We didn’t really need that second car

Galway City

Who did this?

Colm and Laura

Useful Links

Galway Cycling – a local group campaigning for cycling in Galway

The Irish Cycling Campaign – a national cycling network group

Compare Cars – a calculator from the SEAI that shows you how much a car really costs – whether that be diesel, petrol or EV

Do You Need a Car? – a good article from the SEAi on whether we really need that second (or first) car.

Impact:

• Colm and Laura would have saved at least 2.1tonnes of CO2 per year (equivalent offset by 151 trees) and saved themselves about €1,679 per year in energy costs – and up to €60,000 in total ownership costs over 10 years![1]

What inspired you to do this?

I saw a statistic that, on average, our cars sit parked 95% of the time – that really made me sit up and think. My wife Laura and I had taken out a loan and had paid around €17,000 for our second-hand Kia Sportage in 2022. It caused us no problems, apart from the cost of it and the plain fact that we didn’t really need it.

We reckoned we needed 1.1 cars and given that no one has quite mastered the creation of 0.1 of a car, we ended up with 2 cars sitting in the driveway with a total purchase cost of €50,000 (not including the interest we were paying on the car loans!).

There was also the carbon footprint that is associated with each family car. We could justify this for one car, because we need one car to move our family around. It was much harder to justify the second car when viewed through the environmental lens. A medium sized diesel-powered family car doing 15,000km per year emits 3.2tonnes of CO₂e into the atmosphere!

And finally, we were looking for a way to avoid spending so much of our mornings and evenings stuck in Galway city rush-hour traffic. While traffic in Galway is a disaster at the best of times, it was the unpredictability of how long journeys would take that peaked our frustration. A commute across the city for either of us could take between 15 mins to 1 hour with no way of predicting how long the commute would be on any given day.

What were the personal and or sustainability benefits?

The biggest personal benefit in the short term was the cost savings. We had the car loan for our second car immediately wiped out with the price we got for the car. We also had enough left over to buy a new long-tail electric cargo bike with the balance. We bought this through the bike-to-work scheme which helped with the cost of the bike too. This saved us approximately €300 per month just in loan repayments and we’ll save on running costs, insurance, tax and maintenance over time too.

The primary reason we needed to buy the long-tail e-bike was for the morning school/creche run for our two young kids. Having solved that one logistical barrier, our lives have turned out to be entirely manageable with one car, plus the bike. We got the bike in September 2024 and at the time of writing I have been through a full Galway winter of commuting on it. We probably have been stuck for a second car approximately 3 – 4 times over the entire winter and have managed a workaround each time without too much hassle. One pleasant surprise was how infrequently the weather made the commute difficult. There were only a handful of miserable mornings that made the commute on the bike a real chore.

Another huge personal benefit of switching to the bike was the time savings and consistency of the commute on the bike. Every day, wind rain or shine, the commute to work is a 10-minute cycle. There is real satisfaction in flying past hundreds of cars stuck in traffic on the Quincentennial bridge or down Lough Atalia road knowing you’ll be home before most of the cars get to the next set of traffic lights. The smugness is probably palpable as I cycle past! Getting in and out of the city on a Saturday or Sunday to get some jobs done is, again, so much more straightforward on the bike. There really is no quicker way to travel around an urban environment in my opinion.
And finally, from a general health perspective, every day myself and the kids get a lot more lungfulls of fresh air and time spent outside. Especially during winter, I would have found myself spending that vast majority of the day inside my house, inside my car, inside my office etc. Weeks could go by without a much fresh air in some cases. Now, every weekday, we start by getting outside in the elements and having a fresh start to the day. The benefits are not to be underestimated, even on cold, wet winter mornings.

What advice would you have for others to do something similar?

Someone said to me when I was considering the impact bad weather would have once I switched from car to bike, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad wet gear”. My advice would be to kit yourself (and the kids) out with good gear that keeps everyone dry and warm. Even the really bad mornings are entirely manageable when you’re dry and warm on the bike.
Do your research on the e-bike you are considering. We went for an entry level e-bike from Decathalon. It’s perfect for what we need and it cost us €3,000. But you can spend upwards of €10,000 on some of these e-cargo bikes. Get a bike that suits your needs and don’t spend any more than you need to.

Finally, if you think your lifestyle will allow downsizing to one family car, don’t be scared of taking the jump and do it. It’s a lot more manageable than you think.

The benefits are both immediate, sustainable and you send a clear signal of sustainability, environmental consideration and an active lifestyle to your kids. They will then, hopefully, be more likely and more comfortable making these types of decisions into the future – which they will very likely be forced to do anyway in the coming years to mitigate climate change.

What’s the Community Takeaway?

All individual actions can start a community action: once you’ve started join a bigger group and make your impact bigger.

The Irish Cycling Campaign promotes cycling as a green, healthy, and accessible transport mode across Ireland. They campaign for safer cycling lanes, better urban planning, and pro-cycling policies. It pushes for laws and designs that protect cyclists and pedestrians. It help grow sustainability by reducing how much we rely on cars and by lowering CO2 emissions.

The group supports local activists in their own areas with resources, meeting up with people who can help eachother, and they can help you learn how to become a strong cycling voice in your community.

The Irish Cycling Campaign is part of the European Cyclists’ Federation, which is a group that helps paint the bigger picture for local campaigns.

It also show how local people can run a campaign: making petitions or holding community bike events.

Supporting The Irish Cycling Campaign offers you tools, help from others and real ways to grow sustainable travel in your own area.

Notes and Calculations

[1] We assume a Kia Sportage and use data from SEAI

We do NOT endorse or encourage the purchase of particular products. The references here are for information purposes only.

Search our Community Stories By Map