Residents of Germany’s border regions assess cross-border hospital access; 880,000 by private transport vs 27,000 by public.
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Type:NewsDate30 April 2026Healthcare Infrastructure in Border Regions
Ensuring access to healthcare facilities, schools, and supermarkets to improve and safeguard public services is one of the main objectives of regional planning policy. However, for people in border regions, the best and most accessible facilities are often located on the other side of the border. To date, however, accessibility has not been systematically documented, particularly in a cross-border context. There is a lack of empirical evidence for local and regional stakeholders in the fields of spatial and urban planning as well as transportation planning to discuss the benefits of cross-border opportunities.
This issue presents ways to solve this problem and introduces new methodological approaches: For the first time, granular, cross-border accessibility to hospitals in the German border region and its neighbouring countries is demonstrated, using both private motorised transport and public transportation.
The results show that in Germany’s border regions, approximately 880,000 people can reach a hospital on the other side of the border most quickly by private motorized transport, whereas this applies to only 27,000 people using public transport. Significant differences in travel times are evident due to a lack of integrated schedules, as well as a lack of connections in the often rural border regions.
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