‘Achievable’ and ‘fundable’ traffic calming measure presented for Galway housing estates
Galway City Council engineers are narrowing in on traffic safety in small estates around the city by identifying one, affordable measure.
At the July Galway City council meeting, council officials presented a case for Horizontal Deflection as a means to combat speeding in over 400 small estates throughout Galway City.
Horizontal deflections are small outcropping of footpaths, planter boxes, or green spaces into laneways. This causes cars to decrease speed to stay on the paved roadway and deflect from the structure.
While this “small scale” intervention remains at this point only an idea, council engineers are hoping to adopt a policy built around the measure and then present it to the Transport department to garner funding.
Once funding is secured, the deflections will be rolled out.
The measure was welcomed by councilors in a round table discussion.
Establishing policy would address safety and implementation in predominately residential estates which are subject to 50kmh speed zones and, every once in a while, 30kmh.
Engineers did look at entrance treatments into estates like the traffic humps seen in Castlepark and Bóthar Stiofáin. However, they come at a premium price to install.
Each hump is estimated to cost between €30,000-€50,000.
At this time, one speed hump is being trialed courtesy of Low Accident Reduction Funding. If successful, engineers hope to pitch more than a handful more for surrounding neighborhoods.
The scheme is “essentially about protecting lives” and “improving the value of community space where people are living in,” officials said in the meeting.
The scheme intentionally does not include major roads, speed ramps, or other speeding mediations because council engineers say the need is for “achievable schemes that would be fundable.” This measure would be the first of it’s kind in Galway City.
Estates will be assessed through a matrix scoring system on a variety of components including local conditions, traffic volumes, accident history, and more. Then they will be ranked for the rollout of the measures.
Council engineers were eager to confirm that if a neighbourhood did not have a safety concern present, or ranked lower on the scoring system, it was not going to be excluded all together from the rollout.
“All estates will be considered but it is a long list of inclusion,” engineers said. “It will be a matter of prioritising based on the policy.”
At this time, no funding has been secured.