Getting home by bus or tram on weekends isn’t always straightforward in Germany’s major cities, according to a new study by the ADAC. The automobile club examined 100 late-night connections in 20 cities with populations between 100,000 and one million.
The analysis found that travel before midnight is particularly challenging for under-18s. Routes tested included five suburban municipalities in each city, focusing on areas with a younger population. Researchers looked at connections between 11:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m., with special attention to the 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. slot, crucial for younger travelers.
Half of the cities surveyed offered good to very good service, including Leipzig, Mannheim, Augsburg, Bremen, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt am Main. By contrast, Lübeck, Osnabrück, Potsdam, and Erfurt ranked at the bottom, providing only limited or inconsistent service. Bielefeld, Magdeburg, and Rostock were excluded entirely because available routes failed to appear in online timetable searches at the time of testing.
Connections between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. were a weak spot in many cities. In some cases, the next available bus or tram didn’t run until much later in the night. Only 12 of the cities offered connections to all five suburban destinations within that key window.
Interestingly, all seven cities with more than half a million residents performed well. But size was not the only factor: Koblenz, with just 115,000 inhabitants and relatively small suburbs, also scored positively.
Beyond the service gaps, testers criticized unreliable timetable information on public transport websites. In 13 of the 20 cities checked, schedule data failed to work consistently, and flexible on-demand options were often missing from search results.
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