The city has a new traffic supremo following the appointment of a Traffic Management Centre Head Engineer last month to replace Brian Burke, who departed for a new job in Cork over a year ago.
Susan Loughnane, who had worked for a number of years with Dublin City Council, is now the executive engineer with her fingertips in ‘control’ of the city’s traffic flows.
Around this time last year, serious concerns had been expressed at the failure to fill the vacancy following the departure of Brian Burke earlier in 2015, amid complaints of growing traffic congestion in the city.
According to a spokesman for Galway City Council, the new system is highly automated and computerised but with the flexibility for intervention at key junctions.
“We have a system in place where the traffic lights ‘talk to each other’ all along the main routes and this is being added to as we go along with the addition of this facility along the feeder routes,” said the spokesman for the City Council.
He said that in general, the traffic flows had been improved along the main routes with the new system and they would next be looking at the Kirwan Roundabout (Menlo Park Hotel) for integration into the system.
“Roundabouts work efficiently during non-peak traffic flow times but when the pressure comes on during the peak morning and evening traffic periods, the signalised junctions are approximately 50% more efficient than roundabouts,” said the spokesman.
He said that the key traffic times in the city were from 8am to 9am and from 4.30pm to 6.30pm, with the evening rush hour period now tending to be more extended.
For more on this story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune
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