Vilmos Oszter

The spread of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has urged to take special actions to limit the level of contagion. The unprecedented scale of measures declared by the national governments in nearly every country ot the world would have a huge impact on public transport services and in general, on the citizens travel behaviours. This paper endeavours to give an overview of the emerged epidemic situation caused by COVID-19 in Hungary and some of its neighbouring Central and South-East European countries. It identifies the most important public transport service changes together with their interrelated impacts on the mobility patterns. The responses vary country per country so an overall comparison shows novel findings on emergency transport management policies.

Based on the Interreg Central Europe Territorial cooperation Programme’s CONNECT2CE project the current paper analyses the existing passenger traffic flow across the border which is among the TOP10 busiest border section of the EU. It provides an overview of the main socio-economic characteristic of the peripheral border area and identifies the factors which are leading to the continuous growth of cross-border traffic. Based on previous research and travel surveys it collects the past service attempts offered to tap the growing cross-border travel demand. It also presents the most recent passenger counts and relational (Origin-Destination O-D) ticketing statistic in order to get precise knowledge about the usage level of the existing service which helps to understand the rapidly changing mobility patterns and spatial structure. Finally, it takes into account the existing EU conform legal and organisational challenges for offering competitive public transport services on a cross-border route and proposes two new solutions as a contributionto achieve a sustainable modal shift towards public transport in the peripheral border area.