50% use cars for travel under 2km

Half of all Irish people use a car to travel journeys of less than 2km, while nearly three quarters of journeys outside the capital are by car.

The CSO’s national travel survey includes information from 10,382 respondents and gives a detailed look at the travel habits of people in Ireland.

The most common reasons for making a journey in 2014 were to travel to and from work (25%) or to go shopping (24%).

The average journey distance was 14.6km and on average took 22.7 minutes to complete.

While journeys in Dublin tended to be shorter, they took longer to complete.

Inhabitants of the capital took almost 70% longer to make journeys of the same distance, compared to other areas.

There may be heavy traffic in the capital, but a large proportion of Dubliners, over 1 in 5, or 21.9%, also bucked the national trend and chose to walk or cycle on their journeys, compared to 14.1% across the rest of the country.

Outside Dublin, 73.9% of journeys were by car.

Car-pooling would not appear to be tempting for most people, with 68.7% of all journeys by car being undertaken solo.

Busy Dubliners were also the least likely to stay at home, with 72.9% making journeys on the recorded day of the survey, while people in the border counties were most likely to stay home —36% did not travel at all on the day reported upon.

Nationally, nearly one in three people (30%) didn’t leave their home on the day surveyed, two thirds because they “had no wish or need to travel or were fully occupied with home duties”.

Of those who didn’t travel, 6% chose not to leave the house because of the weather, while 8.8% didn’t travel that day because they were ill.

Although men and women are equally likely to drive, men still take the wheel more frequently in shared car journeys, with women more than twice as likely to be a passenger in a private car than males, at 7.6% of journeys for women and 2.8% for men.