Comment & Analysis / Long Read: It’s a seductive claim that building a second ring road in Galway will let the city and county breathe, but all the evidence we have — including from the councils involved — shows that the new dual carriageway will increase traffic in the city.
Broadcaster and columnist Máire Treasa Ní Cheallaigh argues in today’s Irish Independent for a second Galway ring road, claiming it’s more complicated than it seems. However, throughout her article, she employs simplistic, flawed, and sometimes circular arguments to dismiss evidence or overlook some key facts altogether.
What key facts does she overlook? For starters, the planning documents from Galway City Council and Galway County Council make it clear that only 3% of traffic across the city is bypass traffic. So when Ní Cheallaigh talks about “getting traffic out of the city”, it rings hollow.
It rings even more hollow when she talks about a “chance to breathe” when more and more evidence is showing that even EVs are responsible for toxic emissions (EVs cause more deadly tyre emissions and will not remove brake pad dust). And the new road will, for some time, include petrol and diesel cars.
The mix of climate change and roads is a touchy subject, with some even against new large urban roads, weary of mentioning climate change for fear of arguments such as “should Galway be the ones to save the planet when China is building coal plants every week”.
But (1) non-international transport is responsible for the second-largest sectoral emissions in Ireland, (2) transport planning has an effect on everything from land use to energy use, (3) we’re on track to missing our overall emission reduction targets, (4) we are responsible for our emissions and per person, we’re way ahead of most of the world, and (5) if we’re debating a project which is likely to cost €1.5 billion or more we should be able to debate all aspects of the project including that it is a distraction from solutions which can help with our climate targets.
So, I am going to say that given that An Bord Pleanála’s approval decision on the Ring Road was overridden by the High Court in 2024 because the judge found that decision had not taken into account the Government’s Climate Action Plan, it’s more than odd that Ní Cheallaigh does not mention climate once.
However, climate-related reasons are not the only, or even the main, reason to rethink the project.
Ní Cheallaigh writes that “The mindset that ‘just’ getting people on to bikes and buses will fix the traffic lacks any kind of critical thinking. They must have no memory of towns like Naas, Ennis, Moate and Mullingar before they were bypassed.”
But the centre of towns like Naas and Mullingar are still choked with traffic, and she also dismisses light rail as a solution for Galway.
The project in Galway is called the N6 Galway City Ring Road. It’s an honest name, as it is primarily planned for the growth of car traffic in and around the city. But we live in a car-dominated society and — like anything else which is dominant — challenging that dominance is very hard.
People who travel longer distances regularly are more likely to work with and socialise with people who do the same. This is why media personalities, especially the likes of sports presenters, will have a distorted view of travel patterns.
High travel cross-country is not unique to people with a high profile, but it’s also not the norm for most people. But if it’s your norm, you might be dismissive of how much sustainable transport can fit into most people’s lives.
People whose jobs require such travel patterns are understandably more likely to support the construction of more roads. But that’s no excuse to write about people continuing to “shout and scream” (in other words, underhandedly saying they aren’t being reasonable without having) and then distorting the views of people who want Galway to try to focus money and resources on doing things differently for once.
Ní Cheallaigh says the issues are more complex, but she makes arguments (1) in openly bad faith OR (2) not fully listening to the people making arguments against the bypass.
Ní Cheallaigh writes that “The people of An Cheathrú Rua or Clifden can’t be expected to ‘just’ cycle to town or take a bus to the outskirts and then make their way in and around.” But who exactly is expecting anybody to cycle from An Cheathrú Rua or Clifden to Galway City? Who has said such? Nobody.
An Cheathrú Rua is around 44km from Galway City, and Clifden is just short of 80kms from the city centre. Google Maps’ recommended cycling route from Clifden is 90km long and takes approximately 4.5 hours. Again, to be clear: Nobody is suggesting that a large number of people will cycle from rural areas to the city, and certainly not over tens of kilometres.
This is extreme shadow boxing.
As for the idea that people would take “a bus to the outskirts and then make their way in and around”… what bus doesn’t bring people into the city? A mix of transport solutions is needed for rural to urban areas, and there wouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all fix.
It will clearly include people driving. Driving full trips or switching to a bus or train at a park-and-ride, or — god forbid, maybe even switching to bicycle share within a city centre. But nobody is going to choose for you.
Ní Cheallaigh — like many of the build-the-bypass advocates — makes out she’s standing on the reasonable side of the argument by saying things like we “learn from the mistakes of the 1980s” by “not allowing [the road] to be the only solution” “We need every option going to get the city moving again”, and generally being supportive of things like cycle lanes.
But Ní Cheallaigh offers little in the way of solutions that would free Galway from its current plight of traffic.
At different points in her article, she both supports and dismisses both buses and cycling, makes silly statements about cycling and calls the idea of a Luas light rail line, which could accommodate the city’s growing population and high-quality park-and-ride for rural dwellers — a “fantasy”.
She does this while arguing for a road that will likely cost €1.5 billion or more, and making the main reason for it serving a population of 40k people west of the city. And most of them don’t cross the city on a daily basis.
“It’s time to acknowledge that the population will continue to increase and accept that some of us have the audacity to live in rural Ireland and need a car to get around,” she continues as if sustainable transport and planning cannot accommodate population growth (it can), and again, shadow boxing around the idea that people are trying to take cars off people who live in rural areas (when nobody is suggesting that).
Gaeltacht area dependent on a city’s ring road?
Her hyperbolic claim that not building the second Galway ring road would amount to “abandoning everyone who lives west of the Corrib” is reminiscent of populist calls that everywhere west of the Shannon has been abandoned (newsflash: it has not, and, for clarity: This article is being written from Co Mayo).
As mentioned above, most people west of the city do not cross the Corrib daily, and it is hardly a positive aspiration for improving rural Ireland to be even more dependent on such longer trips, which not only have environmental and practical issues but are also proven to be detrimental to family, social life and even peopel’s health.
She claims that Údarás na Gaeltachta’s job of attracting businesses to the Gaeltacht west of the city and, so, keeping people locally, is hampered by it taking, she claims, “two hours to get a shipment from An Spidéal to Oranmore.” Similar rhetoric has been said about the city during years when the city has attracted significant new jobs.
Even if this overstated timeframe were true, the evidence is clear that new roads, such as the Galway “bypass” project, do not offer time savings beyond a short-term timeframe.
As per a 2019 paper published in ‘Transport Policy’:
“Research studies since the 1960s have suggested that, because of induced demand, the hoped-for benefits from highway expansion tend to be short-lived and do not provide lasting relief to traffic congestion. Early studies by Downs (1962), Smeed (1968), and Thomson (1977) go so far as to argue that, over time and without any other offsetting deterrent, rush-hour traffic speeds tend to revert to their pre-expansion levels. The finding has even been dubbed the Fundamental Law of Road Congestion (Downs, 1962), which asserts that the elasticity of vehicle miles traveled with respect to lane mileage is equal to one, implying that driving increases in exact proportion to highway capacity additions.“
“Bypasses and public transport aren’t mutually exclusive anywhere, except Galway,” claims Ní Cheallaigh after a few lines before she said we should “Ban cars from the city centre”. However, unless Galway City is going to die economically, any ring road will fill and slow people like Ní Cheallaigh, who are driving back to west Galway. Talk of “banning” traffic in the city centre is not going to change that.
And the fact is, we already have an example of a road filling up — Ní Cheallaigh says the current delays in Galway delayed a trip back on the Easter Bank Holiday Weekend, and somebody I shared the article with said they had the a similar trip but with a delay in Dublin because of the M50 and no delay in Galway.
A second ring road around the city will likely not just have a negative effect on city alone, it will also supercharge the issues which parents and other residents along the R336, a road which they say “puts lives at risk every day”.
The R336 runs through areas such as An Spidéal, Barna and Furbo and towards An Cheathrú Rua. From the city to TG4’s studios, there’s near-continuous sprawl for 26km along what is supposed to be a rural regional road and every little road off that road. This is the development pattern:
This is, of course, a car-dependent area, and people living here will need cars into the future. But the status quo is dangerous and is not conducive to making the Gaeltacht areas along it an attractive place to live or set up a business.
A solution along the R336 will be hard, but making it safer will likely include slowing down some people travelling to places like An Cheathrú Rua. But it has to be again asked, do we want these places to be able to grow as communities with basics such as allowing children to be able to walk and cycle to school, places with a community balance, or is the future of these Gaeltacht areas just residents commuting elsewhere?
It’s easy for a columnist like Ní Cheallaigh to say they support things like reopening an old railway that’s still intact, making fares cheaper, building bus shelters, building cycle lanes, and also building a “bypass” too. Having our cake and eating it, which never really happens.
Actually prioritising sustainable transport, and having communities with transport options, is much, much harder.