LAST UPDATE | 17 Dec 2023
ON 11 DECEMBER, while the negotiators at COP28 in Dubai were haggling over text to save the planet from the scourge of fossil fuels, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was opening the new Moycullen bypass.
Cutting the ribbon on the €35m project, he declared that people travelling to work, college and public services will have more efficient, safer journeys with less congestion.
Situated on the N59 between Galway and Clifden, Moycullen epitomises the urban generated rural growth that is typical of many Irish towns and villages that are in the hinterland of bigger cities.
Once a sleepy Gaeltacht village 12 kilometres from Galway city, Moycullen is now a satellite town of Galway with residents commuting to the city for work, school and business, almost always by car, because frequent and reliable public transport alternatives do not exist. The latest census data found that Galway County has the highest percentage of people driving to work at 71%, reflecting the abysmal planning controls in the county over decades and the preponderance of rural one-off houses.
I do not begrudge the residents of Moycullen or anywhere else relief from traffic congestion. Heavy traffic destroys town centres as well as creating hazards for pedestrians. Congestion creates noise, delays and pollution and is horrible to live with.
But bypassing every town at a cost of over €8m per kilometre is a very expensive solution that won’t solve our traffic problems. While some bypasses should indeed be built for road safety reasons, congestion is a problem best tackled with interventions such as demand management, public transport and public realm improvements. New roads and even bypasses may attract more traffic and journeys instead of deterring them, thus making the problem worse in the long run.
While ring roads, bypasses and new roads can initially reduce traffic congestion, research from all over the world has found that they often become ineffective with time due to the generation of induced traffic.
And did I mention climate change? The 2023 Climate Action Plan sets bold targets for limiting carbon pollution from the transport sector. In addition to the ambitious targets for nearly a million EVs by 2030, the Plan aims to achieve a 20% reduction in total vehicle kilometres, a reduction in fuel usage and significant increases to sustainable transport trips and modal share. Someone needs to brief the Taoiseach that merely electrifying the fleet won’t do the trick: we have to change the way we move around in the first place.
Yet the Taoiseach is only saying what most politicians believe: more roads will fix everything, and besides, that is what the punters want. Why think about the future and the catastrophic legacy we will bequeath to our children when there are votes to be won now?
With local, European and possibly a general election next year, politicians will be falling over themselves promising new road projects and bypasses.
Unlike public transport, which you really have to use in order to understand its benefits and challenges, road projects have a simplicity and familiarity in terms of their alleged benefits that never get challenged in political debate.
Few aspiring politicians will take the trouble to campaign for improved rail and bus services despite the fact that the funding and policy commitments to support increased public transport investments are assured in the Programme for Government. The fact that we have legally binding climate commitments that apply to the transport sector is unlikely to feature in any of the glossy brochures that will start arriving in our letterboxes.
The truth is that many backbench TDs in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael probably see the climate measures as a temporary deviation from normal politics and that once the Greens are gone things will revert to business-as-usual on the roads front.
And while Sinn Féin has supported the carbon budgets and climate action policies generally, the party is still an unknown quantity. In government, it too could baulk at making some of the tough decisions that are needed. A growing rump of climate-denying independents, if they somehow found themselves propping up a future coalition, could try to force disastrous U-turns that would jeopardise Ireland’s reputation as a country that takes climate change seriously.
All of this will soon come to a head again as the N6 Galway Ring Road is considered again by An Bord Pleanála next year. The project, an 18km stretch of new road in Galway city is expected to cost somewhere between €500m and €1bn, or about the cost of building the original Red and Green Luas lines in Dublin.
Arguably, this project belongs to a different era, a set of political promises made years ago that have yet to come to fruition, that prioritised the movement of cars over sustainable mobility.
Building a ring road in a city that screams for better public transport and that is already threatened by rising sea levels, storm surges and flooding is hardly a prudent use of public finances.
Yet true to form, the Taoiseach was quick to voice his support for the project earlier this month in the Dáil, telling Noel Grealish TD that the ring road will free up the city and road space within the city for pedestrians and cyclists and that electric cars powered by renewable electricity will mean that we don’t need to worry about future emissions.
He concluded that “the argument that building this road will mean more fossil fuels and more greenhouse gases being emitted in the environment is, I think, a weak one” without offering a single piece of evidence to support his claim that new construction techniques and EVs essentially cancel out the irreversible environmental and spatial impacts of the new road.
All of his statements have been comprehensively debunked by architect and campaigner, Ciarán Ferrie, who pointed out that the ring road will result in increased traffic on most of Galway’s roads according to the modelling results submitted as part of the planning application.
So the next time we point fingers at shady petro states and the influence of the fossil fuel lobby at the recent COP in Dubai, we would do well to remember that all climate action begins at home. It begins when we redirect investment away from car dependence towards affordable, equitable and sustainable mobility solutions in ways that do not cost the Earth.
Sadhbh O’ Neill is the senior climate advisor to Friends of the Earth Ireland. She is a member of the board of Transport Infrastructure Ireland.
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