All aboard! Can Luxembourg’s free public transport help save the world?
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All aboard! Can Luxembourg’s free public transport help save the world?
In 2020, in a bid to cut carbon emissions, Luxembourg made all its public transport free. But what is it like to use? And why are there still so many traffic jams? I took a trip to find out ...
www.theguardian.com
Public transport is now free in several cities including Tallinn, Estonia (since 2013), Valletta, Malta and several French cities, including Dunkirk and Montpellier
In 2020, in a bid to cut carbon emissions, Luxembourg made all its public transport free. But what is it like to use? And why are there still so many traffic jams? I took a trip to find out ...
Wed 20 Sep 2023 08.00 BST
It’s not quite John o’Groats to Land’s End, let alone Florida to Alaska, but undertaking an end-to-end expedition across Luxembourg has its advantages. The first is that you can do it in a morning: it’s about three hours by public transport. The second is the journey won’t cost you a cent. That’s right – total cost for two buses and two trains, travelling about 60 miles: zero euros. Since March 2020, all public transport in Luxembourg has been entirely free to use. While elsewhere in Europe rural bus routes are disappearing and train travel can be more expensive than driving or even flying, Luxembourg has taken things in the opposite direction: improving its transport services and dispensing with fares altogether, with a view to easing traffic congestion, reducing inequality and meeting climate targets. As a very small and very wealthy country – the richest in the world if you look at GDP per capita – you could say Luxembourg has it easy, but could this initiative work in other parts of the world? Does it even work in Luxembourg?
I set out on my trans-Luxembourg odyssey one summer’s morning, with not a euro or a care in the world. All I really need is the journey planner on the government’s easy-to-use Mobilitiéits Zentral app.
Even the tram from my hotel to the central train station feels different. The line through the centre of the city, which opened in December 2020, is clean, modern and frequent. Each stop has its own little jingle when it is announced over the speaker, and, in a gesture to urban rewilding, there is grass growing between the tracks in some sections. And you can just jump on and off at any stop you like. After 24 hours in the country, in fact, the thought of paying to use public transport ever again feels like an affront. No need to book or reserve seats, no fumbling around with cards or phones or cash, no confusing ticket zones or price structures. This is just as well, as almost everything else in Luxembourg is incredibly expensive – with one key exception, as I shall discover.
Steve Rose in Luxembourg, waiting for a train. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/The Guardian
My journey begins in Rumelange, a small, leafy town at the southern border with France. Much of Luxembourg is leafy outside the main city, which is a mix of orderly mitteleuropean grandeur and arid corporate and institutional architecture, such as the European court of justice. From Rumelange, it’s a 10-minute bus journey to the train station at Esch-sur-Alzette, where I head north via two doubledecker trains – which, like the bus, feel almost brand new and are virtually empty. It is almost gratifying to discover that not everything is running smoothly: the first train is delayed, which threatens to undermine my entire app-generated itinerary. I have to sprint to make my connection or else I’ll have to wait an hour for the next one. Then it’s another short bus journey from Troisvierges station to Schmëtt – at the northern border.
People I meet along the way seem generally happy and proud of their newly liberated public transport, although many point out that it was already pretty cheap before – a go-anywhere day pass for trains was just €5 – and fare-dodging was apparently rife. But, for unemployed people or low-income workers, free travel amounts to a substantial saving. It has also made a difference for young people, says Marie, a graduate in her 20s. “When we were students, a lot of people went to school by car instead of bus and train,” she says. “And now it’s easier for young people to hang out after school or on weekends. If you want to go to a certain village, there’s always a way to get there by bus.”
Parents Philip and Elspeth are returning home to south Luxembourg after a cycling holiday in Germany with their daughter – there’s dedicated space for their bikes on the train. “It’s very convenient and easy because we don’t need to pay anything,” says Philip. “Before, it was a big mess, because at small stations usually there were no ticket offices, so sometimes it was not easy to find the appropriate fare.” When the trains became free three years ago, adds Elspeth, for many of her children’s friends, “it was the first time in their lives they were taking a train, at 16.”
Schmëtt is not billed as “Luxembourg’s northernmost point” or anything like that; I just looked it up on Google maps (to be precise, the very northernmost point is the corner of the Lidl car park). With more time, I could head south-east from here to go hiking in Mullterhal, “Luxembourg’s little Switzerland”, or south-west to the Upper Sûre lake for a swim – all for the price of nothing. But there’s nothing to detain me in Schmëtt itself, apart from the Lidl. It’s not even really a town, just a strip of roadside retail. The only remarkable thing about the place is the fact that it has four petrol stations.
Steve Rose in Schmëtt at the Luxembourg-Belgium border. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/The Guardian
This is Luxembourg’s dirty little secret: while basic amenities are prohibitively expensive (a pint of beer costs €7.50, or about £6.50), petrol prices are the lowest in western Europe. There are four petrol stations at the border because people in Belgium drive over to fill up. “This kind of behaviour is not helping for a change to a fossil-free future,” says Frédéric Meys, Greenpeace’s local campaign manager.
“There is inside Luxembourg a culture of the car,” says Meys. “We have one of the highest levels of cars per inhabitant: it’s just below 700 cars per 1,000 people. And the average age of the cars is quite low compared to other countries in Europe.” Luxembourg also has the highest number of luxury cars per capita – dealerships for the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bentley appear to be everywhere. Luxembourg is a small, rich country, Meys explains. “So people are spending their money on cars.”
Many Luxembourgers I spoke to admitted as much. “Most of the people I associate with, the fact of making public transport free hasn’t really driven them to use it,” says Damon, a young lawyer who lives about 25 minutes’ drive outside the city centre. Most people still drive to work, he says, especially if they have somewhere to park at the other end. “It’s just faster. And if you’re leaving work at like six or seven in the evening, the frequency of the buses is reduced. So, instead of maybe every 10 or 15 minutes, it might be every 30 minutes or an hour. I can’t control when I finish work, so I might have to wait an hour for the next bus.”
Luxembourg’s car problem was part of the motivation for the free public transport initiative in the first place, explains François Bausch, the deputy prime minister and minister for mobility and public works. “Luxembourg is a country where the population was told by political officials for decades that the best way to move around is to buy or to have a car,” he says. “But, due to the development of the economy, and the specifics of Luxembourg – we have 630,000 inhabitants but also each day 230,000 commuters commuting from Belgium, France and Germany to Luxembourg to work – the congestion problems became terrible.” Up until a few years ago, Luxembourg’s city centre was routinely gridlocked. It’s not quite so bad today, says Meys, but it is still a problem.
Prising Luxembourgers out of their cars has not been easy, says Bausch, a Green party member. When he took over as transport minister in 2013 as part of the coalition government, he set about implementing a “paradigm shift”, he says. Making public transport free was a small part of that – “the cherry on the cake”. The real work was improving the transport infrastructure: building new train lines, upgrading stations and rolling stock, building the new tram line, adding cycle lanes and improving connections between different modes of public transport. “Nobody believed at the beginning that it would be possible in such a car-loving country,” he says.
Ahead of the launch of free public transport in 2020, there was a public campaign to change attitudes. “You must sell public transport in the same way cars have been sold in the past,” he says. “The success of the car was not only to be able to go on an individual basis from A to B, but also the way of life that was being sold. We tried to do this now. In the same way.” There was a jokey advertising campaign counting down to the big day – “like the first step on the moon!” – and on the day itself local bands played in railway stations and there were free public concerts.
The loss of income from abolishing fares was small, Bausch explains: about €40m a year, when the overall cost of running the system is about €800m, not including new investment. Unfortunately, the launch coincided with the arrival of the Covid pandemic (Luxembourg’s first recorded case was the day before the launch), which has made the success of the scheme difficult to assess. In 2022, the number of rail passengers was actually slightly lower (22.1 million) than it was in 2019, although tram journeys increased from about 22,000 a week in 2018 to 88,000 a week in 2022.
Some of the problems Luxembourg cannot fix by itself.
The army of commuters from neighbouring countries, for example, who still have to pay to get to Luxembourg on their own country’s rail systems.
Rush-hour commuter trains to and from Luxembourg are notoriously overcrowded, so many expat commuters still find it more convenient to drive, despite the longer journey times.
Combined with those Luxembourgers who enjoy driving, it means the traffic jams have not really gone away.
But the next phase of Luxembourg’s transportation plan, which goes to 2035, will hopefully address these problems, says Bausch.
He reels off his targets: 50% more seats on commuter services to France; trains to and from France every seven minutes by 2028 (Luxembourg is even investing €225m in modernising French rail lines to its borders). The central tram line is being extended to the airport in Findel.
All buses will be electric by 2030.
And a carbon tax on motor vehicles was introduced in 2020 and is increasing year by year.
It is now €30 per tonne of CO2; in 2027 it will be €45 per tonne. Electric cars are now heavily subsidised.
Last year they made up 20% of new vehicle sales; this year Bausch expects it to be about 38%.
“It’s not that we’re against cars,” he says. “Cars will remain a major part of the mobility chain in the future. So maybe for your daily business, you go the first five kilometres by car, then park it and the main part of your journey to work is by train, and then maybe you ride a free bike the last mile.”
Car fixation notwithstanding, Luxembourg is setting the standard.
“In the past two years, I’ve had interview requests from everywhere in the world,” says Bausch.
“I’ve even been on South Korean television.” In Greenpeace’s recent survey of European public transport, based on simplicity, affordability and accessibility, Luxembourg was the only country to score a perfect 100 (next came Malta, Austria and Germany).
Transport “accounts for 25% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions and almost 70% of all oil used in the EU,” says Greenpeace. “Shifting from car and air travel to public transport is a crucial strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil demand in Europe.”
Other countries and cities are waking up to this.
Public transport is now free in several cities including Tallinn, Estonia (since 2013), Valletta, Malta and several French cities, including Dunkirk and Montpellier.
Free transport is harder to replicate on a larger scale, but Spain, Germany and Austria have all experimented with free or reduced ticketing – to meet climate targets and ease citizens’ mounting living costs.
In October 2021, Austria introduced its Klimaticket – as in “climate ticket” – an annual pass offering unlimited travel on regional public transport within the country for just €3 a day.
Germany introduced a similar deal last summer, for just €9 a month. It proved wildly popular – attracting 31 million passengers in June alone – and there were calls to extend it.
This May, Germany introduced a permanent travel pass for €49 a month. Similarly in Spain, in 2022 the socialist-led coalition government reduced all public transport fares by 30%, and certain rail routes by 100%.
Car fixation notwithstanding, Luxembourg is setting the standard with its free public transport … Steve Rose on his odyssey.
Car fixation notwithstanding, Luxembourg is setting the standard with its free public transport … Steve Rose on his odyssey. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/The Guardian
To many countries this still seems like a distant fantasy, however.
In the UK, which privatised its railway system 30 years ago, train fares are expected to increase 8% this year – the largest increase in decades. Meanwhile, fuel duty for British motorists has been frozen for the past 13 years.
영국, 30년 전에 철도 사유화 경험.
올해 철도 요금 8% 올라.
“It’s a question of priorities,” says Bausch. “For me, a public transport system is really the first thing that the government of the state has to do, especially the infrastructure – the heavy investments …
The car industry is not responsible for the financing of the road system; the road system is funded by the public.
It should be the same for the public transport system. The basic idea is that you must invest. You must invest in infrastructure, in a mobility system, in a public transport system that is high quality, and only the public can do this. Believing or dreaming that private investors would do this, that’s ridiculous.”
The costs may be daunting, says Bausch, “but I’m convinced that today, if you are an important economic hub, giving access to mobility to everybody, on an equal basis, and having an efficient public transport, that’s an important factor. If we had continued like we were before, in 2013, it would have slowed down our economy.”
National politics are often the stumbling block (and Luxembourg has a general election next month), but the popularity of discounted public transport schemes across Europe shows that the public is crying out for solutions such as Luxembourg’s – to help with cost of living crises, traffic congestion, pollution and climate emergency targets. “This is the way we need to go,” says Meys. “We don’t have many other choices.
Electric cars are better but they are expensive, and there are pollution issues related to their production. The solution is really a shift in mobility: to walking, cycling and public transport. If we continue what we are doing now, we are headed for a brick wall.”
