The new junction at Briarhill is to open on Thursday December 8 and City Hall believes it will make a significant difference to motorists with fewer delays and allowing traffic to flow more freely.
The Briarhill junction is on course to open next week and is part of a major series of works which will see the Galway City Council replace many of the city’s roundabouts with signalised junctions.
According to Jim Molloy, the chief executive engineer with the council’s Galway Transport Unit, the biggest change motorists will notice, apart from the absence of the roundabout, is “the number of new lanes”.
There will now be four lanes from the approach road from the Galway Clinic (two straight ahead and one left and one right ); the layout of the roadway coming from Ballybrit Racecourse will also have four lanes (two straight ahead and one left and one right ), an increase of two lanes from what was there before; the road from Galway Airport will have four lanes (two right, one straight ahead, and one left ); while the road from Doughiska will have three lanes, one in each direction.
The works were budgeted to be €1.1 million, but the final cost may come in under €1 million.
Galway motorists have been concerned about the plans to remove the roundabouts and replacing them with signalised junctions. Concerns rest on the delays and disruptions that will be caused during construction; that the problems experienced at the Moneenageisha Junction will be replicated elsewhere; and that the junctions will not reduce the traffic congestion they were meant to.
However Mr Molloy says that changes were necessary as the roundabout was hindering traffic flow and contributing to traffic congestion.
“The problem was that traffic using the N6 was experiencing delays of 20 to 25 minutes when coming into Galway and 20 to 25 minute delays when coming out, particularly on a Friday evening,” said Mr Molloy. “Other problems were that some lanes would have traffic flow but that another lane would be blocked for a long time, so there wasn’t a balanced flow of vehicles. The roundabout wasn’t working.”
He also said that the problems caused motorists to divert through roads to Carnmore and Doughiska, leading to the problem of heavy traffic on secondary routes and through residential areas.
Mr Molloy believes the new junction will make a significant difference.
“This will enable us to have, at the minimum, three lanes, in most cases four, moving on green, whereas now it’s only two,” he said. “It should be that people will be able to move from green light to green not from green to red. It will also reduce the possibility of one lane blocking most other lanes which is a problem we have in Briarhill at the moment.”
Mr Molloy also says the urban traffic control system that is to be introduced into the Briarhill junction in mid-January will also help with the flow of traffic.
“Once the control centre is up and running we can create signal plans depending on the time of day,” he says, “for example traffic coming out of town on a Friday evening can be prioritised. There can be plans for morning, afternoon, and night, which is very hard to do when you are operating with ordinary traffic lights.”
