Council spent Û40,000 on rectifying new Moneen lights

The growing cost of the so-called ‘smart lights’ at Moneenageisha Junction is set to exceed €600,000 after Galway City Council continued to spend more than €10,000 a month rectifying the chaos that followed the installation of the lights.

An internal report obtained by the Connacht Sentinel reveals that consultants and engineers known to have provided flawed data for the controversial traffic light system were nonetheless re-engaged by the cash-strapped council and paid additional sums to rectify the logjam they had created.

The document has sparked outrage among a number of city councillors, who have described it as a “comedy of errors”, an indictment of the council’s initial planning of the junction, and “an acknowledgement of failure of the original plan”.

The cost of the signalised junction up to May 2009 when it first opened was in excess of half a million euro. However, the report from the Directorate of Transport and Infrastructure reveals that the council quickly became aware that “the system was not working very well” and causing knock-on traffic delays at adjacent junctions.

Contractors were recalled at least six times to make changes to the system between June and December last at a cost of at least €40,000. The cost of much of the renovations could not be provided by the council because work was still ongoing, and formed part of a separate contract.

Councillor Padraig Conneely has described the project as one of the worst examples of wasteful spending in the history of the council and said commuters had been treated like “guinea pigs” as the local authority proceeded with alterations to the junction on a “trial and error” basis.

“Galway City Council spent more than €100,000 on consultants and engineers to provide traffic modelling to plan the junction, and their own report shows that this advice was dysfunctional,” he said.“Yet they still paid more money to the same consultants to remedy their own mistakes; effectively rewarding their failure to do the job properly in the first instance.”

Local councillor and resident Brian Walsh said that the signalisation of the junction had had a worsening effect on the traffic mayhem that existed when it was controlled by a roundabout.

“There has been no improvement whatsoever in the traffic flow to justify the colossal sum that the council has paid out,” he said. “The advice of the consultants involved in the original traffic modelling has to be questioned and I am not happy that additional fees were paid to the same consultants who had provided flawed advice in the first place.”

The report details how Transport Planning International (TPi) were paid to produce a traffic model and introduce a cableless fixed time plan to coordinate Moneenageisha Junction with Lough Atalia Junction in June 2009.

However, the document states that “this resulted in a less efficient junction” and longer queues on College Road and Lough Atalia Road. After just a few days, TPi were recalled and engaged to abandon the fixed time plan and to change the junctions back to their original state.It is also reported that the original timings derived from a model produced by TPi that predicted traffic flow was quickly found to be at stark variance to the actual flow when the junction opened in May. This caused “longer queues and delay for vehicles passing through the junction than was predicted”.

Elmore Group, who had been paid €73,321 under the original contract, was subsequently re-engaged to make alterations to the timings of the signals at a further cost of €5,517.50.

The series of admissions of such difficulties dealing with traffic chaos following the opening of the junction conflicts with information provided by the city council at the time, according to Cllr Conneely.

“This totally vindicates my criticism of the junction, which I expressed in a letter to the City Manager last July. His response denied any difficulties peculiar to Moneenageisha and contained no indication that the council was in the middle of crisis management in relation to the junction as we now know it was.”

Director of Services Ciaran Hayes said that the scale of the Moneenageisha Junction project had to be recognised and that it was always anticipated that there would be teething problems.

“This was a major undertaking at a junction that caters for over 50,000 vehicles a day and further works were always going to be required. The pre-existing roundabout was probably the greatest congestion point throughout the entire city,” he said.

Mr Hayes claimed that the traffic lights were now working “quite well” and refuted that the signalisation of the junction had added to road users’ commuting times.