Every five years, TU Dresden conducts a Germany-wide survey of the modal split, i.e. the percentage of the population that uses different modes of transportation for their journeys. As part of this study, a detailed survey was commissioned and carried out for Wiesbaden.

The biggest change compared to the previous survey in 2018 can be seen in the significant increase in walking among the Wiesbaden population, while at the same time car traffic has decreased. The proportion of pedestrian traffic has risen from 27.9% to 33.5%, meaning that a third of all journeys made by the Wiesbaden population are on foot.

The cycling mode share increased by 1.9 percentage points compared to 2018. While the share for short distances of less than 3 kilometers remained stable, it increased significantly for medium and longer distances. The cycling mode share has more than doubled for distances over 5 kilometers. One driver of this development is also the increasing use of e-bikes: one in five bikes in Wiesbaden is now electrically assisted. The bicycle is becoming increasingly relevant as an everyday means of transportation for journeys to work: the share has risen from 7 percent of journeys (2013) to 10 percent (2018) and 13 percent today.

The figures show that walking and cycling are increasingly complementing each other: While walking has been able to increase its dominance on routes of less than one kilometer (from 75 percent to 80 percent), the share of cycling on all routes over 3 kilometers has roughly doubled.

The share of local public transport remained almost stable, despite the disruption caused by the damaged Salzbachtalbrücke bridge and the reduced ESWE timetable at the time of the survey. The increase in the proportion of people working from home over the last five years - 21% of respondents were working from home on the day of the survey - has also had a dampening effect on demand for bus and rail travel. This was offset by the introduction of the Deutschlandticket, which was available for two thirds of the period under review.

"Lots of cars on our roads are a burden for everyone - for residents, but also for all those who rely on cars. The fact that the people of Wiesbaden are making significantly fewer car journeys today than five years ago is a positive sign. Following the latest TomTom study, which found a significant gain in travel time of over one minute per ten kilometers in Wiesbaden, the new modal split data is now the second piece of good news in a short space of time. However, through traffic from the Taunus remains a problem, which we would like to shift step by step from inside to outside the city with various measures," says Kowol. He sees the great leap that pedestrian traffic has made as confirmation of the city's activities to promote pedestrian traffic, for example through new barrier-free road crossings and the new pedestrian zones Mühlgasse, Wellritzstraße and Gerichtsstraße. "The fact that bicycle use has increased, particularly on longer distances and on journeys to work, is an incentive for us to increasingly connect the suburbs and neighboring towns with new cycling infrastructure. The e-bike is about to become a real game changer."

Conclusion and outlook: Walking is the big winner in the current transport study. This finding confirms the city's strategy of making more space available for walking: This includes the barrier-free conversion of junctions (e.g. Klarenthaler Straße), wider set-up areas at two of the most important traffic lights (in front of the main railway station and Schwalbacher Straße/Bleichstraße) and the creation of new pedestrian zones in Wellritzstraße, Gerichtsstraße, Mühlgasse and at Schiersteiner Hafen.

The study shows two major potentials for changing the choice of means of transportation: On the one hand, around 37,000 trips are made by car every day for short distances of up to 1 kilometer; up to 3 kilometers, the figure is as high as 150,000 car trips per day.

On the other hand, 34 percent of journeys to nursery, school or training are made by private motorized transport (private motorized transport, driving oneself or as a child in a so-called "parent cab"). Only 24 percent use public transport and only 9 percent cycle. Here, the city can create incentives to switch to another mode of transport.

Methodology: The "Mobility in Cities" transport survey was introduced in 1972 as the "System of Representative Transport Surveys (SrV)" and is used to determine the mobility characteristics of the urban resident population. Every five years, the Technical University of Dresden collects important basic data for municipal transport planning and on cross-city mobility trends and their boundary conditions using large samples. For the recently published SrV 2023 study, over 280,000 people in almost 500 cities across Germany were surveyed by means of telephone interviews and online surveys between January 2023 and January 2024. In Wiesbaden, a total of 2,016 randomly selected people were surveyed as part of a focus survey coordinated by the Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund (RMV): the results are sociologically representative of the Wiesbaden population.

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