We’ve all heard the slogan that €1 million per day is being spent on active travel. But where’s all that money going? We take a look at the 845 projects that received funding this year to find out …

We’re just going through a phase

The National Transport Authority (NTA) provides funding for active travel. Local authorities apply to the NTA each year for funding to progress their projects.

Projects funded by the NTA follow a specific series of phases, shown below:

While some of the phases are very visible – such as Construction – others are much harder to see. When we’re wondering why it takes so long to build a cycle lane, it’s because building the cycle lane is only one phase in the process.

Phases set to stun!

OK let’s see where all that money was allocated in 2024.

Stunning! A big chunk of the overall budget is being spent on projects that are in the construction phase this year.

For those of you with a mouse, you can hover over the different colours to see where in the country the funds are going. Lots of construction happening in Leinster. Meanwhile on Connaught, there’s a decent proportion of the funding being spent on early project phases.

Dude, Where’s My Car(-free Infrastructure)?

You may have seen the NTA published a list of project allocations earlier this year, for all Local Authorities. What you haven’t yet seen is the phase each project is at.

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Before we get into that, we’d like to mention that the Irish Cycling Campaign is a charity we rely on donations and membership contributions to function.

You can support us by becoming a member for just 8c a day, so we can make sure that the €1m a day is being spent correctly, for the benefit of you and your local communities.

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OK enough about us, let’s talk about you.

Open in full screen view.

End Notes

For clarity we created a separate category “Staff” for allocations that were for staff funding rather than projects. We also combined “Phase 0” and N/A into a single category, for ease of visualisation.

We’d like to thank the NTA for providing the information for this article.