Environmental Awareness and Rail Passenger Transport in Europe

In recent decades, several articles have emphasised the need for a sustainable society, and hence for sustainable development. Identifying policies that will result in a sustainable transportation network is a major challenge for policy makers, because it involves a high level of complexity. A contribution can be made within this ‘complex’ framework by gathering knowledge on current transport development and forecasting future trends. For example, simulations on future scenarios show that the energy consumption in 2030 will certainly favour the ‘train’ mode in both urban and long distance transport. In this regard, it would be interesting to identify which European countries are already shifting to the rail mode, and are thus directed towards more sustainable transport development. An attempt in this direction will be made by this study, aiming to outline the current relationship between environmental and rail performance in Europe. In this context, a simple descriptive analysis will show how a robust relationship between environmental awareness and transport mode choice cannot be detected, although it seems that the larger the share of rail transport, the better the quality of the urban environment. In addition, a multicriteria analysis was performed to draw up a ranking of twenty-five European countries on the basis of indicators concerning environmental awareness and rail performance. The results show essentially that a group of North-Central and Eastern European countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia) seem to have high environmental awareness and good rail transport utilization, whilst a group of other countries (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) displays low values according to these two main profiles. It is likely that these latter countries suffer less from environmental problems owing to their low values in GDP and in transport network in general. These results are indeed indicative, although more data and indicators would be necessary. However, the results highlight – in principle – the need for policy-makers to adopt different ‘sustainable’ policies for different ‘country topologies’ in order to tackle the above-outlined ‘complexity task’ above more effectively.