We did it! Belfast Is the UK’s Most Congested City…

January is usually the month for resolutions and for quietly taking stock of how last year’s good intentions actually turned out.

If 2025 was meant to be the year Belfast finally began to reduce car traffic, then it hasn’t gone to plan. Grand Central Station has now been operating for a full year, yet as the Belfast Telegraph reports, Belfast is the most congested city in the UK.

For anyone who spends their mornings crawling along the Westlink, Ormeau Road or Sydenham Bypass, that headline will feel less like a shock and more like confirmation. According to the figures, the average Belfast driver now loses 102 hours a year sitting in traffic – enough time to watch the entire Fast & Furious saga (5 times) – and, just like Dominic Toretto, living life a quarter-mile at a time can feel a lot like inching through Belfast traffic.

What we are seeing in Belfast is not accidental. Congestion is the predictable outcome of how the city continues to plan, invest and design, even in a year that was supposed to mark a turning point.

We built the conditions for congestion

For years, policy documents have talked about modal shift – fewer car journeys, more public transport, more walking and cycling. But the physical city tells a different story, one that still makes driving into the centre easy, convenient and well catered for.

Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to parking.

Belfast’s own Car Parking Strategy and Action Plan, published in 2018, records close to 40,000 parking spaces across the city centre and its fringes. If you line those spaces up end to end, they would stretch for roughly 120 miles – further than the width of Northern Ireland itself.

Parking shapes behaviour. If there is plenty of it, and it’s easy to access, people will drive, even if they might prefer not to.

And this hasn’t stood still.

Since the parking strategy was drafted, more city-centre parking has been delivered, including a large multi-storey car park close to Grand Central Station that was part-financed with public backing. While policy rhetoric has focused on encouraging people out of cars and onto trains and buses, public investment has continued to support car access right at the heart of the city.

The headline figure also includes a detail worth lingering on. The Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company(NITHC), Translink’s parent body, owns and operates around 1,380 of those parking spaces across three sites in Belfast city centre. When the organisation responsible for public transport is also a significant provider of central parking, a reasonable question follows: is this an admission of defeat, or an acceptance of how limited our ambition for public transport has become? Either way, it exposes the gap between what we say we want – fewer cars – and what the system continues to accommodate.

The bind Translink is operating in

It’s also important to acknowledge the position Translink finds itself in. Northern Ireland has a single, integrated public transport operator that is expected to do two difficult things at once: deliver viable urban services while also maintaining a wide network of socially necessary rural routes.

All of this sits within a funding envelope that, by most comparisons, is weaker than public transport support elsewhere in the UK. Limited funding doesn’t just affect fares or rolling stock, it constrains frequency, reliability and ambition.

When resources are stretched across urban and rural networks, Belfast services struggle to reach the level needed to genuinely compete with the car. The result is a system asked to do more with less, and then judged against cities that invest far more heavily in public transport per head.

“Little changes” won’t fix big structural choices

Against this backdrop, the Department for Infrastructure has launched a podcast series called “Little Changes”, focused on the small actions individuals can take to improve how they get around day to day – travelling at different times, switching the odd journey, making better use of park and rides, or rethinking habits.

None of that is unreasonable. Personal choices do matter.

But there’s a limit to what individual behaviour can achieve when the wider system keeps pointing in the opposite direction.

When buses sit in the same traffic as cars, when rail services lack frequency, when active travel routes are fragmented, and when city-centre parking continues to grow, the scope for change is narrow. People tend to do what the environment encourages them to do.

This isn’t a collective failure of willpower.

Congestion is also a housing and planning issue

Belfast’s Local Development Plan is clear about one thing: density matters. Not just for housing supply, but for transport too. Dense city centres support frequent public transport, shorten everyday journeys, and make walking and cycling realistic options rather than lifestyle choices.

Yet even in the most obvious places, delivery falls short.

Take Posnett Street, beside Botanic Train Station. It’s hard to imagine a more transit-rich location – a rail stop on the doorstep, the university nearby, the city centre within walking distance. And yet the development being delivered there is relatively low density, missing a clear opportunity to put more homes beside mass transit.

A similar pattern can be seen at the Gasworks, next to Lanyon Place Station. New homes are being built beside one of the city’s busiest rail hubs, but again at densities well below what planning policy suggests is appropriate for such a central, well-connected site.

These aren’t fringe locations where compromise is inevitable. They are city-centre sites, right beside train stations, where the case for building upwards is strongest.

Under-delivering density in the city centre doesn’t make demand disappear – it displaces it. Homes end up on greenfield sites at the city’s edge, locking in car-dependent travel and adding to congestion the system is already struggling to manage.

Seen this way, congestion is not just a transport problem. It’s the accumulated result of planning decisions that say the right things, but repeatedly settle for less.

Why good intentions aren’t enough

This doesn’t require a silver bullet or a single mega-project. It requires coherence and a willingness to follow through. If we genuinely want fewer cars in the city centre, we have to stop planning as if their continued growth is inevitable. That means being honest about parking supply, about where public money goes, about density, and about whether we are prepared to reallocate space and funding at scale rather than at the margins.

Belfast didn’t drift into congestion. It was steered here one planning decision, one funding choice, one “just this once” compromise at a time. January is when resolutions are supposed to turn into action. But if we keep indulging the same habits while talking about change, the outcome is predictable. We say we want fewer cars yet we continue to build for them. Until those two positions finally line up, congestion won’t ease. It will simply keep reminding us that intentions, on their own, don’t change cities.