In 2022, a total of 164.3 million tonnes of goods were transported by road, compared with 154.9 million tonnes in 2021.
In October, November, and December (Q4) 2022, a total of 39.2 million tonnes of goods were transported by road, compared with 37.4 million tonnes carried in Q4 2021.
The commodity group Quarry Products, Metal Ores & Peat' represented nearly a third (28%) of all tonnes carried by road in 2022.
In 2022, the total distance covered by road freight transport was 1.8 billion kilometres, compared with 1.7 billion kilometres in 2021.
| Road freight activity, 2019-2022 | |||||
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | % change 2021-2022 | |
| Tonne-km (million) | 12,403 | 11,383 | 12,485 | 12,384 | 1% |
| Tonnes carried (thousand) | 159,414 | 140,998 | 154,900 | 164,258 | 6% |
| Vehicle kilometres (million) | 1,734 | 1,488 | 1,685 | 1,788 | 6% |
| Laden journeys (thousand) | 14,480 | 11,775 | 13,092 | 13,814 | 5% |
Figure 1 shows that in 2022, a total of 164,258 thousand tonnes of goods were transported by road. This represented an increase of 6% on the 2021 total, a rise of 17% on the 2020 total and a growth of 3% when compared with 2019.
Goods vehicles involved in the Delivery of Goods to Road Works or Building Sites carried 67,338 thousand tonnes in 2022, which was the highest among all types of work carried out by goods vehicles.
The commodity group Quarry Products, Metal Ores & Peat represented nearly a third (28%) of all tonnes carried. This was the largest share among the categories of commodity groups in the survey with 47,861 thousand tonnes carried.
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Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (28 June 2023) published results from the Road Freight Transport Survey for 2022.
Commenting on the annual figures, Dr Nele van der Wielen, Statistician in the Transport Division, said: “The figures show an increase in the tonnes of goods transported by road. In 2022, a total of 164.3 million tonnes of goods were transported by road, which represented an increase of 6% on the 2021 total, and an increase of 3% when compared with 2019 (See Table 1B).
Activity measured as weight by distance, or tonne-kilometres (tkm), reached 12.4 billion tkm in 2022.
The total distance covered by road freight transport in 2022 was 1.7 billion kilometres same as in 2021. The commodity groups that were contributing most to vehicle kilometres were Foodstuffs and the miscellaneous category Other Goods (See Table 2)."