The share of rail freight traffic should actually grow to 25 percent by 2030. But the Corona year has made this goal for the federal government even more difficult to achieve.
Rail transport in Germany was significantly weakened in the first year of the Corona crisis: both in freight and passenger transport, railway companies lost shares compared to the road.
This emerges from a market study that the Federal Network Agency presented on rail traffic on Thursday. According to this, only 18.8 percent of freight traffic was handled by rail last year, the rest mainly by road. In 2019 it was 19 percent.
The federal government’s goal is actually to increase the share of rail freight transport to 25 percent by 2030. However, it has stagnated for years.
The decline in passenger traffic was more pronounced. Here the share of the railways fell from 9.1 percent to 6.2 percent. Individualized traffic on the road, on the other hand, was able to increase its share by more than five percentage points to 88.3 percent. Local public transport (ÖPNV) also lost: the share of buses and trains was only 4.5 percent last year, which corresponds to a decrease of 2.5 percentage points compared to the previous year.
The competitive trends of recent years continued on the railways. According to the Federal Network Agency, Deutsche Bahn, as a federally owned group, remains the dominant provider in long-distance transport with a market share of 98 percent – despite the gradual expansion of its competitor Flixtrain’s services.
In regional and freight transport, however, the competitors are catching up: In local transport, the market share of Deutsche Bahn shrank from 72 to 67 percent last year. In freight transport, the railway had to give up one percentage point to its competitors and in 2020 it had a share of 45 percent.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
