The chart above shows the kilometers of rail per square kilometer of land in EU states. Four states (Luxembourg, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Germany) are far above their peers in railway coverage. Germany is especially impressive considering the large size of the state.
Findings
- The difference between the state with the greatest rail coverage, Luxembourg, and the state with the least, Greece (Malta and Cyprus have no rail network), is 0.22 kilometers.
- Luxembourg has 11 times the rail coverage that Greece has.
- Only two states (Luxembourg and Belgium) have two-tenths of a kilometer of rail or more for every square kilometer of territory.
- The mean kilometers of rail per square kilometer of land of the 28 states is 0.08 and the median is also 0.06.
Caveats
- Rail length data is from 2016 except for Belgium (2009), Denmark (1998), Greece (2015), the Netherlands (2003), Austria (2007), and Poland (2015).
- Area data is from 2007.
- Road and area data come from different sources.
- Numbers in the chart are rounded to the nearest hundredth.
- Cyprus and Malta have no rail network.
Details
It is a rarity when the states of the Eastern EU perform so well. Save for the states from the Western EU, they dominate over both the Southern and Northern EU in this metric.
The number of kilometers of railway per square kilometer of land for the European Union as a whole is 0.07 which ranks it just below Romania and just above Slovakia (the numbers in the chart are rounded to the nearest hundredth).
Sources
Eurostat. 2018. "Eurostat - Data Explorer: Railway Transport - Length of Tracks." Accessed March 20, 2018. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do.
United Nations. 2007. "United Nations Statistics Division - Environment Statistics." Accessed January 23, 2018. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/environment/totalarea.htm.