EU Travellers Cover Seven in Ten Kilometres by Car Rather Than Bus or Train

A measure of distance, not of trips

Modal split describes how a country's passenger transport divides between cars, buses and coaches, trains, ferries and aircraft. It is measured in passenger-kilometres: one person travelling one kilometre.

That construction matters more than it first appears. A short cycle to a shop and a two-hundred-kilometre drive are not weighted equally, and cycling does not appear in this indicator at all. The measure describes where distance is covered, not how often people choose each mode.

Across the EU, cars carried 69.2% of passenger-kilometres in 2024, on the measure that counts flights and ferries alongside the inland modes.

The most car-dependent Member States

Lithuania records 83.7%, the highest in the Union. The Netherlands follows at 77.0%, Finland at 75.4%, Germany at 74.6% and Italy at 74.0%.

The Netherlands in second place is the observation that catches attention, given its reputation for cycling. It is not a contradiction: cycling covers short distances that contribute little to total passenger-kilometres, and Dutch cars still cover the long ones. A country can be known for cycling and remain heavily car-dependent by this measure, because the measure is about kilometres.

The exceptions

Croatia records 43.2%, the only Member State where cars carry less than half of passenger transport. Hungary follows at 53.7% and Austria at 57.6%.

Hungary and Austria are first and second in the Union on rail, at 11.3% and 10.4% of passenger-kilometres, and that is where part of their displaced distance goes. Croatia's figure is a different thing altogether. Its rail share is 2.1%, twenty-first of the twenty-five Member States that report the mode, and its buses and coaches carry 6.8%, below the Union's 7.3%. What fills the gap is flying: 45.6% of Croatian passenger-kilometres are covered by aircraft, against 15.8% for the EU. On the inland modes alone Croatian cars carry 83.0%, and no Member State falls below half.

Across the Union the two rankings are unrelated. The rank correlation between car share and rail share is close to zero, so a low car share tells you nothing on its own about the strength of a railway.

What the indicator cannot settle

A high car share can reflect geography, settlement density, the state of public transport, or income. This measure records the outcome without separating those causes, and countries at similar levels may arrive there for opposite reasons: a sparsely populated country where alternatives are impractical, and a dense one where they exist but are not used.