The desperate parking situation on campus has led University of Galway officials to look further afield for ‘park and stride’ locations.
Eamonn Deacy Park in Terryland, home of Galway United, is being assessed for extra college car parking for at least four days per week, the Advertiser can reveal.
A park and ride service has been rejected, because of low height clearance on the Dyke Road beneath the Quincentennial Bridge.
The latest University travel survey from 2025 shows 30 per cent of students and 67 per cent of staff use a car as their main transportation to campus. Difficulty finding parking is a commonly cited complaint – but the challenge is not equally distributed.
“There’s certainly a big disparity in staff-only and student-only parking,” says Students’ Union President Seán de Búrca. Currently, he says, there is one parking spot for every seven staff members, and just one for every 286 students.
A previous proposal to ban anyone living on campus from parking there was scrapped, along with the possibility of making all parking shared between staff and students (the preferred solution of the SU ).
With regard to the potential use of Eamonn Deacy Park, university management was unable to comment on how spaces would be allocated.
The university is planning to promote active travel options and engage with the City Council with regard to safety issues raised by students, said a spokesman. It also plans to use data gathered in the latest travel survey to encourage bus operators to increase the regularity of services and develop more routes.
But, as de Búrca points out, public transportation is not reliable or frequent enough to serve all students. “The city council is stopping more parking spaces being built because they want us to use public transit, but students are a different situation,” he says.
Thirty-nine per cent of students use public transit. Since 2015, the average student commuting distance has increased by a whopping 50 per cent.
“The blanket approach of ‘no more parking spaces in the city’ that the council is taking is not addressing students’ reality. We have students commuting from Kerry, and they’re using cars, because public transportation is not an option for them,” says de Búrca.
Other potential remedies proposed by a university working group include modifying the pay and display spaces in Dangan, Corrib Village, and Áras Uí Chanthail to become student and staff shared parking spaces; communicating the availability of parking space at the Insight Building and the Dangan Sports Campus more widely; encouraging more lift sharing.
The university may also engage with the city and county councils, and with the National Transport Authority to arrange extra, public park and ride facilities.
