Luxembourg’s love affair with cars continues, with the country boasting the second-highest rate of cars relative to population anywhere in the EU in 2024, according to data published on Friday by the bloc’s official statistics agency Eurostat.
Only Italy, with 701 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 2024, had a higher rate of car ownership than Luxembourg, which had 670.
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Luxembourg’s share was much higher than the EU average, of 578 cars per 1,000 residents, while car ownership in the Grand Duchy was almost 50% above the rate seen in the lowest-ranked country of Latvia, at 424.
However, signs of decreasing vehicle usage were also evident in the data, with Luxembourg having been in the top spot until 2021, before being overtaken by Italy the following year.
Luxembourg’s ratio may not be fully representative, as it includes cross-border commuters driving company-leased vehicles registered in the Grand Duchy.
Fewer freight kilometres
There was also a sharp drop in freight transport in Luxembourg over the past decade, according to the vehicle-kilometre metric – multiplying the number of vehicles by the average length of trips in kilometres.
Using this measurement, the distance travelled by freight transport vehicles in Luxembourg plummeted by almost 18% from 2014, against the opposite trend across the EU, which saw a 15% increase.
Luxembourg’s road death rate among highest in EU
Comparing 2022 and 2023 data, Luxembourg saw one of the biggest declines in fatalities due to road accidents across the EU, down from 56 to 39 deaths per million inhabitants, with a larger drop only registered by Malta.
The data was contained in Eurostat’s annual report on transport trends, entitled the “Key Figures on European Transport: 2025 edition,” which also showed that air passenger travel in Luxembourg is the third-highest in the EU relative to population size.
There were 7.5 air passengers per inhabitant in 2024 in the Grand Duchy, more than three times the EU average of 2.3 and surpassed only by the islands of Malta and Cyprus.
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Luxembourg has one of the EU’s densest rail networks, with more than 100km of rail lines per 1,000km of land area in 2023, Eurostat said, with only Czechia, Belgium and Germany hosting more train tracks.
The Grand Duchy has the second-densest motorway network of any EU country behind the Netherlands, and recorded the third-biggest motorway network expansion in the decade from 2013, increasing its network by 6km per 1,000km of land area.
Although it lags behind on other gender equality metrics, Luxembourg had the highest share of women working in the transport sector of any EU country. In 2024, just over one in four employees (26.3%) in the transport industry was female, well above the EU average of 17.7%.