As we get nearer to the election, many candidates will promise the Galway City Ring Road (GCRR ) as the solution to Galway’s chronic traffic problems. Any solution to the traffic has to involve fewer car journeys, but the GCRR will not achieve that.
The promise is that the GCRR will divert lots of traffic away from Galway city. That is how bypasses work. For Moycullen or Adare bypasses where large volumes of traffic truly bypass the town, this makes sense. For Galway, the vast majority of journeys start or end in the city. The end result will be moving the bottlenecks since it will fail to remove traffic from the city. The design report submitted with the plans for the bypass says, “any proposed development must cater for movements from one side of the city in addition to through traffic”.
Ultimately it is a solution that assumes that the private car will be the main mode of transport to get from one part of the city to another. As the population rises this solution will lead to congestion.
Galway traffic is the result of decades of bad planning where we have built homes which are completely car dependent. It led to chronic traffic problems even with a small population. We will not solve our traffic problems until we recognise the mistakes of the past.
The main impact of the GCRR will be to open up more housing west of the city – homes which will depend on the car for every journey, and homes that are too dispersed to be served by public transport. Once that happens we will be locked into huge increases in traffic at our shops, schools and workplaces.
If the question is, ‘how do we get cars from A to B?’ then the GCRR is the answer. But we should be asking, ‘How do we get people from A to B?’ European cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen have dramatically changed to remove cars from their centre. They did not build new roads to do that – they provided alternatives like pubic transport, walking and cycling. In Galway some parts of that solution, like Bus Connects, are in progress and much more can be done for a fraction of the cost of the ring road.
There will always be people who cannot switch from the car, for mobility reasons, for longer journeys, or when goods or equipment have to be moved. But we need to convert a significant portion of our short journeys away from private cars in order to free up space for everyone.
