M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

Is this a rolling list, updated quarterly, yearly etc ? Is it published anywhere or is just a summation from reading various statements from TII over the years ?

Yup, this road will always be needed under any realistic, non-fantasy version of Galway's future.

If you want to turn Galway into a Dutch or Danish cycling town then that is fine by me, but it is clearly not rational to exclude a key feature that is present in all those towns that I can think of - a high-quality dedicated ring road/bypass (or two, or three).

The inexorable trend of past decades has been increased travel in spite of steadily increasing fuel costs. There is no reason to assume this particular fuel cost increase will change that trend. At most, it might encourage switching to electric cars, but they need road space too.

Our interurban network is outstanding, but for Cork - Limerick.

If we're a laughing stock in Europe, its because we have an aversion to public transport investment. Instead, the morons in GCC are in favour of throwing billions on a road to support long haul commutes and English-style retail parks knowing full well it will worsen congestion and sap the life out of the city core.

Other European countries would have little to laugh at on that front since Ireland's motorway network is far more extensive, in terms of km/head of population than any other European country.

It would of course be laughable if we spent a €1,000 million on a Galway Bypass, which the modelling report tells us will only be an effective solution for 5% of trips, after building a €10 million bus corridor which the same report tells us would be an effective solution for over 70% of trips.

There's just no compelling transport planning case to build such a bypass.

70% of trips won't be on public transport but sufficient large numbers of peak hour trips can be moved to sustainable modes to greatly reduce car congestion and improve car journey times. Saving the guts of a billion euro.

Redistribution of road space to sustainability modes can happen without building a bypass. In fact building a bypass would reduce the number of people using sustainable modes because you'd be providing speed and capacity to car drivers

Lots of the rest of Europe has high spec ring roads but of course all built in less enlightened times.

If the councils own data shows that only single-digit percentage of traffic are actually passing right through the city, what makes you sure that this new road will reduce congestion inside the city?

And if it will, why is the new road not part of an integrated plan to change existing road use to public and active transport?

If the council's data shows that there are already a large number of journeys passing straight through Galway, why would a bypass not reduce congestion?

Separately, have you read the Galway Transport Strategy? It lays out the necessity of the Ring Road "in order to enhance the resilience of the strategy by reducing congestion on other principal roads, and providing opportunity for re-allocation of roadspace within the city for bus priority and cycle lanes".

Elsewhere: "Numerous public transport scenarios were modelled in order to assess non-road-based solutions - but provision of a new orbital road was found to provide the best overall benefit (in tandem with multimodal improvements elsewhere)."

@[Deleted User]

I presume the changes laid out in the Galway Transport Strategy (developed by the Galway City and County Councils in partnership with the NTA) don't count for some reason.

The cheapest time to build this road was over a decade ago. The second cheapest time is today (if the government acted to shut down the abuse of our planning system). Because we didn't accept either of those options, we have to put up with building it at greater cost later.

The road was needed a decade ago, it is needed today, and it will still be needed in the future, under any realistic and clear-eyed version of Galway's future.

The sooner it is built, the sooner Galway's town centre can be turned over to buses and bicycles. There will be no political acceptance of the major changes you propose until the drivers barred from the city centre have a high-quality alternative route. The defeat of the Salthill cycle lane proves this point - how do you hope to turn over major quantities of road space when the people of Galway revolted over a short stretch of cycle lane?

Every last delay to this much-needed road inflicted by the environmentalist lobby is an own goal.