Mr. Hugh Creegan:

I will start with some of the points made by Senator Ó Céidigh. The first question was about the relationship between ourselves and the city and county councils. We have a very good working relationship with both authorities. We probably deal more with the city council because most of our activity is focused on the city centre. We have had some engagement collaboratively with the county council as well, but we would deal with Brendan McGrath's officials in the city council on a weekly basis on the various schemes. It is a tight working relationship.

With regard to the engagement level with businesses, we have had some engagement but the local authorities can answer that more clearly than us. They would have the first hand engagement in most cases.

The Senator asked if we have short-tem, medium-term and long-term ambitions to deliver the transport strategy for Galway. As was said by Deputy Ó Cuív, we believe that is the overall solution to the problem in Galway. In page 91, the last page, a programme is set out which divides the various measures into short term, medium term and long term. At the start of it we say that the bus and public transport system must be tackled very quickly. That is set down as the short-term measure. The ring road is included as a medium-term to long-term measure, but the bus priority and the traffic network through the city centre are down as key things to be started in the short term.

Regarding KPIs, we would build them out of this. I do not have certain KPIs to quote to the Senator now, but they are ones that would get developed as we would start to deliver on the various projects.

Senator O'Mahony asked how we would respond to Mr. Coll's proposals for responding to individual bottlenecks.

We are very familiar with how to optimise traffic flow. We do it all the time at various locations. We do not believe it is the answer for Galway, albeit it would help. While there is no doubt that certain things can be improved, it is often the case that when one improves one thing, it is at the expense of something else. For instance, to improve the movement through a junction, one may have to ban a left or right turn. There are things that can be done to improve junctions and the flow of traffic, but quite often one finds that one is just moving a problem down to another place and must chase it along. Fundamentally, one is dealing with a city with very narrow streets and too much traffic running down them as it is. While there are things that can be done to help, it is not our view that this is the long-term solution. What is in the transport strategy is the foundation to solve the issues. Certainly, there are beneficial things we would not ignore that could be done.

Deputy O’Keeffe asked if we had looked at traffic management and measures like this. We have. To build on the last point-----