More and more Leipzig residents are walking on their daily journeys. This is shown by the results of the current mobility survey "Mobility in Cities - SrV (System of Representative Transport Surveys)" by the Technical University of Dresden in Leipzig, which are now available. Around 3,500 Leipzig residents from 2,000 households were asked about their mobility behavior in 2023. According to the survey, Leipzig residents walk 33 percent of their daily journeys and use a car for 31 percent. Just under 20 percent of everyday journeys are made by bike and a good 16 percent by public transport.
Leipzig is therefore coming ever closer to its goal of becoming a "city of short distances": on average, respondents are covering shorter distances - the average travel distance per journey has fallen from 6 to 5.3 kilometers. At the same time, the proportion of journeys made on foot has increased significantly. This trend is reinforced by the fact that work trips are becoming less important as a result of working from home, while leisure trips are gaining in importance. At the same time, people's mobility and health awareness has changed.
Leipzig is also doing well with regard to the modal split targets of the city's mobility strategy: The environmental alliance is getting ever closer to the target of 70 percent of trips. In order to achieve and maintain this, great efforts are still required. Environmentally friendly means of transport, especially public transport as the backbone of mobility for longer journeys, must also be promoted more strongly in the future. To make buses and trains more attractive than cars, local public transport must continue to be expanded and accelerated. There is also potential for improvement in walking and cycling. While the services here are already at a relatively high level, especially in the inner-city areas, there are still major gaps in the cycling network in the outlying areas, for example, which need to be closed.
"The results of the survey show that the implementation of the Mobility Strategy 2030 is working. More and more Leipzig residents are relying on eco-mobility, i.e. walking, cycling or using public transport more and more often. We have therefore almost achieved the goals that the city council has set us for the coming years." Says Thomas Dienberg, Leipzig's Mayor for Urban Development and Construction.
The proportion of car journeys - measured in passenger kilometers ("modal split by transport performance") - is down by a fifth or 11 percentage points compared to 2018. The eco-friendly modes of transport, i.e. cycling, walking and local public transport, increased by 30 percent or 11 percentage points in the same period. This will significantly reduce the CO2 emissions caused by Leipzig's residents in the transport sector.
In terms of the distances traveled ("classic modal split"), the share of public transport will remain slightly lower than in 2018, but there will be a clear trend reversal in the course of 2023. While the use of public transport was still influenced by the effects of coronavirus in the first half of the year, it rose above pre-pandemic levels in the second half of the year. New demand was stimulated, among other things, by the gradual normalization of the timetable after the pandemic and the introduction of the Deutschland-Ticket and corresponding marketing. This positive trend continued in 2024 and, with the gradual implementation of the route network of the future, led to a record number of LVB passengers: 167 million people used the LVB service in 2024.
"With the support of the Leipziger Gruppe and the city of Leipzig, we were able to bring more services to the streets for the people of Leipzig and thus strengthen the environmental network overall," says Sandy Brachmann, Head of Marketing at Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe.
The efforts to promote walking and cycling in the city of Leipzig in recent years are also having an impact. The share of journeys made by both modes of transport has increased since 2018. For walking in particular, there has been a large increase in the city-wide share from 27 to 33 percent.
The system of representative traffic surveys was established at TU Dresden back in 1972. The survey is carried out every five years - the last survey before 2023 was carried out in 2018. As over 500 municipalities with a total of more than 270,000 respondents take part alongside Leipzig, trends can also be identified across cities: For example, how car-sharing services and electric bicycles are used.
Further information is available at www.leipzig.de/verkehrsbefragungen. The results of previous studies on "Mobility in Cities - SrV" are also available there.
+++ In Leipzig, there is a clear trend towards eco-mobility: walking, cycling and public transport are gaining in importance, while car traffic is declining. The Mobility Strategy 2030 is having an impact and bringing Leipzig closer to its environmentally friendly goals. +++
