Description
Snapshot of the Railway Market Dossier Austria 2021/2022
Austria is a country of car drivers: 60.9 percent of the Austrian population use their cars as a means of transport several times a week. In the country with around 9 million inhabitants, 7.1 million vehicles are registered. This is to be changed within the framework of the aspired traffic turnaround. Austria’s Climate Minister Leono-re Gewessler presented the Mobility Master Plan 2030 in 2021. It aims to make Austria climate-neutral by 2040. The core of the climate strategy and the transport turnaround is the expansion of the railways. In the next six years, Austria plans to invest 18.2 billion euros in the expansion of its rail infrastructure.
An investment that will pay off. The sales figures of the “climate ticket” introduced last year, which allows the use of railways, buses and municipal transport throughout Austria for 1,095 euros per year, show that Austrians want to switch to climate-friendly local and long-distance public transport.
And so the Österreichische Bundesbahnen (ÖBB) remarks, not without reason, that Austria may be a country of car drivers, but it is also a country of rail travellers. After the Swiss, Austrians travel the most by rail in Europe. In an international comparison, they come in third, right after Japan and Switzerland.
This dossier compiles current information on rail-bound transport in Austria, examines the effectiveness of initiatives and programmes with regard to the transport turnaround and analyses the market attractiveness from the perspective of the railway industry. Another important component is the legal framework conditions of Austrian rail transport as well as the European directives from Brussels.
The ÖBB, with a current market share of about 85 percent in passenger transport and about 63 percent in freight transport, is the focus of the analysis.
