New figures from Danmarks Statistik show that access to public transport within 500 meters of home has worsened in two out of three Danish municipalities since 2023.
DR reported on August 25 that in 67 municipalities, a larger share of residents has lost access to public transport within 500 meters of their home since 2023. The broadcaster published an interactive map allowing readers to check their own municipality.
The figures come from a new Danmarks Statistik calculation of service levels in collective transport. The method looks at how often it is possible to board a bus, train, or metro within 500 meters of a person’s front door. According to DR, both stop locations and the number of departures have changed, and the declines are small in some places and larger in others.
Danmarks Statistik measures this as indicator 11.2.1 under the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The agency’s documentation, updated March 18, 2026, describes five service levels, ranging from very high to none, based on departure frequency and the number of transport modes. The measurements were taken on typical working days in December 2019, March 2023, and 2025, between 06:00 and 20:00.
The underlying municipality data comes from a table in Statistikbanken labeled LABY49, which was updated on April 1, 2026. It combines stop information from Rejseplanen, the road network from Kortforsyningen, and population data from the civil registration system.
Traffic researcher Otto Anker Nielsen from DTU told DR that the finances of collective transport in rural areas have become difficult. There are fewer passengers and less ticket revenue in sparsely populated areas, while drivers’ wages have risen. As he described it, routes are then closed, service gets worse, and even fewer passengers remain, creating a vicious circle.
Nielsen also pointed to a shift in municipal priorities toward express routes, where buses run more directly between main towns without detours. Many passengers appreciate the faster connections, he said, but a small number of residents in outlying areas lose the coverage they previously had. He noted that serving every part of a municipality is expensive, which has driven cuts to bus routes in several places.
Rural municipalities most exposed
The specialist outlet MobilityWatch reported the same figures on August 25, stating that access has deteriorated in the majority of the country’s municipalities. It added that express routes and carpooling solutions are gaining ground as traditional routes are scaled back.
Danmarks Statistik’s own theme page on rural and urban areas, updated August 22, 2026, notes that the highest shares of residents with low or no service level are found in rural and hinterland municipalities. That pattern was also described in a 2024 factsheet from the Bus22+ project, which summarized the same 500 meter method.
Both DR and MobilityWatch present the story as a response to the newly processed 2025 measurement, which allows direct comparison with March 2023 for every municipality. Readers can compare stops and departures using transport apps that draw on the same Rejseplanen data.
