Tramore’s Ring Road Park lights at Elm Park have an unhappy history and are described by one local public representative as ‘the laziest lights in Waterford’.
Installed some years ago to regulate traffic at the busy Holy Cross School junction, the lights have had a chequered career to date.
Commenting, Cllr Joe Conway said that while they were supposed to govern traffic, they might as well not be there at all. “They have been out for the whole of the month of July, which is not critical because the school is closed for its main business. But it is in use for summer language classes and the junction continues to take huge volumes of traffic – servicing the Shopping Centre at Elm Park, the Ring Road traffic and constant movement of trucks and heavy plant at the building of the new primary school”.
Cllr Conway recalled that last March the lights were inoperative for eighteen out of the thirty-one days of the month – and that was when the school was open and they were supposed to regulate the safety of close to six-hundred pupils and their parents. “It’s a joke”, he asserted.
The outspoken councillor has long maintained that Tramore suffers by comparison with Dungarvan and in that context he added: “Despite our larger population, we have just this one crossing on our Ring Road, compared to Dungarvan’s four – and the relative lengths are approximately the same. I’m in Dungarvan three and four times a week and I never see a faulty light down there.
Surely, he said, the County Council could do more for the safety of the children, adults and motorists of Tramore than just throwing them a set of lights that had earned the soubriquet of ‘the laziest in Waterford’.
