The Commuter Belt

Michael Diskin, Manager, Townhall Theatre, Galway City

How do you travel to and from work? By car.

How long does it take? I live in Highfield Park in Galway city and it takes between eight and 10 minutes to drive to work.

What time do you leave home? 9.50 a.m. I'm lucky in that I have to be in for 10 a.m. If I had to be at work for 9 a.m., it would take me twice as long to get there.

What time do you arrive back home? 7 p.m.

What do you enjoy about your commute? Its brevity and the intellectual challenge in seeing how I can "best" one particular traffic light . . .

What bothers you most about your commute? That traffic light which was programmed in the 1970s to give greater time to the cross traffic when the road used to be a major route out of town. Now, the light discriminates against those on our side of the queue into town. I also pass the side wall of a secondary school on my route into town and it's obvious that most students don't walk or cycle to school any more by the number of cars pulling in to drop children off.

Would you change your mode of transport if you could? No, because I am the only employee in the building who has a car and I'm the general chauffeur for the theatre for that reason. But, by Galway standards, I live in the city centre, and I occasionally walk to work - which takes half an hour. Public transport is not a viable option as the buses are snarled up in the same traffic as the cars because there is no room for bus lanes.

How could your journey be improved? A bomb on that traffic light I mentioned. In Galway, we expect to move around the city quickly so it's unreasonable to have that much of a delay at one point. There are three to four times the amount of cars using more or less the same streets as 40 years ago. There is major congestion in Galway at weekends and in the summer time, yet there doesn't seem to be any debate or talk of solutions for this problem . . . Also, there is a microcosm of what's happening in Dublin, with suburban housing being built in towns such as Tuam and Loughrea, with no consideration of the traffic loading that will have on the city.