Gridlocked Galway heads list of congested cities

GALWAY is the most congested city in Ireland with almost 40% of roads gridlocked, a study has found.

Dublin and Limerick come a close second and third, with both cities having close to 30% of roads clogged with traffic.

And it is bad news for Cork and Waterford who took fourth and fifth place in the top traffic hotspots.

The study was published yesterday by TomTom, a leading satellite navigator provider, with rankings based on how fast cars can travel on a city or town’s road network.

The percentage measurements were made by the anonymous speed data that TomTom collects every day from drivers who use its devices. Wherever drivers were travelling at only 70% or less than the posted speed limit, traffic was defined as congested. And the congestion meant that an hour-long commute would include 20 minutes or more of significant delays.

The percentages refer to main roads that experienced congestion during a day.

“Navigation isn’t just about getting from A to B anymore. It’s about finding the quickest and easiest route to your destination,” said TomTom’s Ireland country manager David Crotty.

TomTom also plans to publish a list of Ireland’s most congested roads next month, but two such roads in Munster have been revealed already — the M8 going towards the N8 and the Commons Road, Cork.

TomTom’s chief technology manager, Mark Gretton, said the information was extremely reliable because it was based on the actual measured flow rate of every single road. He pointed out that the congestion rate for Galway was high because it had fewer roads in the city. “Dublin may have more kilometres of roadways but, as a percentage, Galway was higher,” he explained. “Because we got this database showing how fast everyone is actually travelling at any given time on a road, we can work out the most congested street and most congested time and build better ‘sat navs’. Instead of basing a route on road categories, which is how most systems work, we use it on the measured average speed and that means a driver is given a different route for a different time of the day.”

Mr Gretton said a division of TomTom specialised in extracting statistics and making it available to local authorities to help planners. “Government have been trying to collect this kind of data for years using students and strips in the road, which is very expensive. We have 45m motorists driving around Europe and feeding the information back all the time.”