M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

Thought of Galway when I saw this;

https://t.co/IawOtIRCu5

"I'll believe it when I see it".

Spot on there with the that sentence. This is 20 odd years in the making. If it's started in the next 5 years I'll be surprised.

This part was interesting and could be a real stickler.

Nope, Labour and materials remain 90% of costs

I think a lot of the delay was ABP postponing decisions repeatedly. If only we lived in the utopia of China where all things are good!

You don’t have to build a tunnel under Galway Racecourse. Pay them off, let them move. You want your road, don’t you?

Racecourses and Golf Courses should be well outside city boundaries - which Ballybrit was, of course, when the first race meeting was held in 1869. The city has come a long way since then. Such a large amount of land lying idle for so many days of the year is an obscenity. CPO the land, and let them feck off to (way) outside the city and preferably near a train line. And by the way, the location of Leopardstown Racecourse in Dublin is just as bad.

Whatever it would cost to CPO the land would be more than earned back from the savings on tunnelling. Plus, the council could then develop the remainder for housing. And if the Ring Road never gets built, we, the people, have a whole lot more housing land available.

But no, this is the kind of hard decision that will not be taken, because the racing set are rich and well-connected and they couldn't possibly be asked to trot a few more miles outside town for their enjoyment.

You can't describe this project as a ring road as it doesn't circle the city. Same as M50 and N40 can't be called ring roads until they actually ring their respective cities. By pass would be a better description. M25 around Greater London is a ring road as well as peripheriques around numerous cities in France......... only saying!!

Doesn't matter, it's still a dualler- minimum , the whole way around. Meaning you can drive 360 degrees around London non stop.

(apart from the tail backs I admit)

Yes, ring-road is technically incorrect here, and they should have used “Orbital”, the catch-all term for any road that circles a city without necessarily forming a complete ring. But these days, “ring-road” is understood to be any orbital route. I would not pick that as my hill to die on...

But “ring-road” is much closer to the truth than “bypass”, because the one thing the N6 is not is a bypass. Bypasses are built to serve through traffic, but only 3% of the traffic on existing roads crosses the river Corrib.

The closest descriptive term for this M6 project would be a Collector-distributor: a road that collects local traffic onto it, carries it through an urban area, and then distributes it to other neighbourhoods.

C/Ds do have a bad press, because they're a classic feature of car-dependent urban sprawls in the USA (e.g., Dallas, Los Angeles, etc), but they don't have to be huge motorway-type roads: the Limerick Northern Distributor is an undivided, 4-lane, urban C/D road that opens up a previously isolated part of the city and will make provision of public transport services there more efficient.

I'll let him speak for himself, but my guess is that he's referring to the common image that the environmentalist movement in this country consists predominantly of wealthy, comfortable Dubliners with plenty of alternative mobility options telling people who live in rural or car-dependent areas that they are not allowed to have any investment which will make it easier for them to get around by car. Or calling for carbon taxes and charges which mostly hit poorer or rural communities due to the lower quality of older house builds, lack of access to gas mains, or longer commutes, knowing that they themselves will be minimally affected. Or other things along those lines.

If this is correct, I think the link to the Ring Road is obvious given the number of posters in this thread who have called for it to be scrapped. While many reasons are given, the key underlying sin seems to be that it makes life a little bit easier for people who need to get around by car.

Who needs to get around by car? Most people living in and around Galway, given the current travel patterns. The government has a duty to make their lives better too - not just the people already commuting by bicycle or living so close to work that they can walk. It's an odd world we are living in when the possibility that an investment might make the busy and stressed lives people lead just a little bit easier is a reason NOT to go ahead with it.

Buses and bike lanes aren't going to change the traffic problems Galway faces in any meaningful way unless there is major concurrent investment in new roads, and we all know that. But it's that sort of wishful thinking, the almost dismissive attitude of "ah sure, cancel the road investment because it might make it a bit easier to drive, build a few bus lanes and bike lanes to say we tried, and just let their journeys continue to get longer and harder, because at the end of the day it won't affect us" that is a bit bothersome.