Although public transport has been free for the past five years, it is still struggling to win over people living in Luxembourg for their commute to work, according to Statec’s 2021 census.

People in the Grand Duchy are attached to their cars. Two-thirds of them (67%) drive to work, to which must be added 2.2% sitting in the passenger seat on the way to work.

Cars dominate the choice of transport in Luxembourg and the country is one of the European countries with the highest car ownership per capita rate, at around 678 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 2022, according to Eurostat

Among the remaining 30% of commuters, public transport is the most widely used mode of transport. Over 11% of working people use the bus, while 4.2% travel to work by train and 1.4% prefer the tram. The majority of soft mobility users walk (9.7% of workers), with the bicycle far behind (3%).

Fewer cars, more walking and cycling

“The percentages relating to car use remain particularly questionable, both in view of the development of public transport, and in view of the share of passengers,” said Statec. A large proportion of the population lives in the capital and its suburbs, or southern urban area around Esch-sur-Alzette. “These dense, multi-purpose areas should, in principle, encourage the use of public transport,” the authors of the report said.

Compared with the data from the 2011 census, there has been a decline in the use of cars for home-work journeys. The proportion of commuters using the car has fallen from 72.3% to 69.3% in ten years. This shift has been to the benefit of soft mobility, with walking and cycling increasing from 8.4% to 12.7% between 2011 and 2021, while the share of public transport has remained unchanged, “despite the undeniable improvement in the offer and the introduction of free public transport,” the report said.

While the proportion of business trips made by car has fallen, there has been an increase in the number of people working in the country due to population growth. As a result, there are more and more cars on the roads, even if the rate of people taking the car has decreased.

Disparities between localities

In Luxembourg City car use has seen its biggest decline, falling from 55.6% of home-work journeys in 2011 to 38.5% in 2021. The municipalities on the outskirts of the capital saw a fall of between 5 and 15 percentage points in the proportion of people travelling to work by car.

Conversely, in many municipalities in the north and along the country’s borders, the proportion of working people using the car to get to work has increased, up 14 percentage points in Troisvierges and 12 percentage points in Kiischpelt, for example. Public transport is less flexible in these regions, the statisticians said. Homes are also further from public transport station and more people are moving to areas that are further away from their work.

Unlike in 2011, the 2021 version of the census allowed residents to indicate whether they took more than one means of transport to work. This revealed that less than 20% of the working population, or 34,460 people, took at least two modes of transport. For these people, the bus is the most popular (30.4%), followed by walking (24.1%) and the train (15.2%).

The car is still faster

For a one-way trip, 70% of working residents live within 20km of their place of work, 86.9% within 30km and 94.4% within 40km. As the distance increases, the proportion of people walking decreases. While 78.3% of working people living less than one kilometre from their workplace walk to work, only 21.5% do so between one and five kilometres away. At this distance, the car is already used by half of all working people.

This choice may be motivated in particular by the journey time. Despite the availability of public transport, the car offers a shorter journey time. Users say they take an average of 41.5 minutes by car to get from their home to their work around the capital, compared with 59.7 minutes by public transport. These differences in access times to the capital increase the further away you are from it.

Despite a relative decline in its use, the private car remains the predominant mode of transport in Luxembourg, the report found. Public transport, and even car-sharing, are not much favoured by residents. “This directly calls into question the ability of public policies to absorb, proactively and optimally, the growing population and the resulting flows,” Statec concluded.

Methodology

This publication is based on data collected during the 2021 census. In 2021, Luxembourg had 287,067 working residents, of whom just over 270,000 worked in the Grand Duchy. Of these, 188,221 provided information on their home/work journeys. Statec made a selection based on the consistency of the responses on the mode, duration and distance of the journey, so as not to take into account atypical behaviour that may have been caused by the pandemic. In the end, 172,357 responses were considered.

(This article was originally published by Virgule. Translation, editing and adaptation by Audrey McGaw.)