Meeting hears city bypass will increase traffic congestion

The proposed new city bypass will increase traffic congestion not reduce it, opponents of the road claimed this week.

And vested interests were accused at a public meeting of driving the road project forward to free-up new land-banks for development to expand the city.

Committee members of Galway N6 Action Group attempted to debunk the argument that the city needs a bypass to a room packed with around 300 people at Westwood Hotel in Dangan on Wednesday night.

The majority of those attending were impacted by the emerging preferred route selected by Arup, the consultants hired by the local authority. About a dozen general election candidates spoke.

The group presented statistics that revealed the bypass would divert, at best, only 4,200 journeys away from the city each day. This represented between 3% and 5% of the 77,200 daily journeys made in the city.

Peter Butler, in his presentation, said the bypass will not solve the traffic snarl-ups associated with schools and third level institutes. Some 22,000 people attend GMIT and NUIG each day and a further 13,400 go to the city’s primary and secondary schools. “The bypass will do nothing for these people . . . only 3% of people need to bypass the city. The numbers do not justify a bypass,” he said.

Mr Butler said the taxpayer would incur “huge losses” because not enough traffic would be using the new bypass and so the State would be liable to the contractor who builds it if the numbers of journeys don’t meet an agreed target. This was happening on other loss-making roads across the country, he said.

For more coverage from the meeting, see this week’s Galway City Tribune