Galway’s leaders need to break bread and talk!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

The way both Galway City and County Councils react to cars serves as a metaphor for much that is wrong with the modern world. They say it’s integrated but it’s dislocated. They tell us it’s coordinated yet it’s bewildering. It’s distracting and unnerving and maddening and baffling.

Nothing works better than a bit of coordinated town planning, and that’s what we’ve got right now: nothing. Galway has so many plans for its county town’s traffic I’m surprised we’re not all driving into each other head on.

They tell us they’re getting rid of all the roundabouts on Galway’s ring road to install a massive chain of intelligent traffic lights that can sense the volumes of traffic at any given time, who you’re talking to on your car phone, what you had for lunch and why most of it is smeared all over your fave pink skirt.

Then they fail to count the number of exits on one of the roundabouts and the whole scheme rear-ends itself. Even if it hadn’t, nobody seemed to notice the effect of the roundabout at the top of Bohermore, which would have screwed up the ring road plans anyway.

I’ve given up driving the ring road. Red light after red light, it gnaws at my soul.

Yesterday I actually saw a bus using the bus lane down the Westside. I was so shocked I nearly drove into the car in front, which would’ve caused an almighty tailback, because there’s only one lane of traffic each side of the road.

For years we watched, waited, put up with piles of rubbish, contra-flows, road closures and the loss of a swathe of St Michael’s green playing fields. After enough time and heavy duty construction to knock up a pyramid or two, we ended up with exactly the same amount of space in which to drive our cars, a few dead trees, and a bus lane, which in itself would be a wondrous thing, were there plentiful buses using it.

Right now, all over the world, there are those who want to rid society of cars and those who want to make it easier to drive them everywhere. In Galway City the sides are drawn up clearly. Trouble is, none of the city’s leaders knows or cares what other parties are saying or doing. Business leaders are obviously eager to make the city more car-friendly. This colyoom has oft pleaded over the years for an extension to the two-hour limit on Galway’s Pay and Display parking. It’s an insult to a great city. If the city were a date, you’d have just enough time for a sip of your aperitif at the bar before dinner. 

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.