New statistics released by the Department for Infrastructure have shown the worst affected routes for Belfast city centre traffic congestion.
Public debate over congestion in the city centre has been widespread in the weeks since the opening of the new £340m Grand Central Station.
DfI has said a “robust” traffic modelling plan was submitted as part of the planning application for the new station, despite criticism from some over its handling of traffic issues in the city centre.
New figures released by DfI appear to show average journey times in a number of routes have worsened in the last year, some to a greater extent than others.
The figures are based on the November 2023 average, and compared with Thursday 12 December 2024, while also showing journey times on Thursday 5 December when there were a number of road traffic crashes and incidents affecting traffic.
The most impacted route according to the figures is Great Victoria Street northbound, whose journey time has increased from 15 minutes to 24 minutes.
The same route southbound has increased by one minute to 12 minutes.
East and westbound on the Grosvenor Road has also increased by five minutes each.
According to the DfI figures, journey times have decreased in some areas in the last 12 months, including the Donegall Road and Ormeau Road southbound.
A spokesperson for the department said its data had been taken from Tom Tom floating data, which tracks journey times via GPS locations from vehicles in the city.
“The journey times presented is derived from information the Department retrieve from Tom Tom floating data,” a spokesperson said.
“This dataset includes journey times, speeds and traffic movements and is used to assist the Department with its modelling, monitoring and understanding of the transport network.
“The monitoring data in the table is a small extract of the data we use to monitor and understand the transport network; this table was provided to help demonstrate how traffic conditions vary across days and time periods depending on the events, incidents and issues occurring at the same time.
“For instance the figures show that the journey times on the 5 December were impacted by a number of collisions, events and incidents across the city that evening and dates from the following Thursday 12 December and November 2023 are supplied for comparison purposes.”
Representatives from Retail NI, Hospitality Ulster, Translink, the Business Improvement Districts, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and Belfast City Council attended a meeting with Mr O’Dowd this week to address the traffic issues in the city.
Among the measures proposed by the department to combat the issue are increased enforcement of yellow box junctions, review of traffic signals and increased use of the Trafficwatch social media account.
Mr O’Dowd also introduced a new order this week allowing taxis into bus lanes in the city centre as another way of attempting to alleviate traffic.