Countries With the Highest Public Transit Use

In Hong Kong, roughly nine out of every ten daily trips happen on a train, bus, tram, or ferry, which makes it the closest thing on Earth to a place where the car lost. Most of the world does not look like that. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of trips still happen behind a private windshield, and much of the planet falls somewhere between those poles. Who actually rides, and who merely could? Those turn out to be two different questions with two different answer sheets, and this article works through both, ending with the twenty countries where city dwellers are most likely to have transit within reach.

Two Ways To Count A Rider

There is no global turnstile. Every country counts transit ridership differently, if it counts at all, so the cleanest way to compare nations is the United Nations' measure of access: the share of a country's urban residents who live within a walkable distance of a public transport stop, roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) for a bus or tram and 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) for a metro or commuter rail line. That is the measure behind the table below. Actual usage is tracked separately through surveys, and the two tell different stories. A country can wrap nearly every city block in bus stops and still watch its citizens drive past them, which, as the numbers show, is exactly what happens in a surprising number of wealthy places.

The Usage Champions

By raw habit, the crown belongs to Hong Kong, where the MTR and its allies carry about 90 percent of daily motorized trips. The system is so well run that it does something almost no metro on the planet manages: it turns a profit, funding itself through the famous rail-plus-property model that builds neighborhoods on top of its own stations. Singapore plays a similar game with different tools, pairing a spotless metro with eye-watering car ownership taxes, and a recent consumer survey found 65 percent of Singaporeans ride public transport at least twice a week, the highest share of any country measured.

Daily dependence looks different in the developing world. A widely cited 2017 global survey found the largest shares of daily transit users in Kenya (63 percent), Russia (57 percent), and a cluster including Venezuela, Ukraine, and the Philippines (56 percent each), with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, Colombia, and Chile close behind. The common thread was not luxury but necessity: where cars are expensive relative to income, the bus is not a lifestyle choice, it is the economy's circulatory system. Nairobi's privately run matatu minibuses move the city almost single-handedly, and Kenya's Madaraka Express, the standard-gauge railway launched in 2017, added a modern intercity spine between Nairobi and Mombasa.

Perfect Scores And Near Misses

Two countries hit a flat 100 on the UN's access measure: Israel and Monaco. Israel earns it with compact cities blanketed in bus routes, plus Jerusalem's light rail and the growing Tel Aviv system, with the notable national quirk that most of the network rests on Shabbat. Monaco earns it with geometry. The entire principality covers about two square kilometers, smaller than New York's Central Park, so there is simply nowhere to stand that is far from a bus stop.

The near-perfect tier is more surprising. The Maldives scores 98.8, powered by Malé, one of the most densely packed cities anywhere, where ferries do the work highways do elsewhere. Turkey lands fourth at 97.6, anchored by Istanbul, a city so committed to transit that its Marmaray rail line runs beneath the Bosphorus and carries commuters between Europe and Asia in minutes. Qatar follows at 97.4 on the strength of the driverless Doha Metro, built in under a decade and opened in 2019.

Europe, Wall To Wall

Then comes the European wall: fourteen of the top twenty are European countries, from a continent that treats a nearby bus stop as basic infrastructure rather than an amenity. Luxembourg (97.4) went furthest of anyone. In 2020 it made every train, tram, and bus in the country free, the first nation in the world to abolish public transport fares entirely. Spain (97.2) backs one of Europe's largest metro networks in Madrid, and Austria (96.8) is home to Vienna's celebrated 365-euro annual pass, which prices a full year of unlimited rides at roughly one euro per day.

Access, though, is not the same as ridership, and Europe proves it. A 2024 European survey found that 81 percent of residents use public transport for day-to-day travel, yet Eurostat reported that 51 percent of EU residents did not use it at all in a typical 2024 week, and even in Luxembourg, the EU's most frequent-riding country, only 23.1 percent used it weekly. In Madrid and Warsaw, more than half of residents still reach for the car first. Building the stop, it turns out, is the easy half of the job.

What Actually Gets People On Board

The countries at the top of both lists share a short recipe. Density does the heavy lifting, since transit thrives where people cluster and struggles where they sprawl. Price closes the deal, whether through Luxembourg's free fares, Vienna's euro-a-day pass, or Hong Kong's fares kept low by real estate profits. Frequency keeps the deal closed, because a bus every five minutes is transport while a bus every 45 minutes is a rumor. And legacy matters: Georgia rounds out the top twenty at 94.0 largely because Tbilisi inherited a Soviet-built metro, opened in 1966, that still moves the capital every day. Countries that laid the rails early are still collecting the dividend.

The Top Twenty

Figures are the share of urban residents living within walking distance of a public transport stop, from the United Nations SDG Indicators Database (indicator 11.2.1, 2020 values, national averages across measured cities).

The Stop Is Only The Start

The table rewards countries that put a stop near everyone, and the surveys reward countries that give people a reason to use it. The rare places that ace both, like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Luxembourg, do it by making transit cheaper, faster, or simply more pleasant than driving, not by assuming proximity will do the persuading. For everyone else, the lesson runs one way: the walk to the stop is the shortest part of the journey to actually getting people on board.