Efficiency of public transport for cross-border commuting: An accessibility-based analysis in Central Europe

According to the principles of sustainable mobility, public transport (PT) is becoming a new paradigm to measure the accessibility of a region. This paper analyses PT accessibility for commuters that travel in cross-border areas of Central Europe, a region that has registered a significant growth of transnational movements in the last 20 years. A specific geographic area (i.e. the boundary between Hungary and Austria) is then deepened, according to its territorial and socio-economic peculiarities. Here, the indicators usually adopted in a gravity model (i.e. distance between origins and destinations and their number of inhabitants) do not completely match with the registered movements; rather, the average income and the work opportunities available in the destinations explain the cross-border flows better. Then, a Cross-Border Commuting PT Accessibility based on the Relative Network Efficiency Indicator is made for the main connections and compared with the Domestic Commuting PT Accessibility. This analysis highlights that 1) cross-border accessibility by PT is limited for several rural destinations that have few inhabitants but a non-negligible number of cross-border commuters; 2) the differences in PT attractiveness between domestic and transnational journeys are still very high and are mainly due to long travel times, complex multimodal chains, and unappealing fares. These results suggest the importance of an integrated approach among operators from different territories, which are called upon to bridge the existing technical, coordination and cooperation gaps.