The Swiss use the railways over 50% more than Austrians, who came in second place in Litra’s analysis.
Keystone / Gaetan Bally
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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