Car remains favourite form of transport for Irish people

Car sales may be in decline but the Irish love of their cars is not, according to figures released by the National Transport Authority today.

The authority’s annual household travel survey showed 85 percent of all long journeys were taken by car, while 70 per cent of people said the car was their most used form of transport.

Such is the love of the personal conveyance that more than half of all daily trips are less than three kilometres in length - and more than half of these short trips are made by car.

In addition a startling four out of five “work trips” - commutes and work related journeys – were taken by car, either as a passenger or a driver, in 2012 according to the survey.

The figures are based on a survey of some 6,000 households across the State with 80 per cent of those keeping a ‘travel diary’ of their transport usage.

While half of those interviewed said they had walked in the past week the figures for sustainable travel could have been better. Seventy percent of respondents said they used the car as their most regular form of transport while just three percent said cycling was the mode they used most often.

Almost 40 percent of all trips to school or college were less than two kilometres in length - but almost half of these short trips were made by car

Some 12 million trips were made across the country as a whole on an average weekday in 2012, with, on average, people making 2.65 trips per day.

The survey also found :

*Car usage was highest in rural areas where public transport alternatives were limited

* Just one in seven people said they had used the bus in the past week, while just seven percent said it was the mode of transport they used most frequently.

* Six percent of daily trips were made by either bus, train or motorbike.

* Some 73 percent said the mode they had used most often in the past week was the car, while the corresponding figure for ‘other’, which includes Luas, train or motorcycle was just three percent.

According to a separate report on rail statistics also published by the National Transport Authority, annual passenger journeys on Irish Rail services fell slightly while numbers on the Luas rose slightly.

The number of passenger journeys on Irish Rail services fell 1.2 percent in 2012, to 36.92 million. The numbers of passenger journeys on the Luas rose by 0.8 percent to 29.32 million.

The report notes however that significant extensions were added to the Luas line in 2010 and 2011. In addition significant extensions were added to Irish rail services in Cork, Between Clare and Galway and Between Dublin and Meath in 2010.