Croatia stands out from the EU: air transport overtakes car in passenger kilometres
While the main news at the European Union level is that trains have overtaken buses in passenger-kilometre share for the first time since 2014, data for Croatia show a completely different picture. In 2024, Croatia had the highest share of air transport among all EU member states, at a massive 45,6%.
Trains are growing in Europe, but the car still dominates
Eurostat estimates That in the EU during 2024, around 6.13 trillion passenger kilometres were travelled. Cars accounted for 69.21% of total transport activity, while air transport reached 15.81%.
Trains have increased their share to 7.5%, thus overtaking buses, coaches and trolleybuses, whose share dropped to 7.3%. This last happened more than a decade ago. Compared to 2014, the rail share increased by 0.9 percentage points, whilst air transport rose by 3.6 points.
As for Croatia, air transport accounted for 45,6% of total passenger-kilometres, far ahead of Bulgaria with 30,3% and Cyprus with 25,3%.
The share of cars simultaneously fell to 43.21 TP3T. Croatia is thus the only EU member state in which cars account for less than half of this indicator. A year earlier the ratio was reversed: road transport accounted for 45.41 TP3T, and air transport 43.51 TP3T. Croatia also stood out at sea. Maritime transport had a share of 2.31 TP3T, behind Estonia at 2.71 TP3T and Malta at 2.41 TP3T.
The figures do not mean that Croats travel by plane the most
Here, a methodological caveat is important. This is not a survey of residents' habits nor a statistic of tourist arrivals. Eurostat measures passenger kilometres on a territorial basis. In air transport, kilometres are also allocated according to the national airspace over which the flight passes. Therefore, the Croatian 45.6% should be interpreted as an indicator of the structure of transport activity, rather than as a claim that almost half of all journeys in Croatia are made by air.
Slovenia is not among the countries that stand out in this Eurostat overview for its modal share. However, Slovenian railways recorded a passenger kilometre growth of % in 2024, showing that the European recovery in rail transport is also visible in the region.
