The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross TD, has today welcomed the Transport Trends 2018 document published by his department, setting out the latest developments within the transport sector from available data and statistics.
Minister Ross said the report, ‘Transport Trends – An Overview of Ireland’s Transport Sector’, demonstrates strong and continued growth across the various transport domains in Ireland, including public transport use, aviation and maritime traffic, and freight volumes.
He said:
“An additional 16 million public transport journeys last year, record numbers travelling through Irish airports, a 19% rise in cruise ship passengers and a 5% increase in goods handled by our ports are all signs of a thriving economy."
“We will continue investing in transport infrastructure to ensure that this growth continues and that workers can get to their jobs, tourists can get to every corner of the country, and goods can be shipped all over the world. Developing from the National Development Plan, our ambitious new investment plan, ‘Linking People and Places’ will deliver close to €25bn in investment in Ireland’s transport and tourism infrastructure over the next 10 years.”
“The plan includes investment of €19.7bn in our public transport and road networks including a renewed focus on the maintenance of our existing network, upgrading and expanding our inter-urban network, and major new infrastructure projects in our cities, including Metrolink and BusConnects, an innovative reimagining of the bus systems of Dublin, Cork and Galway. We have also earmarked a further €4.8bn to enable State airports and ports to improve Irish connections with the rest of the world.”
Minister Ross also welcomed the fact that road fatalities fell 16% to 157 in 2017, the lowest since records began, and said his recently-introduced legislation imposing tough new sanctions on drink driving aimed to reduce that further.
He said:
“Every death on our roads is one too many and we will continue our work to save lives by taking drink drivers off the road and making it socially unacceptable to ever drink and drive."
The Minister acknowledged that challenges remained, particularly with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to nurture our strong international connections:
“Ensuring economic growth is also environmentally sustainable is a complex task, but there are promising signs. I welcome the growth in electric vehicle purchases last year, and measures such as our new incentive reducing toll costs for electric vehicles will encourage greater uptake of greener transport.”
Minister Ross concluded:
“This report highlights how people are making ever greater use of new technologies such as Leap Cards and Real Time Passenger Information that make their journeys easier. My department will continue to support innovative new solutions to 21st Century transport needs."
The Transport Trends 2018 document can be found here.
ENDS
Transport Trends 2018 is a compendium of statistics relating to the transport sector in Ireland. It is compiled by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport mainly from existing data published by other organisations (including CSO, NTA, TII, RSA, EPA, Eurostat etc) with different time periods applying to different data sources (e.g. 2016 or 2017). Some data is provisional and could be subject to future amendments– this is indicated wherever possible throughout the report.
Key points
Emissions from the transport sector increased by 4% to 12.29m tonnes CO2 equivalent in 2016, with 52% coming from private cars and 26% from goods vehicles. Transport is the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions after agriculture and energy