YOU’LL HAVE SEEN it outside your own local school. A line of cars idling bumper to bumper, sometimes within sight of a bus stop that runs a service twice an hour.

It’s not that the bus doesn’t exist. It’s that nobody quite trusts it to turn up, or to get the kids there on time if it does.

That, more than anything, is the real story of Irish car dependency.

We get accused of being in love with our cars, but the numbers don’t back that up.

Ireland actually has one of the lower rates of car ownership in the EU. Eurostat’s latest figures put us at 475 cars per 1,000 people, 23rd out of the 27 member states, against an EU average of 584. Italy tops the table at 709, with Finland, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Poland all well ahead of us too.

We’re not the country with the most cars. We’re the country where, outside Dublin, roughly three in every four journeys are made by car, not because people love driving, but because there’s often nothing else worth taking.

Researchers have a name for it: forced car ownership, where a household ends up needing a second or third car not out of preference but because the alternative simply doesn’t exist where they live.

So the question isn’t really why Irish people love driving so much. It’s why we haven’t built anything else people can rely on.

You’d think, given how much the government talks about getting us out of cars, that public transport would be getting cheaper to make the switch easier. Instead, it’s about to get dearer.

The National Transport Authority confirmed this week that bus and rail fares will rise by an average of 15% from January, the first general increase in almost a decade.

The Journal’s Valerie Flynn covered the fallout this week, and the reaction she gathered was telling. Dubliner Toni Kelly noted that while she herself can avail of free travel, plenty of others will just have to absorb the increase and cut back somewhere else. A Galway campaigner put the contradiction even more sharply, saying the government is “penalising commuters who are trying to do the right thing… while spending hundreds of millions subsidising fossil fuels through excise reductions”.

Trinity’s Brian Caulfield made much the same point: funding could be........

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