Purpose of Strategy

Purpose of Strategy

through new services, frequency enhancements and route extensions.

Accordingly, the purpose of this Strategy is to encourage changes in travel behaviour with a view to reducing, where possible, unsustainable journeys and overall travel demand. However, it is not about eliminating the car as a mode of transport or curtailing people’s freedom to move around. Rather, it is about finding new approaches to making travel, by whatever means, more efficient and pleasant for everyone. The Strategy recognises that the car will remain the dominant mode of transport for many people for a variety of reasons including the lack of readily available sustainable alternatives for many necessary journeys.

To give a better sense of the rate of uptake, 5.5 million passenger journeys were carried on services launched or enhanced under Connecting Ireland in 2023, a 90% increase on 2019 (65% on 2022). In 2025, TFI Local Link services recorded almost 7 million passenger journeys, a 19% increase compared with 2024.

In 2022, to encourage and facilitate greater uptake of public transport services, a 20% average fare reduction on PSO services was introduced – the first such reduction in 75 years. Young adults aged 19 to 25 and students also benefitted from a further 50% reduction in fares with the introduction of the Young Adult and Student Card (YASC) Fares Scheme that same year on PSO and participating commercial services. Such fare reductions have remained in place, or have been extended in some cases e.g. free travel for children under 5 years has become available to those aged 8 and under from September 2025.

The approach set out in the Strategy is threefold - 1) to identify and leverage the potential of existing Government policies and programmes to impact travel demand (by optimising their positive impacts and mitigating their potential to generate travel demand); 2) to identify and address impediments to policy measures that reduce travel demand and/or increase transport system efficiencies; and 3) to enable and empower initiatives to be taken at national, local and community level that will help deliver the objectives of the Strategy in a coherent and collaborative manner.

While the recent CSO Census 2022 data5 has highlighted that levels of transport demand have increased, it shows encouraging changes in behavioural trends and an appetite to respond when the right type of investments and decisions are made at local and national level, most notably with a reversing of the trend in total share of children and young people being driven to school.

The Strategy has been developed following extensive engagement with a wide range of interests and expertise. This collaborative approach to the design of policies and measures, from community to national level, will be vital to delivery. Experimentation and innovation will be critical to designing measures that deliver in a targeted manner, addressing local needs and circumstances, without creating unintended consequences for the broader transport and planning system. For this reason, many of the recommendations allow for the development of tailored solutions, in some cases requiring demonstration or pilot projects to test solutions which can then be scaled up.

Irish drivers are also embracing the switch to electric, with EV sales exceeding profiled trajectory targets to 2025, with 204,000 EVs on our roads as of end 2025. EV uptake can also be expected to be bolstered by significant expansions in our public charging infrastructure in coming years, and through the ambition in the Programme for Government 2025 to accelerate the electrification of the fleet by examining ‘the current EV grant system and the introduction of additional incentives with a view to increasing take-up of EVs and replacing older, polluting vehicles’.

This national approach to managing travel behaviour is also relatively unique from an international perspective. While there are examples of strategies at city or even at regional Government level, there is not an equivalent demand management strategy in place at a national level.

Building on the momentum of the substantial investment that is being made in public transport services, and infrastructure for active travel and EVs, this Strategy seeks to support that investment through the integration of measures that will encourage greater system efficiency in the transport system to the benefit of all.

5 https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/population/censusofpopulation2022/

As there is no precedent or model against which we can benchmark success, a vital aspect of the Strategy will be to ensure that the impacts of any interventions are appropriately measured and evaluated from the outset, ensuring that the range of expected benefits can be optimised and measures can be re-calibrated and adjusted as and when required.

so, the Strategy can support a reduction in emissions, with significant co-benefits for Irish society in terms of road safety, air quality, health, and community life as well as assisting in objectives to revitalise urban centres in line with the Government’s Town Centre First policy. The new Programme for Government 2025 speaks to this through its commitment to ‘Work with local authorities and State agencies to develop decarbonised zones in our urban areas, focusing on pedestrianisation, cycling facilities, and use of renewable energy across all transport modes’.

It is intended that the Strategy will provide an overarching framework for the development and delivery of measures that can effect a transformational change in travel behaviour. The choice of measures that implementing authorities and others can take to achieve the strategy’s objectives will depend on various factors including, for example, the timing and the extent to which sustainable alternatives are provided in particular locations. The Strategy will provide the evidence base to inform these choices and the guidance to facilitate their delivery in a coherent and equitable manner.

At a government level, the National Transport Authority (NTA), Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) and the local authorities (LAs) are the primary implementing authorities for transport-related interventions - they will be required to determine the type of measures that are most suitable for implementation in any given geographical area or any element of the transport network in line with relevant statutory remits.

The Strategy is based on a set of principles with a particular focus on a just transition. It will guide, support, and enable relevant authorities to implement demand-led measures at national, regional, and local level to achieve the desired emissions reduction target and well-being benefits.

Some measures, such as policy, regulatory and fiscal measures, will require implementation at a national level by government departments. However, the Strategy is also widely applicable to many agencies and organisations beyond the transport and national government sphere, and this is reflected in the recommendations. The recommendations call for leadership across business, education, voluntary and community organisations to consider and make appropriate adjustments to the travel demand impacts of their activities. Travel behaviour is influenced by a range of factors, including individual and collective choices. The Strategy will enable and empower both organisations and individuals to support the making of more sustainable choices.

The concept of ‘demand management’ can often have negative connotations in a transport context – it can be viewed as limiting or as an attempt to constrain mobility. This is not the case. In fact, demand management measures have enormous potential to support improvements in the transport system, as well as having wider societal and environmental benefits, unlocking congestion, re-prioritising road space towards active, shared and public transport modes and ultimately, making sustainable travel choices more attractive, reliable and cost effective to wider cohorts of the population. It is understood that by building greater efficiency into the transport system, greater value can be extracted from the significant investment being made by Government.

A system-wide, societal change is required to reduce demand from transport – at individual, local and national level. The associated outcomes of such change will realise greater efficiency for the transport system, benefiting those who still need to travel by car, as well as the freight and logistics sector which are critical enablers for the Irish economy.

With people’s needs to the fore, this Strategy seeks to bring equity and well-being into the use of public space generally. With a particular focus on road and street spaces, the Strategy will support conditions that are more amenable and attractive to daily life, active travel, shared mobility and public transport services. In doing

The Strategy seeks to support a radical, yet equitable transformation in how we travel over the coming years, helping in the transition towards a fully decarbonised transport sector by 2050. By ‘moving together’, whether through small steps or systemic change, the cumulative impacts will be