this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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This is the wrong statistic! It doesnt matter how often you take the train, but how far you go. There is something called a passenger kilometer. Someone traveling one kilometer by train makes one passenger kilometer, 6 people on a train going 10 kilometers makes 60 passenger kilometers. The same can be done for other modes of transportation. The modal split (the right statistic) then shows how much each mode of transportation is actually used. Here you can find the statistic for each country of the EU: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/passenger-transport-modal-split-2#tab-chart_1
A few examples why modal split is better than frequencies:
Most people have far more km to work every day than the longer trips to visit distant relatives. Thus how often you take the train is a useful metric.
Plus someone who drives to work.already has a car so the marginal cost of the longer trip is insignificant. While someone who normally doesn't drive has to make up the costs of a car for rare trips only and that makes the marginal cost of a car very high. So people who don't drive daily are more likely to figure out how to take those long trips without a car.
This pattern is true and passenger kilometers represent it just fine. There is no need to use the how often you use the train metric. Note that my two examples were there to explain the metric, not actual factual examples.
As an actual example: I take my bike to work and dont own a car, so my modal split is mostly trains because of longer distance trips, but I use the bike far more often. Frequencies only make sense if each occurrence is very similar (in quantity). For example: How often does one eat meat? Each meal roughly contains the same amount of meat (may be factor two or three difference). Here frequencies make more sense as more detailed statistics dont actually give more insights.
The most useful metric for a transit system is % of people who are on a monthly unlimited rides pass. So long as the pass is priced well that measures who useful transit is.
Of course for people who bike an unlimited rides pass may not be cost effective, but I still like it as people who are on the pass won't hesitate to use transit for odd trips.