Truck traffic reached a record level in Germany last year. The market share in traffic performance in freight transport rose by almost one and a half percentage points to 72.6 percent. At the same time, Deutsche Bahn’s share fell from 18.6 to 18.0 percent. This is shown by statistics from the as yet unpublished report “Traffic in Figures” by the Federal Ministry of Transport, which the pro-rail railway alliance says it has.
Its managing director Dirk Flege criticizes: “Never before has the truck’s market share in freight transport been so high.” This means that the transport of goods in Germany is heading in a “completely wrong direction”. In order to make progress in climate protection, significantly more goods transport would have to be handled via the climate-friendly rail routes. In the coalition agreement, the new traffic light government made up of SPD, Greens and FDP made a clear commitment to expanding rail’s market share in freight transport to 25 percent by 2030. Flege emphasized that the gap to this level has now grown to seven percentage points. From the point of view of some experts, it will therefore be extremely difficult to even close the gap by 2030.
A look at Europe shows that things can be different: In Latvia, the rail share is 70 percent, in Lithuania 67 percent and in Estonia 42 percent. In Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Finland, too, rail has a market share of over 25 percent in freight transport, the railway alliance said.