Getting around Galway

Bus Éireann do get penalised by the NTA for every service not operated - their PSO payments are reduced.

Do they self-report or is this dependent on users complaining? I'd love to cross-check their declared no shows. City Direct too, frequent no shows.

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Have you seen the traffic on the routes it uses? It is probably the most delayed BÉ bus here

I hope the route numbering was a nerdy inside joke.

If the departure operates over 6 mins late, then they would be penalised under the punctuality criteria.

Because the surveys showed that 97% of all traffic in galway either starts or ends in the city.

There isnt actually that much traffic seeking to bypass the city as a whole - most of it is commuters who live in the city, or work in the city, or both. A bypass would not solve anything. This has been done to death in multiple threads.

Most of it does not start or end in the city centre though. Someone from Barna travelling to Parkmore has no option but to travel through the choke points in Westside/ Newcastle and the Headford Road. Someone travelling from Tuam to UHG similarly. This traffic needs to be taken away from what are now almost city centre roads, enabling these roads to be used for PT and Cycling infrastructure.

Check out the Departure's page (Abfahrt) 20 train departures in the next hour

https://iris.noncd.db.de/wbt/js/index.html?typ=ab&bhf=8000107&lang=en&seclang=de&zeilen=20&style=qrab

Nah not all. Nothing wrong with roads, we have plenty of them - its how to use them efficiently is the argument we have continually here in Galway City. I can guarantee you that in Freiburg they have moved away decades ago from this thinking of

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 By providing an alternative for traffic that does not need to enter the city centre

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The use of personal vehicles for individual transport is going to continue to form a large part of human transport. Ignoring this does not make it go away. Taking as much of this traffic as possible away from small streets is a positive for the overall goal of reducing the use of individual vehicles and making a better lived environment for everyone. By not having provision for the vehicles that will still need to travel within, to and across the city for a myriad of perfectly valid reasons we will leave an environment within the city that will inhibit many from using alternatives. Parents wont want to let their kids cycle on busy streets, people sitting in traffic on a bus will think, "might take a little longer but would this not be much more comfortable in my own space" etc etc.

Estimates from a couple of years back put the number of cars in the city centre that were traversing the Corrib rather than going into town at 60%. Take the bulk of these out of town and immediately providing alternatives becomes much easier. And the number of people needing to travel to, within and across Galway on a daily basis is only going to grow massively over the next few decades. Without a joined up approach traffic problems in Galway will at best stagnate unless both the provision of alternatives in the form of cycle and PT infrastructure and the removal of necessary vehicles to an alternate route for the bulk of their journey is achieved. Doing one or the other benefits no one.

Ya it interesting, but what you say is a "project" is no longer a "project". Its done, its built. It's a place.

I am not sure it's even worth citing here in this thread, very hard to imagine us getting to anywhere close to that level here in Galway City

No that is incorrect to say the reason Freiburg could do it because they had some super duper network beforehand - they just decided to eliminate as much private motor traffic from the equation altogether. They continue to "free up" the existing road network they have while increasing the population(and not building additional roads).

We are doing nothing evening remotely like that here in Galway City yet, we haven't even got to the public consciousness stage that something even like that needs to be done, can be done, has been done.

"One can free up the road network in a City without building roads."

They looked at it from perspective of what is the best way people can move in Freiburg - they don't restrict themselves to just a City Centre mindset either as Vauban shows. They do it everywhere.

It's a nice aspiration to say that building a ring road will free up space for other transport methods within the city centre but the reality is we can realistically expect the opposite to happen.

As it stands the projections included in the planning submission by Galway City and County Councils and Arup show the private motor traffic on many city centre roads increasing, not decreasing, after a ring road is built. And they show no movement away from private cars to other forms of transport in the overall 'modal share' of the city. We are being sold a ring road on the promise that it will alleviate traffic but it's clear that this will not happen and instead all it will do is facilitate more car dependent development on the outskirts of the city. There is no doubt that, as soon as work starts on a ring road, work will also start on new housing developments on all the open space north and west of Knocknacarra. There will be thousands more cars using the ring road to cross to Parkmore or Athenry every day and only a very short time will have passed before you'll have drivers going back to the Quincentary Bridge to avoid the tailbacks on the ring road. We'll be back to 'square one' but 10 times worse.

It's been said multiple times in this thread (or its locked predecessor) that if a comprehensive solution was presented that included a ring road, but also a well thought out scalable public transport system and active transport measures, then much of the current opposition to the ring road would disappear. What you are proposing, if it was presented credibly by those with the power to implement, would likely be a popular and effective solution. But as long as we are presented with a ring road in isolation it's going to attract extreme scepticism.

Separately, I have to take issue with your claim that "Doing one or the other benefits no one". Over the last twenty years, as car lanes have been reallocated to other forms of transport in Dublin city centre, the number of cars travelling through the centre at peak times has halved. But the number of people travelling through the city centre has increased as has the number of people living in the city centre. Cars don't need to get to places, people need to get to places. Give people a cheaper and more reliable alternative and many of them will take it. You don't need all of them to switch, and you don't need to ban cars, just make the other options more attractive. Then those who still want (and in come cases need) to travel in cars can still do so. But the same road space can be used to transport many more people, more quickly, by just sharing it differently.

Well the M50 exists and Dublin traffic got worse. Now they're trying to address it when PT and similar infrastructure and it's improving things. Better question is if they'd spent the M50 money on that kind of infrastructure and planning in the first place would they still have the same problems?

@crusd "So the solution is rather than aspiring to a system that eliminates that requirement for a large portion of journeys to enter the city centre you just make it impossible to enter the city centre altogether driving people to "out of town" options."

That's not even remotely close to what I said so I don't know why you're hitting reply to my post to go off on that tangent? Maybe instead respond to the points actually being made rather than putting words in peoples' mouths?

Interesting, too, that you feel the need to move the goalposts re: Dublin by switching from a 20 year timeframe to a 30 year one. It might help to know that the bulk of the decrease in car traffic in Dublin city centre actually happened since 2010, so attributing it to the M50 is a huge stretch. In any case that has no bearing on my actual point, which was a very simple one and bears repeating. Reallocating road space allowed more people to be moved along those roads. Irrespective of whether you build new roads elsewhere or not, reallocating road space to favour more efficient means of transport increases the capacity of those roads to move people.

If we want to move more people across the Corrib at peak times then one way to do so would be to reconfigure road allocation so that we were offering a fast, reliable, frequent, comfortable and economical public transport service that meets the needs of a sufficient number of people currently crossing the Corrib by car. So, again, your claim that "Doing one or the other benefits no one" is incorrect. Offering an alternative to car dependence on existing roads, without preventing people from using cars if they choose, could benefit the majority if done properly.