Oral Hearing on Galway City Outer Bypass

galway | miscellaneous | event notice Wednesday November 14, 2007 17:39 by gníomhaí

The oral hearing on the Galway Outer City Bypass is now taking place at the Ardilaun Hotel, Taylor's Hill, Galway. From today 14th Nov. By all accounts, it will drag on for 2 weeks.

I am in general in favour of bypasses provided:

- A good public transport system is in place. Galway desperately needs an excellent bus and light rail service.

- when rampant development doesn't follow along the edges of the bypass- this will clearly happen though if the bypass is built since vested interests (FF and PD friends) dearly want it to happen.

Certainly, bypasses are very much preferable to the huge network of motorways we are building.
However:

- The newspapers scream of climate change, yet still we build more and more damn roads. We should be REDUCING our carbon footprint by switching to more environmentally benign transport.

- Peak oil is around the corner i.e. oil deposits are shrinking fast and we alredy use much more oil than we are discovering. As oil gets scarcer, prices will (and are) rocketing. Soon only the (very) rich will be able to afford private transport.

- Galway already has a bypass. How many more bypasses need to be built? People can be enticed onto public transport but this will only happen when buses etc are fast, clean, reliable and efficient. Certainly NOT the case in Galway today. People will switch given the opportunity- look at the LUAS in Dublin (if only it were more extensive....!)

- International best practice tells us time and time again not to look at the American model (which we have replicated) ie putting cars and bypasses first before bus/rail. Witness the London M25 bypass -the so-called 'world's biggest car park'.