Swiss are champions of rail travel in Europe
Select your language
Generated with artificial intelligence.
Listening:
Swiss are champions of rail travel in Europe
Switzerland remains by a large margin the European champion of train travel, both in terms of the number of journeys per person and the number of kilometres travelled.
+ Get the most important news directly in your inbox
In 2023, the Swiss travelled an average of 2,466km by train per resident (passenger-kilometres) and used this means of transport 68 times, according to the public transport information service Litra. Over the year, the number of passengers per kilometre increased by 13.2% and the number of journeys by 11.5%.
This means that the Swiss use the railways over 50% more than people in Austria, which came in second place in the analysis, both in terms of kilometres travelled per inhabitant and frequency.
+ Does the Swiss rail network have room for international competition?
Other countries that finished at the top of the list are France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Luxembourg. At the other end of the scale, the train is almost non-existent in Greece and used very little in Croatia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania and Romania.
In absolute figures, traffic in Switzerland passed the 2019 record (pre-Covid) by 2.5% last year, with 22.3 billion passenger-kilometres.
+ Direct trains to run from Zurich to Florence and Livorno
The study is based on data, notably from Eurostat, from the 25 EU countries with a rail network (i.e., excluding Malta and Cyprus), as well as from Great Britain, Norway and Switzerland.
At the global level, another study showed that only Japan rivaled Switzerland for the popularity of rail travel.
Translated from French with DeepL/gw
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
More
Why Switzerland is among the ten fastest-warming countries in the world
More
In Switzerland four out of ten people have a migrant background – who are they?
More
Suicides in Switzerland quadruple among older people
More
French gangs target luxury cars in Switzerland
More
Renewed controversy in Switzerland over US fighter jets – explained
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.