The chart above shows kilometers of rail per thousand people in EU regions. Only the Northern EU has over one kilometer of track for every thousand people in its region.
Findings
- The difference between the region with the most rail per capita, the Northern EU, and the region with the least, the Southern EU, is 0.99 kilometers.
- The Northern EU has 3.88 times the rail per capita that the Southern EU does.
- The Southern EU is the only region with less than one-half kilometer of track for every thousand people.
Caveats
- Population data is from 2011.
- Rail length data is from 2016 except for Belgium (2009), Denmark (1998), Greece (2015), the Netherlands (2003), Austria (2007), and Poland (2015).
- Rail and population data come from different sources.
- All figures are rounded to the nearest hundredth.
- Cyprus and Malta have no rail network.
- The Northern EU consists of Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
- The Eastern EU consists of Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
- The Western EU consists of Germany, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, and Luxembourg.
- The Southern EU consists of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.
Details
The Northern EU also has the most roads per capita suggesting that the region's low population may be the reason why it has such high values in both metrics, especially when noticing that the Northern EU's rail coverage on a geographic basis is the smallest in the EU.
The European Union as a whole has 0.64 kilometers of rail for every thousand inhabitants ranking it under the Eastern EU and above the Western EU.
Sources
Eurostat. 2017. "Data Explorer." Accessed December 11, 2017. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=urb_lpop1&lang=en.
Eurostat. 2018. "Eurostat - Data Explorer: Railway Transport - Length of Tracks." Accessed March 20, 2018. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitViewTableAction.do.