M6 - Galway City Ring Road [planning decision pending]

The amount of CO2 released in concrete production is massive. And then you need to factor in all the other things needed to build the road. All the building material produce massive amounts of toxic chemicals during manufacturing. And think about all the heavy machines that'll be needed. They'll produce orders of magnitude more co2, etc. than a modern car. There's also the impact to the landscape from such a big project. Think about how much runoff is going to go into our water and particulate pumped into the air.

I haven't looked at the numbers but I'd bet that if we built the road and instantly abandoned all cars for PT, cycling, etc., it would still take a century or two to offset the environmental impact of building it.

Back on the topic of the resubmission, I'm betting the council will paint it in the same light of being beneficial for the environment by ignoring as much of the (environmental) cost of construction as they can and overstating the predicted uptake on electric cars (which I believe is far lower than previously expected).

The fewer electric cars ironically, the greater the benefit.

By your argument, you should just stop building houses altogether. Given that won't happen, and house building is massive all over the suburbs, there has to be roads to service them.

Nobody cares about any of this. People just want the Ring Road.

It will remove extraneous traffic heading north and west of Galway and it will enable improved public transport and active travel options within the cordon of the RR.

Private car traffic between the Canals in Dublin has fallen by 35% over the last 15 to 20 years.

If you don't think that could have happened without new public transport options AND the M50, then you're off your rocker.

It shall be no different for Galway City.

Having said that, a segregated bike lane should be built right now. Looking at you Greenway.

Yes it would make a big difference but on its own it's kind of a sticking plaster or time bomb. Exact same as the M50 and N40. Yes we need them. But they are failing to function because of excessive commuter use. That's not my analysis of it, it's the TII's.

I'm not against this road at all, but by not coupling sustainable schemes with it (or by trying to couple distributor function with bypass in general!) they're dooming the project to a failure from which recovery will be a more difficult. People will choose the easiest transport mode (the only mode being facilitated) and the numbers will grow, to the point that the mode is no longer the easiest mode.

A simple one for you with my "crayons" out: even straight off if they said that part of this project would see the current N6 reverted to a distributor with pedestrian/cycle/bus/car each side, the whole thing might be possible to sign-off overnight as a sustainable infrastructure scheme. The additional costs probably wouldn't even be that large.

What on earth are you talking about? In your rush to criticize your preferred "villains", you've picked on some who actually approved the scheme! Save that shock jock stuff for facebook.

The scheme failed because the project team made a mistake. It wasn't some minor technicality, they tried to ignore legislation "because it was new". The scheme isn't currently being held up by greens, nimbys, etc…YET. It's being held up because the project team didn't resubmit yet.

And as an aside, plenty of us here think it might be subsequently held up by greens, nimbys etc when the project team resubmit because we expect them to resubmit more flimsy documentation. Blaming the greens, nimbys etc if/when that happens will be like blaming the police when you get caught speeding. Why not just do it right!

Edit: in terms of ABP being "like some supreme council of the elders", I'd settle for them doing their job to be bluntly honest. Because they've been caught rubber-stamping so far.

Afraid it might actually work?

The Bus Gates could be done pretty quickly on College Road and Salmon Weir Bridge if the will was there.

Would certainly help improve scheduling and reliability of public transport in the City.

Seems Like a very easy to do project with massive benefits. I note it's the council lending the project, not the NTA so it's probably destined to failure. If it was successful their Bypass pet project would face greater viability issues.

These types of projects should be taken off the council and transferred to the nta. Clearly not enough competency at council level.

You clearly for whatever reason don't want it built. You'd rather have oul diesel's in standing traffic bilging toxins out for folk to breathe. I suspect you live in an area affected by the road. That area has the deepest pockets in Galway unfortunately.

It certainly isn't a false argument no matter how you try and twist it, because the houses have already been built in an urban sprawl from Salthill to moycullen. There is no transport infrastructure. There aren't even enough pavements. That horse bolted so long ago it is in the food chain. There's a few of the ultra rich who are perfectly content that the residents of lower Newcastle and all the estates circling the east side of the bridge are living in permasmog so long as the view isn't spoiled. 🙂

Agree that Councils are a mess in this Country. Little power(apart from re-zoning) and unaccountable. Needs big reform.

NTA have ALL the data on the City Service Buses - they really should be putting BIG BIG pressure on the Council to put in these bus gates ASAP. Its been practically a decade since they were first proposed and would have far greater benefit now that 10 yrs ago

What improvements in public transport, cycling, etc. have come with the Moycullen bypass?

But…the project isn't a bypass. It's a distributor/bypass "ring road". It'll only operate as a bypass for a couple of years before it's clogged again. That's literally what most people are complaining about.

I don't have any problem with a bypass, but Galway councillors are saying that they need this road to facilitate development. What I'm saying is that it's not being built to free up transport, it's being built to "unlock development lands". This is something you should also be pushing against, if you're in favour of a bypass?

They really need to remove a few of the junctions if it's to work as a bypass. But also I believe that if they do this the projected traffic figures won't be high enough to justify the project, so they're in a bit of a bind. And if the project goes ahead in its current form you'll get a dysfunctional road like the N40 or M50, which need ever-increasingly expensive projects to fix the bottlenecks. We should just build a bypass and do it right first time.

I don't have data to hand, and I'm not going digging for it, but maybe I didn't phrase myself very clearly. Taking Oranmore as an example, the bypass there is 30 years old and nothing was done to encourage alternative travel choices within the town after it was built. I don't think that there is any doubt that there is more traffic within Oranmore town today than there was 30 years ago. It's only natural that there would be with the increase in housing in the town since then and nothing done to discourage car traffic within the town or to make other transport options more attractive. But the bypass also certainly increased overall traffic as it made it more viable for people to choose to live in Clarinbridge/Gort/Ennis and work in Galway city. You can argue that the bypass is a good thing, as someone travelling from Limerick to Sligo no longer had to drive through Oranmore, but the other effect was to increase the number travelling by car from south Galway and further into the city, bypassing Oranmore, but then contributing to increased congestion on the Coast Road, the Old Dublin Road, Bothar na dTreabh etc. The one positive here is the opening of Oranmore station (albeit 2 decades after the bypass was built), and the rail connectivity from Gort and Ennis, but if you're living in Bluebell Woods for example there are still no attractive options to get from your house to the station other than by car through the town.

The bypass of Moycullen will work out the same way. I know people who were already commuting from Doon and Oughterard to the east side of the city before the bypass, and they are having a much easier commute since the bypass opened. But painful nature of that commute before the bypass limited the number of people willing to take it on. Now the existence of the bypass is going to encourage more people who work in the east city employment hotspots to live north of Moycullen. Before long the traffic delays will equalise again, just with increased volumes over what was there before. And there's no prospect of rail arriving as partial relief like it did for Oranmore.

The Ring Road, as currently planned will just have the same effect on a much larger scale. Despite the efforts of one lazy poster above to dismiss the objectors as anti-everything dope smoking greens it has been frequently pointed out, in this thread and others that touch on the subject, that if there was a comprehensive transport plan, that incorporated a ring road with corresponding improvements in public transport and active travel provision, then much of the opposition would evaporate.

This is hilarious. On the one hand you want people to "engage on a factual basis". On the other hand you say:

You only have to look at Oranmore or Tuam. Traffic in those towns is just as heavy, if not heavier, than before their bypasses were built.

I can't comment on the situation in Oranmore, but this statement is completely false in relation to Tuam.

When asked to provide facts on which you made this statement, you say:

I don't have data to hand

Doesn't seem like "engaging on a factual basis" to me.

Think you're misunderstand me here. That all sounds great and a big benefit to the village. But there's no PT improvements coupled with these developments so probably little reduction in the number of people driving to work, etc., which is what we really need. The roads will be filled up again if there isn't this modal change. Only a matter of time. Then we'll have even more cars on the road that need to be accommodated. It's impossible to have everyone driving all the time without traffic issues. Too much space needed for each person (I.e. the size of a car), too many pinch points, too many chances of accidents or breakdowns, etc.

That's what my issue with the M6 is. If it was part of a bigger plan to incentivise a shift to more efficient forms of transport then it would be fine. But it's just more of the same and that doesn't work.

And no I'm not "anti car" before that old troupe gets trotted out. Grew up in the country during the times it went from no cars to two cars per driveway. They're unbeatable for how flexible and versatile they are but they're not without downsides. Sitting in traffic jams while life ticks away being my least favourite

In fairness, the moycullen bypass has been great for moycullen itself, but it remains to be seen whether it will make much difference getting into Galway or over the bridge until the schools and college are back.

Most folk moving out that way are doing so because they can't afford what they want home wise, be it purchase or rental in Galway city.

😂 Ok

We need to just accept that we'll all be either retired/dead before they even start this ring road.

It's not either/or, and we should be moving on with those other solutions immediately. There's no excuse for parking everything with a "this road first before we do anything at all" strategy.

Councillors were more than happy to keep promising that the ring road would happen. It was a Pie in the Sky promise that would get them re-elected without having to do the work on actual broader solutions.