car usage in Ireland

enas

Hi, I was recalling hearing some figures on car journeys, I believe in Ireland, with some impressive ones, such as an average distance of 3km over all car journeys, and something like 70% of trips covering a distance of 3km or less. I have no idea where I'm holding that from. Now that looks really extreme, so I was wondering if any of you heard that, and if you could provide a link to the data. In any case, I would be grateful if any of you could point me to statistics on car usage in Ireland. This is for some "informal" cycling advocacy at my place of work.

Thanks!

Yi Harr

Something like this ??

enas

Thanks that's what I was looking at the moment. It contains only raw data, so I'm making the sums myself. Which is pretty interesting indeed!

enas

If you're interested, here are some interesting figures I extracted from the 2002 census.

Travels to work and to school are the most predictable and consistent journeys people would make with their car, so the easiest to plan an alternative for. They also make up the highest part of petrol costs of a car owning family.

Tables 60A and 61A give figures on travel to work and travel to school in Ireland, by means of travel and distance travelled. So let's look at the Motor car category (both driver and passenger), for people living in an "Aggregate Town Area", defined as "population clusters of 1,500 or more inhabitants".

If we sum people the first two categories of distance travelled, 0 and 1 miles, we get 13.3% of people! If we add in the third category, 2 miles, we obtain 25.5%. If we add the fourth category, 3-4 miles, we get 42.6%. To summarise:

travel to work in towns
distance %
<=1 13.3
<=2 25.5
<=4 42.6

The same table for travel to school (basically school runs, with children from 5 to 12) gives us the following *astonishing* figures:

travel to school in towns
distance %
<=1 46.5
<=2 70
<=4 85

If we look at the figures on the same tables, we see that walking appeals most for distances of 1mile, and cycling for distances of 3-4 miles. Greater than that, and in the absence of good public transport in Ireland (that's a whole other story, but lobbying in this domain is extremely different), car use will remain massive. But below it is very realistic to expect people to switch to walking and cycling, and there is quite a big potential of people concerned.

Armed with these figures, it might be easier to convince people around you of the benefit of cycle commuting. Hope this is useful.

monument

Some charts on the distances and modes used for travel in the Greater Dublin Area (see map below) -- http://dublinobserver.com/2011/03/dublin-data-blog-how-when-and-where-travel/

It shows a huge percentage of commuter journeys which could be cycled, for example:

Within the inner suburbs (light green) 50.5% of trips are under 5km, another 30.7km are under 10km -- more than 80% of those commuter trips are a cyclable distance. That's not to say everybody could cycle 5km or 10km, but a huge bulk of people could, and some could cycle a little more than 10km if pushed / conditions were right.

In the outer suburbs (darker green) there's still nearly 60% of commuter trips under 10km (nearly 34% of those under 5km).

Captain Havoc

Had to drive through Kilkenny City today, never, never, never again, I could have done the trip ten times on my bike.