The bus stop was erected under the Ballybane-Castlepark Road active travel scheme.
Residents immediately took to social media showing pictures of the newly constructed signpost in the middle of the pedestrian and vehicle entrance to An Culán housing estate.
Galway City Council confirmed the pole was taken down within a week of its debut on Thursday, March 12.
A council spokesperson told the Irish Independent that the bus stop was put there by mistake however, the work was “not carried out by Galway City Council, nor any contractor working on its behalf.”
What is planned for that junction, council officials said, is a stop sign for vehicular traffic outside the housing estate which will be installed “in the coming weeks.”
Additionally, the stop sign will not be directly affecting pedestrian or vehicle traffic to any location.
The Ballybane-Castlepark project has been a source of mounting frustration as it nears completion, with elected representatives saying many of the issues now emerging could have been addressed before work began.
The new road layout does not include bus pull-in areas, meaning car traffic must wait behind commuter buses as they stop to pick up and drop off passengers. Because the road was built to national design guidelines, some larger bus services are also navigating narrower carriageways.
Drivers are required to be “perfect all the time”, according to Frankie Burke, transport manager for Burkes Bus, who said there is “no room for error”.
He warned the layout brings cyclists extremely close to vehicles at certain points along the route, with as little as three inches between a bus wheel and a cyclist. “Our number one concern is pedestrians and cyclists,” he said.
The final stages of the scheme are being completed with traffic lights turning on around Easter, to avoid school traffic delays.
In February, councillor Shane Forde, who has kept a close watch on the project’s progress and previously described it as a “disaster scene”, asked Galway City Council engineers to provide the final cost of the scheme, including any overspend.
Cllr Forde told the Irish Independent he is still waiting for an answer as the project’s projected April completion date approaches.
The Irish Independent reached out to TFI and the NTA with enquiries regarding the signage.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting scheme.