The chart above shows road lengths per thousand people in EU states. The Baltic states dominate in this metric as they have more roads per capita than any other state in the EU. Meanwhile the Southern EU only has one state in the top ten and that is in the tenth spot.
Findings
- The difference between the state with the most roads per capita, Estonia, and the state with the least, Romania, is 41.19 kilometers.
- Estonia has 12.31 times the roads per capita that Romania does.
- Eleven states have less than 10 kilometers of road for every thousand inhabitants.
- The mean kilometers of road for every thousand inhabitants for the EU is 14.18 and the median 12.43.
Caveats
- Population data is from 2011.
- Road length data is from 2008 except for Denmark which is from 2006, and Italy and Portugal which are from 2005.
- Road and population data come from different sources.
- Bulgaria is not included because it did not have complete data in the road data set.
- All figures are rounded to the nearest hundredth.
Details
It is hard to explain why the Baltic states have so many roads for every person when their vehicle ownership rates are low and they have the least number of vehicles per kilometer of road. At first glance, there also does not seem to be a strong correlation between this metric and population density. A future post will examine the relationship between the two closer.
The European Union as a whole has 10.61 kilometers of road for every thousand inhabitants ranking it just under Greece and just above Cyprus.
Sources
European Union Road Federation. 2011. "European Road Statistics 2011." Accessed March 12, 2018. http://www.irfnet.eu/images/stories/Statistics/2011/ERF-2011-STATS.pdf.
Eurostat. 2017. "Data Explorer." Accessed December 11, 2017. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=urb_lpop1&lang=en.