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Share of city residents with convenient access to public transport

What you should know about this indicator

  • This indicator measures the share of people in cities who live within a short walk of a public transport stop — 500 metres for buses and trams, 1,000 metres for metro and rail. Distances are measured along the street network, not in a straight line. The higher threshold for metro and rail reflects that people are willing to walk further for faster, more reliable services.
  • This tells us whether people can physically reach a stop — not whether the service is actually good. A bus that runs twice a day counts the same as one that runs every five minutes.
  • In many cities, informal transport fills a large share of daily travel needs. Because these networks are often not fully mapped, actual access may be higher than the figures suggest.
  • Stop locations come from a mix of sources — OpenStreetMap, GTFS feeds, Google Maps, TomTom, and others. European cities use Eurostat data; some countries report their own figures from surveys or administrative records. This means the numbers are not always directly comparable across countries.
  • Country figures are averages across cities, weighted by population. Larger cities count for more, which better reflects where most people actually live.
  • City boundaries follow the Degree of Urbanization standard and may not match official administrative boundaries.
Share of city residents with convenient access to public transport
Share of people in who live within a short walk of a public transport stop — 500 metres for buses and trams, 1,000 metres for higher-capacity services like metro and rail.
Source
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 2, 2026
Next expected update
March 2027
Date range
2020–2020
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations Human Settlements Programme – SDG Indicator 11.2.1 - Access to Public Transport

SDG Indicator 11.2.1 measures the proportion of the population that has convenient access to public transport, disaggregated by sex, age and persons with disabilities.

Retrieved on
March 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/access-to-basic-services-in-cities-and-urban-areas
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). 2025. SDG Indicator 11.2.1 – Access to Public Transport. Urban Indicators Database.

SDG Indicator 11.2.1 measures the proportion of the population that has convenient access to public transport, disaggregated by sex, age and persons with disabilities.

Retrieved on
March 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://data.unhabitat.org/pages/access-to-basic-services-in-cities-and-urban-areas
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). 2025. SDG Indicator 11.2.1 – Access to Public Transport. Urban Indicators Database.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Administrative regions (167 entries) were excluded from the original SDG dataset to focus on actual cities. Country values are calculated as population-weighted averages across all cities with available population data. City populations are sourced from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) Urban Centers database (2020 values). Cities are matched with GHSL data using multiple strategies: normalized name matching (removes diacritics, handles alternative names), substring matching, compound name handling (e.g., "City, Province" → "City"), prefix matching, and 59 manual mappings for cities with transliteration differences or alternative names (e.g., "Casablanca" → "Dar-el-Beida", "Luxembourg-Ville" → "Luxembourg (Lëtzebuerg)").

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of city residents with convenient access to public transport”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2024) - “Urbanization”. Data adapted from United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260422-182736/grapher/share-of-city-residents-with-convenient-access-to-public-transport.html [online resource] (archived on April 22, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of city residents with convenient access to public transport” [dataset]. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, “SDG Indicator 11.2.1 - Access to Public Transport” [original data]. Retrieved April 22, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260422-182736/grapher/share-of-city-residents-with-convenient-access-to-public-transport.html (archived on April 22, 2026).

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