There’s a video doing the rounds on social media of someone driving through Galway in 1965. The car drives along Bridge Street and Mainguard Street, before turning onto Shop street.
Over stirring music you see cars moving slowly along the now pedestrianised street, before emerging out onto Eyre Square. Watching it today, one of the things that jumps out at you, is just how busy the pavements are.
Pedestrians are forced out into traffic all along the street while the car sails cleanly through. If you were on foot in Galway in the sixties, you were expected to occupy a tiny corner of the streetscape.
The pedestrianisation of Shop Street – from William Street to Quay Street – began in the late nineties. Initially it was met with significant resistance. Shop owners complained that it would be a disaster. They worried about a collapse of footfall if customers couldn’t drive into the centre.
But today, it is universally hailed as an achievement. Instead of the rush from one shop to another, the urban space encourages city-goers to dwell, shop, eat, drink and generally hang around.
In the summer, it becomes a victim of its own success, with thousands of tourists wandering the 500m stretch, almost up to Eyre Square, enjoying the buskers and soaking up the bustling atmosphere,
Outside of the small core of pedestrianisation, it is a very different story. In the West End (aside from evenings in the summer ), Upper Abbeygate Street and around Woodquay, walkers are squeezed onto narrow, broken down pavements. The space is deeply hostile to wheelchairs, buggies and those with limited mobility. Cork, Limerick and Dublin have pressed on with pedestrianisation, giving more and more space to their residents, reducing or eliminating car lanes and increasing footpaths and cycleways. But in Galway, that progress has stalled.
There are few things which symbolise the car-centric culture in Galway as clearly as the lack of zebra crossings. In every other city in Ireland, these are used liberally by planners to give priority to pedestrians, and slow down traffic to make it safer for everyone.
It is a simple mechanism to smooth the way for walking in a city, without taking space away from moving or parked cars. Yet, in Galway, you could walk the entire city and hardly see a single one. When they do exist – like at the bottom of Victoria Place – they are all but useless, positioned away from direct or popular pedestrian routes.
Instead of lots of easy and safe pedestrian crossings, the City Council has installed a small number of expensive traffic lights. These make pedestrians wait, often for quite significant amounts of time. In subtle ways, the city tells walkers and wheelers that they are less important.
That the car is king. We see this in particular at Spanish Arch. The area is one of the few major outdoor civic amenities in the city. It is a significant site for tourism and a public space where residents gather to hang around.
But it is common to see groups of pedestrians, gathering around the lights at either side of the Wolfe Tone Bridge, waiting for them to change. The unspoken message is pretty blunt. You must wait. The cars come first.
Until planning permission was granted for a new crossing beside Droichead an Dóchais, University Road was another clear example of Galway’s hostility to pedestrians. In the morning, students stream up from the city across the new bridge and through Nun’s Island.
During the day parishioners come from the Cathedral, and secondary students from the many schools in the area wander aimlessly. But to get safely from the city to the university side of the road, they must either go all the way to the Courthouse, or walk around to the main gates of the university.
The City Council finally recognised that this was a problem last year, and now they have received planning permission for one set of traffic lights.
But even this welcome development shows the car-centric thinking of the City Council. We could imagine a very different, pedestrian-friendly solution to the problem of University Road. Instead of this one new traffic light, we could have had four pedestrian crossings.
One where Canal Rd crosses to the university, one for parishioners as they come out of the cathedral, one for the new bridge, and one replacing the lights at the main gate of the university.
While zebra crossings with flashing yellow lights are expensive, in recent years it has become acceptable to simply paint the road with stripes and put up a normal sign.
There is no need for raised platforms or flashing yellow lights. On my understanding, the city could install six of this style of pedestrian crossing, for the price of one set of traffic lights.
Galway is an amazing, vibrant, exciting city. It has the beaches, the lake and the river within the city. And it has the immense benefit of being small and comparatively compact.
Encouraging people to walk in the city centre is crucial to reducing congestion, improving accessibility and increasing the number of residents and tourists who want to spend time in the city centre. But to do that, the City Council needs to think very carefully about the subtle ways in which it makes the fabric of the city hostile to pedestrians.
There are signs that might make pedestrians hopeful. Last week at the Galway Climate Inspirations Festival, Derek Pender, Director of Services Roads Dept Galway City Council, said that his vision was for a pedestrianised city.
The plans being developed for Salthill and Southpark will significantly increase the civic amenity space available to residents. There are areas that the Council have gotten thing right. But in comparison to other Irish cities, Galway has a long way to go.
Dr Illan Wall is a lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Galway, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Warwick.
