- cross-posted to:
- austria@feddit.de
- cross-posted to:
- austria@feddit.de
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This is the wrong statistic! It doesnt matter how often you take the train, but how far you go. There is something called a passenger kilometer. Someone traveling one kilometer by train makes one passenger kilometer, 6 people on a train going 10 kilometers makes 60 passenger kilometers. The same can be done for other modes of transportation. The modal split (the right statistic) then shows how much each mode of transportation is actually used. Here you can find the statistic for each country of the EU: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/passenger-transport-modal-split-2#tab-chart_1
A few examples why modal split is better than frequencies:
- Environmentally CO2 is emitted per kilometer. Someone may bike a short distance everyday to work, but visits his parents who live far away every weekend by car.
- On the way to work someone could take the car and the train on the same commute.
It isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just two different metrics meant to measure two different concepts.
Thanks for your comment. Not wrong in the sense that the data is wrong or faked, but that the metric is not useful. Especially when better metrics are readily available for that region. Can you name me one prediction or result which you can infer from the frequency of train travel other than „fun facts“? (I am actually really curious :) ). With the modal split you can for example calculate CO2 emissions or estimate needed capacity increases if you want to replace one mode with another and much more.
I think the number of trips says a lot about the role trains play in people’s everyday lives, maybe even more than the kilometers travelled. Sure, that’s not a “metric”, but it does give us an idea if people use trains just for vacation a few times a year, or for their commute to work or other daily trips. For someone taking a train just once a year, even if that is for hundeds of kilometers, we know that they will use a different means of transportation for most trips.
I really like when I can just show up at the station and jump of a train without the need to consult a timetable beforehand. Not sure what you can infer, but I value frequency!
Yes, absolutely a game changer. Maybe comparable to having your car parked in front of your house vs the need to rent a car for each trip.
That unfortunately is the other kind of frequency, an not the one depicted in the graph
Ah, right. I misunderstood the graphic…
Interesting! For example, while Switzerland and Turkey appear on opposite sides of the spectrum in OP, they are close to each other in the modal split. And Turkey has even much less car use than Switzerland! 61.6% vs 77.7%. Apparently, taking the bus is very common in Turkey. With 36.6% more than any other country has in train and bus combined.
And while Germany looks literally green in the upper half in OP, modal split shows it’s car dependency with 85.4%.
Sweet link! These stats are really cool. Low car and high bus usage seem to be very linked to poorer (relatively) countries. High train usage in general seems to be much wealthier countries, yet those countries also have way more car usage. Also this is very incomplete without looking at bicycle usage, and walking of course. This makes the percentages even more misleading because it’s a percentage among sampled transportation modes
Thanks, and good observations. Many countries (Germany and the Netherlands for example) have statistics for every mode of transportation, which as you said is way more informative. I just quickly grabbed the first statistic I could find for the EU to be honest :D
Here is the data for Germany: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/verkehr/fahrleistungen-verkehrsaufwand-modal-split#undefined
For the Netherlands they have the data split by county which is very interesting. In the bike capital Utrecht still 50% of all passenger kilometers belong to car travel. I cant find the government website right now.
Wow, those are still way too high for car travel. I wonder how that’d compared to turkey, as they have 61% car travel but that’s not counting biking or walking.
Switzerland is also on top for person-kilometres.
Germany, would be better in Case you would measure the time that it takes to travel.
Danks ju för traffeling Wiss Deutsche Bahn …
Even that has problems. German railways might not be on time, but most of the main lines are upgraded to 200km/h and some new lines are even faster. So compared to for example Switzerland that means higher speed, but it is much more likely to be delayed.
The main reasons of which the German trains are mostly to late are Not enough Tracks for all the trains and Not enough people who works at Deutsche Bahn.
If we would like that more people taking the train, we need also more acces to trains, that means more trainstations in villages Connected to the railway systhem
Here’s the article this image arms to be based on, which includes many more counties.
That looks like bullshit. Or it’s at least missing some data. Czechia, by the very nature of being in the middle of Europe, we have the densest train network which in turn means our trains go even to the smallest of shitholes and it’s very common to take a train somewhere.
This does not seem to be true. According to Wikipedia the Czech Republic has 9567 km of railways. This leaves them with a density of 0.121299336891 Railway/km².
Switzerland, which was listed as the densest in the Article, has 5317 km of railways. This leaves them with a density of 0.128787695288 Railway/km².
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size
Keep in mind, that the dates of the data collection are 3 years apart (Czechia 2017, Switzerland 2020).
I fully understand not wanting to use a train in Greece.
https://www.dw.com/en/greece-train-crash-government-admits-decades-of-failure/a-64864913A probe into the tragedy would focus on the “chronic delays in implementing railway works, delays caused by chronic public sector malaise and decades of failure,” government spokesman Yiannis Economou told reporters in Athens.
That said, I feel all European countries, maybe except of Switzerland, have failed to proper care for their rail infrastructure and missed the chance to convince more people to travel with trains instead of cars. :(
Correction: trains in Greece are no longer public sector. They are all owned by Ferrovie dello stato italiane, the failure of setting up failsafes and maintenance are because it wasn’t profitable enough to do so.
Finland is missing
Is the EU a country
Might be an EU average.
My country has 0 trains.
The Netherlands is very much missing from this
My thoughts as well. There is a ton of train commuting within the Randstad for example. My girlfriend’s company has a surprising number of people who do a daily commute from Rotterdam to Amsterdam as well as places like Den Haag and Haarlem.
If you look at the stats here, The Netherlands ranks 7th nationally for % of trips taken by rail and only Austria and Switzerland are ahead of it out of western European countries.
It also ranks very highly for passenger kilometers which is saying a lot because the country is small as shit, most of the people are packed into an area about 1/3 the size of Belgium, and the overall population is fairly small when compared to places like Spain, France, Italy, and Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage
There is a strange drop-off where train travel gets significantly worse for longer distances though.
Commuting within the Randstad, and to a certain degree the provinces of Flevoland, Gelderland and Noord-Brabant is pretty compelling because the network is well connected. Need to get anywhere else though and the benefits of train travel over commuting by car start to disappear quickly.
This also ties into the fact that our public transit is by far the most expensive in the EU (and possibly even worldwide). Which makes traveling by train really only a viable option if you have the money to spare or your employer covers your travel expenses.
A pretty standard daily commute can cost upwards of €20 per round trip, which comes down to nearly a fifth of a minimum wage budget after taxes. That doesn’t well with a housing crisis.
Yeah I do agree the pricing sucks and it’s got its shortcomings.
We almost always rent one of those Greenwheels cars to see my girlfriend’s folks who live in a smaller town because the alternative is an ordeal. Also we have repeatedly gotten stranded in Haarlem after a night of drinking because the train cuts off surprisingly early (something like 1:30am? I can’t remember). Fortunately our place is on the west side of Amsterdam so the Uber is fairly cheap, but it’s pretty annoying.
The country could certainly stand to put more money into transit.
Well sure but that’s because Switzerland has a pretty awesome and geographically-appropriate-for-its-size train system.
Also, the flag’s a big plus
What does that mean? I’m not sure if I correctly interpret that as somewhat dismissive, as if a good train system was a given or not. It’s the result of political will and investment.
in 2017, Germany invested €69 per citizen in its railways, ahead of France’s €38 and Spain’s €32. It’s still far behind other countries, however, with Switzerland and Austria investing €362 and €187 per citizen respectively.
A bit like when you get Zerg rushed in Starcraft and say “Well sure but that’s because they built so many units early on”. It’s a decision, and becoming good in that metric was precisely the intent. Also not to do so is a decision. Unlike in Starcraft, the decision to neglect your public transport is not a similarly viable strategy.
I mean that Switzerland has a local and regional rail system that is damn near perfectly sized, scaled, and engineered for its geography and citizenry, which also integrates pretty well with the rail systems of all of its neighbors.
They could have made faster trains, but with the way they wanted to run them, it made more sense to design the rolling stock to have good top speed, but excellent acceleration, thus improving the average speed more meaningfully than a higher top speed would. The rail network is fairly pervasive - you can from and to just about anywhere in Switzerland using trains, with perhaps a bit of bus travel tacked onto either end.
Source: was just over there a couple months ago visiting a family friend, and used the train system a lot.
this seems to somewhat correlate with cold.
Also the economy to some extent which would make sense because rail infrastructure is not cheap
I would say to a bigger extent than climate. Population density is also important.
What do European country are you from?
France, Germany, EU, Sweden
All are countries in the EU
It’s obviously referring to the EU average.
This is very common in European and EU graphs. In statistics with countries world wide, it’s common to see “World” (and sometimes also “EU”) as an entry
