It can now take up to 1½ hours to do what used to be a 20-minute journey from Tuam to Galway during the morning peak period, writes Frank McDonald.
Galway can barely cope with the explosive growth it has experienced since the mid-1990s.
The city has long since burst its seams. Its ring road is gridlocked almost every day, and the Headford Road roundabout has become known as the "Roundabout from Hell".
With plans to extend new development to the east along the "Ardaun Corridor" to house 18,000 new residents and yet more hi-tech business parks, and a new outer ring road also in the pipeline, the city's suburbs will stretch more than 30 miles from Athenry to Spiddal and northwards to Tuam.
A great arc of commuterland is already gathered around Galway. This was dramatically illustrated by a map showing areas where people drive more than 20 miles to work, based on data derived from the 2002 census.
A similar pattern is evident around Limerick and, more notoriously, Dublin.
It can now take up to 1½ hours to do what used to be a 20-minute journey from Tuam to Galway during the morning peak period.
And since the main culprit is sprawl, the spread of housing further and further away from the city will only intensify unsustainable commuting patterns.
New bungalows above Barna were all approved by Galway County Council, which operates a liberal regime on houses in rural areas; they account for 70 per cent of its housing permissions.
Slewn-out suburban estates have also been tacked on to Tuam, Claregalway, Craughwell, Gort and Loughrea.
The 2003 Galway Transport and Planning Study (GTPS) attempted to reconcile conflicting planning policies in the city, which is seeking to consolidate Galway's growth, and the county, which has become a major area of expansion both in and around satellite towns and in the open countryside.
The draft city plan, now under consideration, concedes that recent growth has not been without its costs.
"We now have longer journey times to jobs and services, under-development and erosion of public transport, unequal access ... for those without a car and unacceptable levels of congestion."
The big idea in the GTPS was to develop the Ardaun Corridor, running eastwards from Doughiska.
A third of the land involved lies within the city boundary and two-thirds in the county, which gives it some "stake" in the development. Unlike Knocknacarra, it will also have a local area action plan.
According to the Mayor of Galway, Labour's Cllr Catherine O'Connell, the Ardaun plan should only be accepted if the bus network
on which it is based actually materialises. Its realisation, as the draft city plan says, also "implies a high level of co-operation with Galway County Council".
But though the County Hall on Prospect Hill and the City Hall on College Road are literally within an ass's roar of each other, there seems to be very little co-ordination of planning policy.
This is not helped by the county council having no planners at a senior level; it remains steeped in an engineering culture
"The urban core is very successful, but the fringes of the city are a mess," according to Pat McCabe, partner in Simon J. Kelly Architects, who organised an exhibition on contemporary architecture in the west last year.
"The county is a quagmire. There is huge resistance to modernity and change."
Neither the Galway county manager, Pat Gallagher, nor the director of planning services, Paul Ridge, were available to comment. Gallagher, a former Labour TD for Laois-Offaly, said after he took over last August that it was important to "look at the overall impact" in assessing individual planning applications.
There are peculiar attitudes in the city too. At a city council meeting last month, acting city manager Joe O'Neill said simply because the council was putting in bus lanes this didn't mean that it was trying to boost public transport use, no more than cycle lanes were intended to increase cyclist numbers.
Although there is Government funding available for quality bus corridors (QBCs) in cities outside Dublin, Galway has been slow to submit any plans.
The city's first bus lane is only now being installed on the Dublin Road in Renmore, but there will not be one on the Western Distributor Road until it is widened.
Cllr O'Connell, who cycles to council meetings, says there "needs to be a real focus on public transport, instead of just paying lip-service to it".
She also believes that Galway "has reached its limit", and the task now should be to "capitalise on city we have" rather than allow further haphazard expansion.
According to the mayor, the city council needs to show more leadership in pointing a way forward, and she deplores its decision to rezone St Joseph's Diocesan School ("The Bish") on Nun's Island from institutional to residential, as proposed by the planners, with a view to relocation out-of-town.
The Government has barely acknowledged Galway's "gateway" status in the National Spatial Strategy.
Under its decentralisation programme, only 10 public servants would be relocated to Furbo, west of the city, while a further 200 would be divided up between Ballinasloe, Clifden and Loughrea.