Cross-border mobility: Rail or road? Space-time-lines as an evidence base for policy debates

Mobility and transport patterns in border regions are highly relevant topics, as these regions still tend to be areas of limited accessibility, embedded in complex political settings of transport policy. Moreover, the contemporary call for a transition to sustainable mobility applies also to border regions. Nevertheless, limited data availability and harmonization across borders hamper the debate. In this paper, we develop a methodological approach that builds on open-source data and allows for comparative analysis and visualization of cross-border mobility and accessibility. The key elements are “space-time-lines’, combined with an indexation approach. Our study aims to position the different means of transportation in border regions. More concretely speaking, we seek to answer three main questions: In which regional settings are rail or road connections quicker? Can we identify categories of accessibility patterns? How do domestic und cross-border accessibility relate? We respond to these questions with a rail and road accessibility analysis of German border regions from a comparative perspective. Our results show that (a) the catch-up process for cross-border accessibility is not yet complete and that (b) some regions show tunnel effects, as cross-border infrastructure improvements can bypass the border region in the local sense.