Rail travel is booming—in 2013, there was an increase of 12 million passengers.
The latest market report from Schienen‐Control shows a highly encouraging trend: in 2013, rail companies carried a total of 274 million passengers. This represents an increase of 4.6 percent compared with the previous year – a rise of 12 million passengers. Transport Minister Doris Bures is delighted with these figures: "Investments in a modern rail service are paying off. A high-performance infrastructure, shorter travel times, more frequent services, excellent punctuality and modern, comfortable trains are leading to more and more people switching to environmentally friendly rail travel." Maria-Theresia Röhsler, Managing Director of Schienen-Control, cites the expansion of the Westbahn and Unterinntal lines and the optimized regular-interval service across the entire Austrian rail network as reasons for the increase in passenger numbers. But it is not only the number of passengers that rose significantly last year; the number of passenger kilometers traveled also increased. This means that more and more people are traveling longer distances by rail. Specifically, passenger kilometers traveled rose by 0.9 billion passenger kilometers to 12.1 billion passenger kilometers last year, which corresponds to an increase of 8.1 percent (2012: 11.2 billion passenger kilometers). While passengers traveled an average of 42.8 kilometers by rail in 2012, they traveled an average of 44.2 kilometers in 2013. Bures: "Traveling by rail helps our environment: 12.1 billion kilometers traveled by rail correspond to CO2 savings of 1.2 million tons per year." In addition, the figures from Rail Control show higher train utilization. This means that on average more passengers were transported per train and the trains were therefore better utilized. At the same time, the market share of private railways in passenger transport (there are currently 16 private railways in Austria) rose by 3.5 percentage points compared to the previous year – from 8.8 percent to 12.3 percent.