In the second quarter of this year, the population of Switzerland took the train more than ever before. The number of so-called passenger kilometers has reached a new record value of around 5.6 billion. This is reported by the information service for public transport, Litra, and the Association of Public Transport (VöV).
This is the absolute peak value in rail passenger transport since quarterly reporting began in 2014.
A lot of people are out and about, especially on the weekends
Traffic performance in the second quarter of 2023 is eight percent higher than in the first quarter, which was already the strongest first quarter ever measured. Compared to the same quarter of the previous year, growth is even 14.8 percent, and compared to the second quarter of 2019, the last year before the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the increase is 5.9 percent.
Caption: Crowds of people at Lucerne train station (06/15/23) KEYSTONE/Urs Flueeler
Regional transport is primarily responsible for this strong growth, as Simon Steinlin from Litra tells the Keystone-SDA news agency. Accordingly, leisure traffic around the weekends has grown in particular.
Goods transport by rail is becoming less attractive
In the case of freight transport, traffic performance in the second quarter of this year was just above the first quarter at 3.08 billion net tonne-kilometres. Compared to the same quarter of the previous year, this is a decrease of 3.2 percent.
Litra and VöV see the reasons for this in the currently low operational quality and the high production costs on the European corridor in transalpine transit traffic as well as in the economic developments in Europe. Compared to the same quarter of the previous year, the transport performance in transalpine goods traffic fell more sharply than in goods traffic as a whole, at 4.4 percent.