about 4-5 cars wishing to make the turn onto the N84 to block the left lane of the N6 Headford Rd. This eastbound side of the junction is all about through put to help clear traffic closer to town and having a design where the left lane is potentially regularly blocked is crazy.

The simple (or at least what would have been very simple to do at the construction stage) change is to have N84 traffic use the Coolough link road and have no left turn at the junction itself. In the current design, N84 traffic have to potentially wait on two long lights. One at the junction itself and the other where the Coolough Rd meets the N84. In the design above there would only be a need for a yellow box where the Coolough Link Rd meet the Coolough Rd and at the existing filter where the Coolough Rd meets the N84. That filter could stay green much longer and more frequently than the one at the junction itself. Thus, you get a much higher though put of N84 traffic and therefore clearing it faster from the crucial section between Bodkin and Kirwan. Also, when the Coolough Rd / N84 filter needs to turn red, you have a much greater holding capacity than down at the junction.

The thing is, it can still work like this with the current design. However, for maximum efficiency, the Coolough Link Rd would ideally finish in a Y with the right lane of the Y joining the Coolough Rd, with a yellow box junction, where the double lane begins. That way, traffic coming down from Menlo, wishing to go town or BndT, would not block access to the left (N84 northbound) lane.

*Edit: coming home tonight the left filter turned green at the same time as the other lights. Perhaps it stays red only when the pedestrian button has been pressed or perhaps they are still tweaking the sequence. IMO the above would still have been a better design.

For a small enough city Galway is a complete f**k up when it comes to traffic. I've never come across so many roundabouts in a confined area.