For more than five years now, Croatia has been
increasingly focusing on making train travel free for
children, schoolchildren and older people. The offer, which
began as a temporary pilot project, has led to a sharp
increase in passenger numbers. Now the government has
expanded the programme once again: since the beginning of
the year, people with disabilities have also been able to
use public rail transport free of
charge.
Today, ten times more
schoolchildren use public transport than five years
ago.
A free train programme originally
started about five years ago as a pilot project and was not
intended to last longer than 15 months. The Croatian
government introduced free public transport for
schoolchildren in autumn 2021. The aim was to improve
connections to remote communities and stop the exodus from
small villages. Schoolchildren were given access to all the
public transport they needed for their journey to school,
similar to the free school transport in Austria. The result
was an almost tenfold increase in the number of regular
users. According to the Croatian news
portals portal.hr and poravski.hr, 7,000 schoolchildren
typically used public transport to get to school in 2020,
but today that number has risen to 60,000.
In the
years that followed, the Croatian government extended the
offer to more and more sections of the population. By 2025,
around 150,000 pensioners were travelling free of charge on
the rail network. Students have been benefiting from free
train travel since January 2024 and use public transport
primarily to commute between their homes and universities.
Since 2026, people
with disabilities have also been able to travel by train
for free as often as they want. The only requirement is a
national or European disability card.
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Tourism
is also becoming greener: trains between Pula and Zagreb are
running again
In addition, the train
connection between Pula and Zagreb was resumed in autumn
2025 after a three-decade hiatus. The new trains are direct
connections, with a journey time of around seven hours.
According to Željko
Ukić, head of the Croatian railway company HŽ
Passenger Transport, the focus here is also on easy
accessibility:
”We need to develop the
habit of using this route and make it accessible to citizens
in order to connect Istria with the rest of
Croatia.“
In addition, it is also about
improving connections with neighbouring countries. For
example, cooperation with Slovenian Railways is to be
strengthened in order to be able to offer more train
connections in the coming years.
”I am
convinced that cooperation with my colleagues at Slovenske
železnice (the Slovenian railway company, note) will lead
to the introduction of additional trains on various routes
in the future,“says Croatian railway chief
Ukić.
The expansion of rail transport
and the revitalisation of the Pula-Zagreb route are not only
beneficial for the Croatian and Slovenian populations. It
also has positive effects on sustainable
tourism.
Nevertheless, the railway in Croatia
is slow and poorly developed
Croatia’s rail
network continues to struggle with a variety of problems.
Above all, the infrastructure is considered outdated. In
addition, Croatia’s national railway company split into
four parts in 2012. According to experts such as Nikolina
Rajković from the Croatian Institute for Political
Ecology, this division made the sector more vulnerable to
further liberalisation and privatisation. Large
international providers could more easily put pressure on
national operators. The decades-long lack of modernisation
is also reflected in the speed of the trains. According to
Rajković, the average speed limits are only around 40-60
km/h. Express trains travelling at 140-160 km/h, on the
other hand, are only possible on 4 per cent of the
routes.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Common License. It can be republished for free,
either translated or in the original language. The original
author/source https://kontrast.at/
/ Anna Weisz and link to the English article on
TheBetter.news.
https://thebetter.news/free-train-travel-croatia/ The rights
to the content remain with the original
publisher.
