Commuting before the pandemic

As some of us return to the work and college after 18 months of working from home, the September Map of the Month looks at pre-pandemic commuting patterns – highlighting how important regional towns are. It is interesting to think how the next survey of commuting will differ.

View the map here: Commuting before the pandemic (PDF)

Cartographers: Stuart Green

View previous Maps of the Months here

Here we show the direction the largest number of people in an electoral district (ED), who leave the ED for work or education, travel.

Each arrow is pointing from the centre of the home ED to the centre of the destination ED. The arrows are log weighted for number of commuters - so the longer the arrow, the more people are travelling and city centre destinations are aggregated.

The arrows point largely toward towns and along main roads, the urban centres acting like magetic poles drawing people in. Whilst more people commute into Dublin than anywhere else- it is not the destination for most commuters. The majority of people live and work within the same ED or travel for less than 45mins. Along the border, especially Donegal, you can see people commuting into Northern Ireland.

Data is from the CSO ED scale POWCAR dataset for 2016. Census 2016 Place of Work, School or College - Census of Anonymised Records (POWSCAR) - CSO - Central Statistics Office