CityLab: Breaking Down the Many Ways Europe's City-Dwellers Get to Work

Perhaps what’s most striking here is how much higher the levels of public transit commuting are in capital cities than in regional cities. This might seem an obvious phenomenon—generally less populous second-tier cities seem less likely to have the sort of snarled up roads that propel commuters towards public transit. Still, some capitals post a relatively poor showing, with less than 30 percent of commuters using public transit in Lisbon, Dublin, Vilnius, and Riga.

Some outliers suggest that investment, not size, is the key issue. Modestly sized Zurich (whose population is just over 400,000) shows public transit commuting rates of over 60 percent, considerably higher than the 40 to 50 percent share for far larger Rome (population 2.88 million). And the city with the highest rate of public transit commuting—Vienna, at 74 percent of all commuters—isn’t even in Europe’s top 20 metro areas. The map implies, without explicitly confirming, that it is a combination of wealth and closeness to power that gets a city endowed with a public transit system good enough to attract large majorities of workers to use them for their daily commutes. [...]

Amsterdam and Copenhagen have a justified reputation as Europe’s most bike-friendly capitals. As the table above makes clear, they may also be Europe’s only bike-friendly capitals, at least to an extent. According to Eurostat’s figures, only in these two cities does bike commuting exceed 50 percent of modal share—although even this is contradicted by figures from Copenhagen Municipality quoted in Danish newspaper Politiken this week which suggest bike commuting has dropped to 41 percent. [...]

Paris is the only city where a (very narrow) majority walk for at least a portion of their journey to and from their workplace—an impressive number given that public transit commuting is also especially high in the city. At the other end of the scale, the city with the lowest number of walking commuters surveyed is actually Copenhagen. So why are the rates so different?

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