Highways grow, railways shrink
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2003-02-17
As Europe's roads become more congested, it's network of railways is shrinking.
The length of the motorway network in the European Union (EU) grew by more than 25% between 1990 and 1999, to total nearly 50,000 km in 1999. The length of the rail network, shrunk by 4% in the same period, according to a report by the Eurostat. However there is a big difference in motorway density between the older members of the community such as France and Germany and the new countries coming in. The central European candidate (CEC) countries had 1/6th the density of the other EU countries such as France, Germany and Spain.
The biggest relative motorway increases were in countries such as Portugal, Ireland, and Greece, which had low motorway densities at the beginning of the '90s. Motorway building progressed rapidly in the candidate countries and this is also where the decline in rail networks was the greatest.
The Benelux countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) had the highest motorway density in 1999, with the Netherlands at the top of the list with 58 km of road per 1000 km of overall roadway. By comparison, Belgium has 55km/1000 and Luxembourg 44. At the lower end of the scale, Ireland and Finland both had 1.4 km/1000 in 1999. Sweden had 3.5 and Greece 3.8.
The biggest drops in railway networks in the EU were in Germany and France, but in relative terms, Portugal had the greatest drop (22%). The shift from railway use to roads was most prominent in the CEC countries, where the railway network decreased by 6% (4,000 km). Most of the drop occurred in Poland (3,300 km).
The level of use of a network can be measured by relating the volume of traffic on the network to its total length. Based on this, the CEC countries used rail twice as much as the EU countries. Rail use in the CEC was highest in Estonia and Latvia for freight, and in Hungary and Romania for passengers.
The Central European candidate countries are: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia
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