Cities around the world that are reducing car access

Weird that the article doesn't really discuss the proposed referendum and new phase (17?) of the A100, I would have thought those would be major topics of discussion. Both would sort of argue against the broad topic of the article though, but it's odd that they were just left out.

FWIW, I don't really think there's much pushback in Berlin, not really. Most people there don't drive. I'd be of the opinion that there seems to be more pushback against reduced car access in London (LTN's etc) than there is in Berlin.

The constant complaints about cancelled services and ghost buses affecting the BusConnects roll out are not convincing people to use public transport either.

Younger commuters especially are saving to buy a car so that they can get to work and avoid public transport in Dublin.

Traffic on the M50 now 11% higher than 2019 levels. That is a huge increase.

General population increase in the greater dublin area will drive an increase in cars on the road.

County Dublin has increased in population by around 180k people since 2019.

Thats equal to the entire populations of Galway and Limerick cities combined.

The nunber of cars on the road across Ireland has increased 20% from 2016 to 2024.

CSO.

2.6 million in 2016 and 3.1 million in 2024.

That's for all vehicles registered. The rate of growth for car ownership is lower. These figures are also for the entire country, so can not be used to show an increase in the specific areas affected by BusConnects; nor can they be used to show an increase in any specific demographic group.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eii/environmentalindicatorsireland2024/transport/

Its getting worse. More and more people I know are back in the office Full time or 3/4 days a week. I've gone to 4 days a week myself. Sometimes I laugh at big multinationals who want to reduce carbon foot print, be seen to be more greener. Honestly the biggest thing they could do is encourage more flexibility and WFH to get more cars off the road.

As someone else said, this is the wrong figure. However it also doesn't even tell the whole picture. The real figrue was already linked, but the the CSO's raw dataset is a bit easier to read and gives more detail: https://data.cso.ie/table/THA10

The number of private cars on the road has increased by just under 14% from 2016 to 2023 or from 2m to 2.3m. I am not able to find the 2024 data on the CSO website, as all the vehicle population data across many datasets only goes up to 2023.

However, what you also didn't check was that the kilometres travelled, which in 2023 was 35.1B and still below pre-COVID levels which were 35.5B in 2019, let alone the 36.6B in 2016. It is the lowest annual km travelled since 2015 which saw 35.0B km from private cars. So even if the number of private cars has increased, the average car use has significantly decreased.