Sir, – Harry McGee’s great piece “Galway: Where the car is still king and ‘glaciers move faster than the council’”, Environment, August 13th) starkly illustrates the almost complete lack of action in Galway to provide safer cycling infrastructure, and that while claiming to support improvements, when it comes to implementation, many councillors strongly favour the status quo.
The lack of interest in providing cycle infrastructure in Galway is part of a larger pattern in the city (and indeed around the country) of encouraging car dominance, both actively, by continuing to build roads, and passively via an extremely “light touch” view of enforcement.
This latter approach can be seen constantly around Galway, where illegal parking on footpaths and double yellow lines, red-light jumping and speeding are all just part of the urban environment. The latter offence is so normalised that some councillors feel the need to complain about the location (and existence) of speed vans in the city.
Of course, one can argue that politicians just reflect the views of their voters, and it’s certainly the case that a lot of people for whom car use isn’t absolutely necessary still feel that public transport, cycling and (to a lesser extent) walking are modes of transport that aren’t suitable for them, and that the convenience of car use is hard to beat.
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If it weren’t for the climate crisis, we could probably just continue to muddle along with this approach for years to come.
But with the need to halve transport emissions in less than eight years, and the roll-out of electric vehicles in anything like the numbers required being extremely unlikely, what we really need now is a bit of political leadership, both locally from councillors themselves, and nationally from the leadership of their parties, who often seem happy to sit back and allow resistance to climate-friendly measures play out at local level.
To come back to the piece in question, let’s not forget that what’s being asked for isn’t a radical tearing-up of the social fabric of cities like Galway – it’s a simple, cheap, widely tested set of measures that will make life healthier, cleaner and (most importantly) safer for normal people going about their daily lives.
All it takes is a modicum of short-term political courage of which the only criticism future generations will have will be “Why did it take them so long?” – Yours, etc,
DAVE MATHIESON,
Salthill,
Galway.