Mr. Uinsinn Finn:

A couple of other questions were raised. The park-and-ride issue was raised by a number of members. Working with the National Transport Authority, we are very keen to develop such sites in Galway and they are very much in the Galway transport strategy. They are linked to the national climate change policy as well. Location is vital to park-and-ride sites. Many of us here are familiar with Galway and within a very small edge of the city, between the Oranmore coast road, the old N6 - now the R446, the M6 motorway, the Monivea Road and the Tuam Road, there is a corridor of approximately 2 km or 3 km and approximately 50% of the traffic coming to the city uses that corridor. There are approximately 80,000 vehicles per day using the national roads in and out, with approximately 40,000 of those vehicle movements coming through that area. It is a key priority for a park-and-ride site in that area, as it would serve the main commuter traffic in and out of the city.

The next element important for the location of park-and-ride sites is the perceived edge of congestion. If a person comes into congestion and drives for ten or 15 minutes, the driver is more than likely to continue the journey. If the point is too far out, the driver will not pull in but go on past it. It is very important to have the location at the perceived edge of congestion. Pricing and parking management is also very important in getting people to use park-and-ride facilities. As people in Parkmore have free parking, it is very unlikely they will use a site where there may be an element of pricing. If it is to be provided free of charge, there must be a grant allocation to run the service. They are expensive to run in terms of infrastructure to be provided. The land is provided initially before the site is constructed and then bus priority is allocated to it.

There is an infrastructural cost to that and then there is the ongoing operating cost as well. Where it does very work very well is in terms of what we would like to see, and that is why it is very important in the Galway transport strategy, GTS. What we are doing in the city centre, in a project that is currently at planning stage, is based on the city centre traffic management plan. There is parking in the city centre and one pays from €5 to €12 to €18 for day parking. What we would love to see is that the people who are parking in the city centre might park at the park-and-ride site and get a bus service into the city that would cut 15 to 20 minutes off their journey time on a cost-neutral basis from their perspective, in that they would be paying for the park and ride on the edge of the city and getting the public transport service into the city. The 409 service that serves Galway is extremely successful because of the priority it has coming in the Dublin Road. We think the park-and-ride system would really work well serving the hospitals and the big employment centres within the city centre in the future.

That ties in very much as well with the modal shift, in that we must be conscious of the people who come from the county and as some members said, are reliant on the car. They will then have the opportunity to change over into the modal shift. When we talk about park and ride, it is not about getting people out of their car onto a bus, it is about getting out of one's car and perhaps onto a bike or walking as well. In the GTS we have walking and cycling routes because we perceive a shift where people are starting to move over into using their bikes for certain elements of their journey. That could involve having bike lockers at the park-and-ride sites or for people to carry a bike in their vehicle.

Parkmore has been raised on a number of occasions. There are more than 6,000 employees in Parkmore and more than 5,000 of them are using single-occupancy vehicles. The Galway Races is used as an example of how traffic is managed. Those of us who went to the races 20 years ago were aware of huge traffic congestion around and one could ask why that has changed now. There is very minimal traffic congestion connected with the races currently and that is down to the modal shift. It is an ideal model. I will not quote figures in case I get them wrong. A significant number of people now go to the races by bus. There are double-decker buses lined up in Eyre Square and various other locations to bus them out. A lot of people also walk to the races. There is also high occupancy in cars that do travel to the races. Three, four and five passengers are squeezed in. That is what we would like to see in terms of the overall context of how one can move people into more sustainable transport, going forward.

I will recap on some of the projects that have been delivered in Galway that we can perhaps forget about fairly quickly. What is very important for Galway city at the moment is the existing N6 corridor across the city. In recent years a lot of junction improvements have been carried out, including the removal of roundabouts and signalising the junctions, which are linked to the urban traffic control, UTC, centre in city hall. Deputy Grealish mentioned the Carnmore junction earlier. Those are all fibre linked and monitored systems. With the traffic modelling and counting we have done we are getting between 15% and 30% more traffic through at each junction since they were upgraded. The key priority for the upgrading of junctions was not just to get more traffic through them, pedestrian safety has been another factor. Safe pedestrian crossing facilities have been provided at the junctions and at the same time traffic volumes have been increased.

In terms of serving Parkmore and the broader area, it is not that long ago when we did not have the M6 motorway linking Athlone to Galway. Consequently, in the example given of a person leaving Parkmore who was half way home at Briarhill, if that person needed to go through Craughwell, Loughrea, Ballinasloe and all the towns along the way, they would certainly not have been half way home. It is not long ago since the M6 opened. The M17 and M18 motorways are now open as well. I think that the example being given was prior to the last 12 months but a lot of improvements have been delivered in Parkmore. We were getting continuous complaints about it taking an hour and a half to get out of Parkmore but I think Mr. Neary would agree with me that there are very few occasions now when there are any significant delays such as was the case previously. I do not want to put a number on it but apart from one or two bad days, the traffic currently is being managed. We cannot rest in that regard because it is important to keep moving and to further reduce delays, as well as to look at the situation in terms of the modal shift. It is not just about providing increased capacity into Parkmore for the single-occupancy cars but also for buses and cyclists.