Status: 15.09.2021 10:13 a.m.
In Germany, the number of registered cars increased last year. Mathematically, every household owns more than one car. Two thirds of all commuters use a car – even for short distances.
The number of cars in Germany continued to grow over the past year. At the beginning of January 2021, 48.2 million cars were registered nationwide. That was 14 million more than ten years earlier, as the Federal Statistical Office announced. In private households, the trend over the past ten years has apparently been towards second or third cars, despite all climate concerns: In 2010 there were 102 cars for every 100 households. Ten years later there were 108, as the statisticians announced.
More than two thirds of all employed persons (68 percent) drove to work by car in 2020, even for distances of less than ten kilometers. According to the Federal Statistical Office, just around 13 percent regularly used public transport such as buses, trams, underground trains or trains to get to work. Every tenth employed person regularly cycles to work.
Almost half of all employed persons (48 percent) say they have to travel less than ten kilometers to their place of work. For 29 percent, the way to work is ten to less than 25 kilometers, 14 percent cover 25 to less than 50 kilometers.
Germany is in the EU average
The figures are based on a four-year commuter survey. Compared to the last survey for 2016, the percentages of the individual modes of transport are almost unchanged. According to the Federal Office, the figures for 2020 relate to the 38.9 million of the total of 41.6 million people in employment in Germany who provided information on the distance from home to work as well as on the time and means of transport to commute to work in the survey .
In an EU comparison, Germany is roughly average in terms of the leading role of the car, according to the statistics office: 84 percent of motorized passenger transport in this country in 2018 was accounted for by cars, nine percent by trains, six percent by buses and two percent by trams and subways . In 2010, the proportion of cars in motorized passenger traffic in Germany was 85 percent.
According to the European Commission, cars accounted for 81 percent of motorized passenger transport on average in all EU member states in 2018. The car was used particularly intensively in Lithuania and Portugal, least of all in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria.