A new report says that EU citizens living in urban areas are using public transport an average of 152 times a year – or three times a week.
The study by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) reports that the countries ranking above the EU average in terms of public transport journeys per urban inhabitant are located either in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) or in Northern Europe.
CEE countries that joined the EU in 2004, 2007 and 2013 generally had high levels of public transport demand.
However, in these countries the number of journeys was generally slowly decreasing, a trend that accelerated when unemployment rose following the financial crisis.
Encouragingly, in the Baltic countries, Hungary and Croatia this dip stopped, with the number of journeys showing moderate growth since 2010.
The report also states that a total of 57.9 billion journeys took place in European on public transport in 2014.
Buses and trolleybuses account for 32.3 billion journeys, and the remainder is equally split between rail modes: 9.34 billion journeys on metro networks, 8.38 billion journeys in trams and on light rail transit, and 7.84 billion journeys on suburban railways.
