Galway coach station parking row rumbles on

Due to the dispute, a number of operators – including Citylink and GoBus – are collecting and dropping off their passengers at the roadside, creating what one local councillor has described as ‘traffic chaos’.

The City Council confrimed this week that it continues to fine coach operators for parking to the front of Galway Coach Station at Fairgreen Road – up to 100 buses per day are illegally parking at the station’s front door.

A number of tour operators have also withdrawn from the station and are stopping at alternative locations, as first reported by the Galway City Tribune in 2020.

The dispute centres on the fees demanded by the station’s operators – bus operators are understood to want a pay-as-you-go system whereas the station management is insisting that because its bays are booked up as part of the bus companies’ licence agreements with the National Transport Authority (NTA), they must pay for all the slots they’ve earmarked.

Galway Coach Station Manager, Oisín O’Brien told the Galway City Tribune that the station would not be viable if operators only had to pay for what they used and said once the NTA had issued licences on the basis that the station was the stopping point for a certain number of timetabled routes, they could not make those slots available to anyone else.

“We need €500,000 a year for the station to wash its own face,” Mr O’Brien said of their running costs.

In a letter to local councillors, seen by the Tribune, Mr O’Brien said Galway Coach Station had not refused any of the operators involved use of the facility.

“In fact, these operators have been issued with contracts for same, however, up to this point they have chosen not to sign the contracts and instead have made a conscious decision to operate on the street, with no action taken against them even though they are parking illegally on the street, and therefore, not in compliance with the terms of their licences,” he wrote.

Mr O’Brien told this newspaper that he was of the opinion that NTA was failing to ensure operators were complying with the terms of their licence agreements.

“The way it works is a bus provider makes an application to the NTA, for example to run 500 buses [annually] between Dublin and Galway. The NTA asks where they will pick up and drop off and the bus operators have two options – public or private property.

“The City Council provides permission to use public stops or if they come to us and say ‘we need 500 slots’, we confirm we can provide those spots to the NTA and they issue the licence with that information included,” said Mr O’Brien.

“The first two lines of the licences say the operator must comply with the terms of the licence and if they don’t, they are committing an offence.

“The NTA has the responsibility to enforce that. They are the licencing and regulatory authority but they’ve done nothing,” he continued.

Galway County Council owns the site on which the station is built and its operated by Head Space Group on a 999-year lease.

The fees for using it are set by the Council and according to Mr O’Brien, they had been set at €8 per slot in 2005, before being increased to €10 following a review in 2020.

The conditions of the lease stipulate that the station must operate 24/7, incurring costs that only payment for all slots allocated will cover, he added.

Mr O’Brien refused to be drawn on if the continued operation of the station would become untenable without the return of the operators, but said Head Space was ‘100%’ committed to its continued operation.

“We are committed fully to Galway Coach Station unless councillors or the NTA decide they no longer want a coach station and that would release us from our obligation,” he said, adding that he remained hopeful a solution could be found.

Chair of the Council’s Transport Strategic Policy Committee, Cllr Frank Fahy (FG) said every effort needed to be made to resolve the dispute as the current arrangement of buses parking haphazardly on the street was causing an obstruction and posed a threat to road users.

“I would like to see this issue resolved – the city needs a coach station and its not good enough for the city to be held to ransom because of a dispute like this,” he said.

A statement from Galway City Council said the local authority was aware of the dispute “between the private entities of the coach station and some of the bus operators. We have engaged with the key stakeholders and this is ongoing”.

“We are aware of the parking issues. Fines have been issued and continue to be issued,” stated the Council.

Citylink and GoBus were contacted for comment.

In a post on social media this week, GoBus responded to a query related to use of the coach station and said: “We look forward to a day when it will be resolved”.