Energy efficiency: rail beats road by a factor of 5
In Switzerland, rail transports 24% of all passengers and 39% of goods, but uses only 5% of the energy used for mobility.
Transport in Switzerland consumes around 38% of the total final energy. Of this, 87% is at the expense of roads; only just under 5% is spent by rail.
The performance of the two modes of transport is comparable: the modal split between road and rail is 76 to 24% for passenger transport and 61 to 39% for freight transport.
This is shown by the analysis of public transport figures recently published by the public transport information service Litra.
Overall, traffic is still growing rapidly: in 2014, a total of 124,656 million kilometers were driven in Switzerland - in passenger traffic alone. In the previous year, the figure was 2,000 million kilometers less, and in 2000, almost 20,000 million kilometers less. Since 1950, transport performance has thus increased almost tenfold: at that time, only 14,798 million kilometers were traveled - 57% of which, incidentally, were by public transport.
