Sustainable mobility

Sustainable Mobility Solutions for Rural and Town Dwellers

The last green mile-an active research project to identify models for sustainable rural mobility
Leitrim County Council seeks to develop models of sustainable mobility to meet the needs of the highly dispersed populations County Leitrim. This project is the result of project ideas from Leitrim County Council that were  selected by the Department of Transport as priority projects under a call for Sustainable Mobility pathfinder projects. The project will carry out the following actions:
- Stakeholder Engagement-Understanding mobility patterns & behaviour. Quantification of Demand for services (qualitative and quantitative data) using design led co-creation models of engagement
-Data collection & Geo-profiling of demand (in correlation with existing transport infrastructure) to determine optimal locations for mobility hubs, services and pilots.
-Development of models of service delivery that are both economically and environmentally sustainable-a business case will be developed including identification of level of public subvention (where appropriate).
-Integration of model with existing services – Proposals may include the creation of a multimodal mobility solution to allow citizens to access, in one digital place, all the mobility-related infrastructural information they require to carry out their daily activities as a Mobility as a Service model.
-Development of plans for pilots in Leitrim

Profile of County Leitrim: Leitrim is the most sparsely population county in Ireland in terms of population and population density. Population is 35,022 and population density 23.35/km2 (Census 2022 Preliminary Results).

The focus is on six areas:
• Personal mobility: structural improvements to infrastructure; and initiatives to encourage cycling, walking, car-pooling and car-sharing.
• Public transport: expanding and improving the already thriving Local Link service, and using technology to better inform residents and visitors of public transport services and schedules.
• Electric/low-carbon vehicles: making public buses electric, adding charging points for public and private vehicles, encouraging e-scooters and e-bikes, and building on the success of the ESB Networks Dingle Project.
• Marketing: creating a campaign that resonates with local residents, and making people aware of how their transportation choices affect carbon emissions.
• Resourcing: identifying funding/staff needs for future projects.
• Evaluation: monitoring behavioural changes and carbon emission reductions.

Sustainable Transport Options for Employees/Commuters

This project will develop and pilot an employee carpooling scheme in County Leitrim’s largest employers. Leitrim County Council will provide leadership by implementing this scheme with its 250 staff members and will engage all of the largest employers in County Leitrim to participate. The project will develop an open source app for its roll out to coordinate requests and to incentivise staff to participate.
Its impact will be to:

• Carbon abatement for regular daily commutes-quantifiable by reducing commuter emissions associated with single occupancy commutes
• Will provide each participant with a record of their carbon savings as well as aggregate figures per organisation
• May facilitate households to move from two car to one car ownership

The project will engage all large employers from the project start. This project looks to create car pooling options that reduce employees reliance on individual car journeys and to increase car occupancy.

This will build on the knowledge base developed by the Western Development Commission’s Sustainable Mobility Index which included Carrick-on-Shannon as one of the study towns.

Impacts:
• Reduced car dependency
• Carbon abatement-quantification
• Fuel savings for employees
• Reduced need for car parking

Sustainable mobility options-the project will analyse all options including car sharing, bike sharing, active travel and integration with public and local transport.

Car Dependency
Rural people are more reliant on car transport, they have less available public transport. Rural dwellers’ transport and travel patterns need to be central to our climate action planning. This project specifically focuses on sustainability issues for work related travel. The demographics figure below shows car usage dominant across all rural age groups and increasing with age.