Bite-Sized Insights: Cars Remain the Dominant Commute Option for Parents

For this week’s bite-sized insights question, we asked parents to tell us how both they and their children commute to work and school. Take a quick read of this week’s bite-sized insights to find out what parents are saying about how they commute.

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We asked our Insights panel of parents to tell us how they commute here’s how they answered:

Has how your commute changed at all during the last year? Comments from our panel members included:

“No, would love to use a school bus for the kids but there are none in our area as the school doesn’t have the numbers.”

“Walk for school, bus to work, cab home as it gets too late and there’s no bus running. Has been the same since the youngest started school in September. Before that used to be walk to creche when he was there.”

“Normally I get the Luas in and the bus home but during Covid, my employer has given staff permission to drive in and park on the grounds, which normally is not permitted.”

“No, we have to bring our daughter to school by car as there’s no bus service available for her. I work from home permanently and my husband’s company switched him to working from home, so we don’t commute ourselves, but my husband used to use a scooter as it was so slow driving in a car and so slow on the bus. Galway traffic!”

Key insights and recommendations on commuting:

Parents expressed an appetite for using a school bus service but many routes are not covered. If you operate a school bus route, work with the school to ascertain interest from parents about adding extra stops to your service.
Almost 60% of parents still mainly use the car for commuting/dropping the kids to school and activities, how best can you encourage sales of electric/hybrid cars to this cohort to reduce emissions?
Schools should look at schemes to help reduce the overall carbon footprint of pupils. For example, schools could introduce a weekly park and stride incentive. This is where parents park further from the school and the class with the most pupils walking in a particular week win a ‘Golden Shoe’ award.
Public transport companies could look at introducing a reduced use travel card as many commuters are only travelling to the office for 2 or 3 days a week rather than all 5.