Brendan Holland says he has been banging on about light rail for Galway city for decades, and that publication of a very positive, official feasibility study last week is a sort of vindication for him and his 22 colleagues on Galway’s tenacious Gluas Committee.
Gluas – light rail for Galway, a pun on Dublin’s Luas – has been positioned by its supporters as not only a partial solution to the city’s chronic traffic issues, but also as an economic driver. Research from several cities shows light rail may increase community wellbeing, boost property values, drive footfall and create jobs. Will Gluas lay golden eggs for Galway?
Mr Holland (70 ), is a well-known newsagent and retailer on Williamsgate Street in Galway's city centre. He says he has stood at Eyre Square, daily, for half a century, watching the decline of his “beloved” city, mainly due to traffic congestion. He welcomes the Atkins Réalis Gluas report, but refuses to be triumphalist, as nothing is built yet.
“Yes it is a vindication. It's vindication for a lot of people on the committee who have gone out on a limb at no personal gain to themselves - and let me tell you - at much cost to themselves. They've gone out on a limb in the belief that what we say is true. And it's nice. It's nice to be recognised for that fact.”
Feasibility Study
The 46-page study, commissioned by the national Transport Agency (NTA ), concludes that a light rail transit corridor from Knocknacarra to Roscam could reduce car usage in the city by 10 per cent. This would be the first line, and based on €1.50 ticket sales modelled on Galwegians' bus use, it could earn between €11m and €20m per year. Including yards, depots and ancillary services, this infrastructure would cost up to €1.34bn, with future spurs to Doughiska, Parkmore, Oranmore and elsewhere coming in much cheaper once the trunk line is in place.
Mr Holland and his committee colleagues, many of whom are engineers and transport academics, submitted a large volume of Galway city-specific information to NTA officials and Atkins Réalis’ consulting engineers over the past 14 months. He is at pains to point out that the Gluas Committee tries to steer clear of other transport issues, but Holland himself is scathing about a lack of decision-making at all levels of government regarding transport solutions for the west of Ireland’s regional capital.
“If the ‘ring road problem’ wasn’t there, every local official and politician would be jumping on our bandwagon,” he says. “The lack of that final decision for twenty years has stymied Galway. If that had been solved, we’d be in a different place now.” Holland condemns the framing of the transport conversation by politicians and officials in Galway, that if one is ‘pro-Ring Road’, then one must also be ‘anti-bus or rail’, and vice versa. He tries to view everything “in parallel”.
Ring Road
Mr Holland sees the potential users of an outer city ring road and a Very Light Rail (VLR ) through the city’s core as “two very different clienteles”. His personal opinion is that a ring road is useful for people coming from Dublin and east County Galway to access western Galway and Clifden, with a subsidiary benefit for people living in Knocknacarra who commute to Parkmore.
“We’re dealing with different animals here. Our [light rail] customer is a fella who wants to go from ATU to the university; someone who wants to park their car at the edge of the city, and ride the tram in for shopping; someone who has a hospital appointment, but is worried about finding parking.”
Mr Holland admits decades of forlornly advocating for a tram system left him worn out, but when independent TD Catherine Connolly organised an 8-week petition signed by 22,000 Galwegians to support light rail in 2018, it re-energised him. He has visited numerous cities to learn from their Light and Very Light Rail experiences, especially Coventry, England, and Caen and Angers in France.
“Light rail, like Luas, needs deep, sunk concrete foundations. As this new report shows, Very Light Rail sits on rafts which may be prefabricated and laid on the road at a depth of only 300mm. All the big French and German companies that make light rail trams and tracks know there are no more cities in Europe to be customers, so they have perfected technologies for Very Light Rail. It’s perfect for cities like Galway.”
Lobbying
The Gluas Committee recently met new Galway city manager, Leonard Cleary, six months after he began his role, and informed him the late Professor John Burke and the late Brian McGuckian were advocating for light rail in Galway since the 1970s and 1980s respectively. Máirtín Mor McDonagh wanted coastal rail from Galway to the deepwater port in Ros a’ Mhíl one hundred years ago, when the city already had a tram from Forster Street to Blackrock via the city centre, Crescent and Lower Salthill. Holland remembers city councillors passing a motion in the mid-Nineties stating ‘Light Rail in principle is Galway City Council’s preferred option for public transport’.
“That policy still stands,” says Holland, describing his tram-supporting group as morphing through “Celtic Tiger, Recession, rejection, Pandemic, five ministers for Transport and seven city managers into the present group, which I like to call: The Fourth Coming of Gluas.”
In terms of the bureaucracy of transport policy, Mr Holland says the Gluas Committee has found it easier to correspond with the NTA than the Galway City Council until recently. He praises Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan, who listed the Gluas Committee as a stakeholder in the Galway Metropolitan Area Transport review last year, facilitating six meetings between committee members, officials and consultants.
“Some of the Atkins [consultants] are based in England. We deliberately got them to walk to our meeting in the university with geography professor Ulf Strohmayer, when they got off the train from Dublin on a rainy day. They saw the effect of congestion on their wet selves. That was our masterstroke!” laughs Holland. “They took it in the spirit it was meant, and we had a few pints afterwards.”
BusConnects
Back on a serious note, Holland warns that Gluas is not a silver bullet for congestion. He worries that an attitude has developed amongst transport planners in Galway to build infrastructure for the BusConnects network, and put light rail on the long finger until the buses run better.
He points to the experience of Caen, in Normandy: a 100,000-population Atlantic region city with bustling nightlife, culture and tourism, hosting major employers in medical devices, pharmaceuticals and light industry. In 2002, it installed a state-of-the-art guided bus network, then “admitted defeat in 2013” says Holland, and built a light rail line instead. The city is currently building its fourth line based on popular and commercial success.
“The thing that really worries me is that they are firing ahead with BusConnects... but there seems to be an attitude out there that ‘we’ll do the buses now because we have our homework done on it, and light rail maybe later’. My view is: why break eggs twice? Let’s do it now too, rather than wait another ten years to find out that the cheap and quick thing we’ve done now, also doesn’t work.”
