10 ms·

More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

102 points by edward 7y ago

pr0duktiv 7y ago
Glad that they’re working on it, right now flying is just cheaper on many cases. Need to go from Zurich to Paris? The TGV Train will cost you almost twice as much as a short direct flight. Berlin to Munich? Also cheaper by plane. Being a student with a limited budget, this very much affects my decision.
- sudoaza 7y ago
  Yes, this is crazy!! We need action on this immediately. I suspect aviation subsides are to blame.
  - dzhiurgis 7y ago
    Aviation is highly taxed (about half of your ticket). Subsidies (or more accurately tax discounts) are only on fuel which is something like 10% of your flight costs. Rest goes on staff and capex. There already is form of transport that's much cheaper than train or flying which is called BUS. We can make them fully electric and even have different classes. They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate...
    - sudoaza 7y ago
      Eeww maybe once flixbus is fully electric...
    - ac29 7y ago
      >They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate... Spending on highways and roads was $175 billion in the US in 2016 [0]. They absolutely do require massive numbers of people to maintain them - for example, Caltrans, the California agency that manages the state highway system, has over 18,000 permanent staff. [0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
- dbmueller 7y ago
  I often find using interrail.eu to be a good option. Much more elastic, and can quickly get financially interesting, even more so for multi-hop travels.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Thing is, not only it is cheaper, it is much more effective regarding use of time. Zurich to Paris just takes too long by train, and doing night trains isn't always an option.
  - dbmueller 7y ago
    4 hours isn't that long, is it? plane cannot beat that by much
    - input_sh 7y ago
      Especially when you account boarding, navigating the airport, having to show up at least half an hour before the flight, security checkups... All time-consuming tasks related to boarding the actual aircraft that you don't have to go through to hop on a train.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        No, you have to run like crazy hoping not to lose the connection train, being stopped in the middle of nowhere without any information, stuffed into wagons without air conditioning and possibility to open the windows, cramped with more passengers than available seats, without any place to stuff luggage, out of order toilets,....
        bravura 7y ago
        Okay so fly to CDG in Paris and then enjoy the annoying train ride into Paris that takes an hour and leaves infrequently. How do you get to and from the airport anyway? Many cities it’s a nightmare to get to the airport, whereas the train station is usually central.
        Sharlin 7y ago
        None of those is somehow intrinsic to train travel, as I’m sure you’re aware. Quality of service is just a function of priorities.
        7y ago
- papaf 7y ago
  Also cheaper by plane. Being a student with a limited budget, this very much affects my decision. My tips would be: * Book at least a week in advance. * Buy a Bahn Card 25. * Get up early. If you do this Berlin -> Munich is €44.90 next Saturday on the 4 hour fast train. Also don't forget, it costs around €11 to go from Munich airport to the city.
  - ArmandGrillet 7y ago
    This is the pro-tip, a Bahn Card 25 reimburses itself in 2-3 trips and trains booked 6 weeks in advance (which is what I do for airplanes) or even 3-4 weeks in advances are inexpensive (like 30€ for a Hamburg Dammtor -Frankfurt HbF which is way more comfortable than going to both airports). One thing I despise about trains in Germany and France is that the experience still feels way too old school. What happens when something is delayed or when a connection has an issue makes you feel back in the eighties. The Deutsche Bahn applications are a great way to see that, it's confused and overly complicated. I wish the UX of apps/websites like https://www.trainline.eu/ https://www.trainline.eu/ would be the standard by now.
    - pr0duktiv 7y ago
      BahnCard is great, but what we really need is an inner-European loyalty card for trains. BahnCard only works in Germany and I don’t want to buy another loyalty card whenever I go to another European country.
  - pr0duktiv 7y ago
    Might have been a bad example, I was about to book the TGV from Zurich to Paris 5 weeks in advance for a weekend trip and I have the Swiss half-fare subscription (like BahnCard 50). Still would’ve been ~170€ instead of 90 CHF for a direct flight (both ways)
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > Buy a Bahn Card 25 Why does buying an affordable train ticket always involve a treasure hunt of weird ticketing combinations and cards like this?
- Hamuko 7y ago
  A flight between Helsinki and Rovaniemi is like 1h 20min. The train will take 8 to 12 hours. Even accounting for all of the airport bullshit, you'll save so much time by taking the plane without a big increase in cost (at least if you book in advance).
WilliamEdward 7y ago
Public transportation is eventually going to have to replace both cars and planes. Yes, it will cost a lot. Yes, it probably wont make profit. This is fine, it's a moral duty we have as a society and at the end of the day railways are far safer than roads. In the long run a densely populated city benefits tremendously from trains, as seen in any major city.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Public transportation is eventually going to have to replace both cars and planes. ...but commercial airline planes are public transportation.
  - WilliamEdward 7y ago
    No, public means public owned and operated by government, ie: not private.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      No, in the UK, for example, the busses and trains are owned and operated by private companies, not the government. But no reasonable person would call them anything but public transport.
Darmody 7y ago
As a European I love this. Not only because it's better for the environment but I really like trains. They are confy, fast and cheap. There's no need to pay extra for your baggage, you just hop in with your stuff, take a seat, read, watch a movie, listen to a podcast or sleep for a while and you're already at your destination.
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  They are not that comfortable. Sure you've got slightly more leg space than Ryanair, but difference is minimal. The only train I've really ever liked was Amtrak, but unsure whether I was somehow upgraded to their premium seats. Taking Canadian train after that was a torture. Also they are much more expensive. Which makes sense as tech itself is legacy. The cost of maintaining, lack of competition (especially with buses) is killing them. Honestly I don't see how we can't replace trains with electric buses...
  - franze 7y ago
    Ok, seems like you didn't ride European trains yet.
    - lixtra 7y ago
      They are on a vast spectrum. Going from Frankfurt to Cologne second class in a train of soccer fans is very different from taking a first class ride in Switzerland.
      - bonoboTP 7y ago
        Or riding in Ukraine or Eastern Hungary. (Europe isn't just Western Europe...)
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        Sure, and flying up front on Cathay is a bit different from flying on, say, RyanAir. https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/816431/Ryanair-flight-sex-Ibiza https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/816431/Ryanair-fli...
rcarmo 7y ago
As a former weekly train traveler, I fully support this. Plane travel has become a loathing, humiliating nuisance that absolutely nobody is excited about (sometimes not even airlines, considering the kind of service they provide).
deugtniet 7y ago
Last weekend, I took the night train from Briancon to Paris, step in at ~21:00, step out at 07:00 the next morning. My first time in a night train, pretty surreal but pleasant experience. I had to take a semi connecting train from Paris to the Netherlands (where I live), so it would be so awesome just to wake up on destination. I'm considering if it's a good idea to tax air travel inside the EU to help the trains move forward. I believe air travel is not taxed at all. The resulting money could be spent on climate change reducing policies.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Not taxed at all? Is that really the case? Most tickets I get are usually £10 fare then like £50 taxes? I think those are passenger duty Vs the actual flight itself though if that is what you mean?
  - deugtniet 7y ago
    Those are usually airport fees and such, I don't know where you get these numbers, but the airline pays the airport for the use of the terminal, baggage handling, air traffic control, etc. This is different from tax, as without it you would not fly.
- fogetti 7y ago
  While I like the idea of traveling by train, and I even took a night train from Munich to Budapest in the past, but on that specific route I had to share my cabin with a guy who just got released from jail a day earlier so I was not pleasantly relaxed. The fact that the cabin only had 2 bunk beds and I was pretty much isolated from other passengers and I had no way to keep my money and other important things in a safe, made me worried a lot. The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with. Having said that, I would still prefer to take the train when it's possible. Central railway stations are usually pretty much in the best locations of most European cities, where the connections are really good. But there is one more thing that even the article mentions: > In general, there is strong demand for reliable and frequent services between large cities I second that: even in Germany the I.C.E is notorious for the delays and the poor passenger experience. So there is a lot to improve for the rail operators.
postingawayonhn 7y ago
Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions. Hardly even worth worrying about. Results will be much better if resources are focused on the big emitters (road transport, electricity/heating, and manufacturing).
- ced 7y ago
  Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions. Because the majority of humanity has never flown at all. What fraction of your CO2 emissions came from flying last year?
  - postingawayonhn 7y ago
    Fair point, though I don't see any major problem even if air travel was to increase by 2 or 3 times, so long as we make significant reductions in other areas. I took 6 flights (~3,000km each). I would start with the immediate implementation of a tax (10%?, 20%?) on all new ICE vehicle sales. Revenue from this tax would be used to subsidize the purchase of EVs.
    - morsch 7y ago
      At approximately 1000 kg COeq per 3000 km trip[1]. Your budget for the whole year was 2300 kg. [1] https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight
      - postingawayonhn 7y ago
        Where is 1,000kg coming from? I looked up one of my flights (actually only about 2,400km) using that calculator and only got 230kg (83kg of C02 and 173kg of "contrails, ozone formations, etc."). This flight was on a A321neo.
        morsch 7y ago
        I took a random 7000 km flight and extrapolated. Sorry if that ended up off by such a large martin.
eddhead 7y ago
As someone in the UK, this won't happen until they lower the prices by a tenth. It's insanely expensive and not feasible depend on it. It's so bad that the train companies themselves ask their employees use flights instead of the network railways to save costs. They're all owned by european governments, so they have no incentive to make things cheaper in the UK.
paul_f 7y ago
If you are travelling inside of one country, France or Germany for example, it's great. However, if you want to take the train from Barcelona to Milan, it's 11 hours and 40 minutes. If you fly, it is 1 hour and 40 minutes.
alkonaut 7y ago
Cross border rail travel is a mess. We had online booking of flights across countries and airlines since forever, and thousands of booking sites seem to be able to hook into the booking backends like Amadeus and provide multi hop booking. Doing the same for train travel isn’t nearly as easy. This should be priority one. The second priority should be cost. Train travel should never be more expensive than even low cost airline tickets. Within the EU this would seem fixable by taxing and subsidies to just move money from air travel to train ticket subsidies. Tax funded subsidies is a clumsy instrument but it’s needed.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Trainline.com does this very well in (north west?) europe, IME. Across borders and different providers.
chrisseaton 7y ago
I think an issue for trains is a lack of an international unified system for routing, timetabling, booking, ticketing, labelling and so on. Planes are the same everywhere. Flight number, gate number, time, and destination, everything available in English. Easy. I can catch a plane in Japan no problem. When I fly into a foreign city and try to take the train into the city it’s always a whole big mess. Inconsistent systems for referring to routes, express trains, stopping trains, multiple ticketing options, travel cards, peak and offpeak, is my train at platform 9 1/4 or 9 3/4, often no reservation system, announcements and signs not in English, no help available. Each city seems to go out of their way to do things completely differently to everyone else. Busses are even worse than that.
- IkmoIkmo 7y ago
  This so much. My biggest gripe with trains is that I am never able to actually get the logistics right. I can hop on google flights and book a multi-city trip, I get a single price, and it's basically going to steer me towards roughly the cheapest option, within a set of parameters (e.g. trip time) that I can set. With trains? Just nearly impossible. You get directed to different websites for price/departure/arrival/amenities information. It becomes a logistical nightmare to plan anything. When booking flights you sometimes get directed as well to multiple sites, but only for final booking, not the search stage. And then indeed, the websites are not in English. Or they have pricing which requires a national discount card which you don't have and can't get online, and makes the trip otherwise extremely expensive. Or you can book your train ticket, but you have to pick up the tickets at the station, which gives anxiety because googling half of these options gets you to forums which say the ticket service is closed until 10AM, while your train arrives at the station with the service at 8AM, and the next train (for which you need to pick up the ticket) leaves at 9AM. And the only reason you know this, is because of some underground travel forum with 3 posts in the past 5 years about this train station. Or you can only look up train tables online, but you can't even reserve tickets online, you have to buy at the station, but they can get sold out, and you're looking to buy tickets for a summer trip in 4 months, so there's literally just no way to plan any other trips or hotel reservations because you have no clue if you can be on that train, until in 4 months. And then you have to go to a travel company which literally sends employees to buy a hundred tickets in bulk, then resells them online to you at a huge markup. But these are just 3-man companies that come and go, lots of scams, lots of markup, and they may sell only some tickets, but not others, meaning to plan a long vacation by train, you're depending on lots of these little companies. At that point I just think, screw that, I'm just going to browse on google flights and be done with planning in 1 hour, it's cheaper, no anxiety, no stress, no dependencies, no scams, lots of insurance and assurance, all in English, mostly through reputable companies with normal UI/UX design.
mateo1 7y ago
Trains can't replace flights. You can't get from Munich to London in 2 hours with a train. Trains are often much more expensive than flights too.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  Going from Brussels to London is great with the Eurostar. It's fast, you can walk around to the bar, and don't have to show up too early. So it depends, but obviously there are cases where they do offer a better alternative.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- truculent 7y ago
  a) Most people don't need to get there that fast b) Plane takes longer than 2 hours when you factor getting to/from the airport and passing through security. Plane is obviously still faster to Munich, but to Paris, Amsterdam, even Bordeaux? I am not so sure.
Hamuko 7y ago
I'm not sure if I can even take a train from Helsinki, Finland to anywhere else in Europe. There's a sea between Helsinki and most of Europe and the track gauge is only compatible with Russia.
- Arnt 7y ago
  Happily there's a world wide web that'll help you inform yourself. Or I can tell you: You have to take the train to St. Petersburg and change there. Going to someplace like Paris you'd have to change one more time, and of course the trip would be long.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    Does that mean that if I want to get between two cities inside the Schengen area, I need to get a visa?
    - Arnt 7y ago
      Probably, at least if you really want to go by train all the way. You can find other weird routes if you try, too. Teheran to Bangkok by train is a weird one. You have to go west via Istanbul, then northeast to Moscow, then take the Transsiberian, then south through China, finally westwards to Bangkok. All possible but very convoluted and hardly something you'd do in order to reach the destination. In one way it reminds me of some friends of mine who went on a trip around the world for two months — on one airline ticket. The ticket was to New Zealand and back, with quite a few longish stopovers. Not the itinerary one would choose just to get to New Zealand.
znpy 7y ago
Taxation of air travel alone might not be a solution in my opinion. The thing is, you have to make trains an actually viable solution for people (speed, comfort). High speed all across the Europe would help a lot.
ReptileMan 7y ago
Central and South Europe have a shitload of mountains. Traversing them will be a total pain as infrastructure to build for high speed rail. North of the alps and south of the Scandinavian is doable, but a lot of that territory is Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. You have a natural corridor that can connect france with finland - which maps nicely with the hanseatic league territories. But from Athens to Amsterdam there is no way to build competitive train service compared to flights.
otec 7y ago
Good luck going through Italy on a train.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.
- ojagodzinski 7y ago
  Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/ https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/
  - yostrovs 7y ago
    Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.
  - kds3 7y ago
    Aren't EU trains electrified yet?
    - martinrlzd 7y ago
      Yes, most of them are electrified.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > I really don't get why trains can be so expensive They’re more expensive because they’re better.
  - postingawayonhn 7y ago
    No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.
bonoboTP 7y ago
Sure, if you fly Düsseldorf - Stuttgart (companies do such things often), by all means switch to trains. For most of us it's not a reasonable alternative. My usual flight takes around 2 hours (7 hours door to door) but the train takes 16-17 hours including e.g. a two hour wait for transfer at 2 AM. The train also costs about 3 times as much. The climate's fate is not based on my 4 flights per year, so I refuse to have flight shame. Pushing the guilt onto normal people from industry is an appalling thing. (like fix your dripping tap, you're wasting fresh water... Ever heard how industry deals with water?)
maxcbc 7y ago
It all comes down to cost vs convenience. I don’t think rail is the answer long term. Trains are generally slower and less comfortable than air travel. Not to mention often similarly priced or more expensive. I’m more excited by the prospect of electric/hydrogen powered regional air travel. IMHO that is what will start to make a real difference.
mhandley 7y ago
We should mandate that aviation fuel is 10% carbon neutral. And then steadily up that fraction yearly. How they satisfy that is up to them - synthetic fuels generated using solar/wind, biofuels, or whatever. The point is that we're not going to be able to replace liquid fuels for long-haul aviation, so we both need to factor in the increased cost of carbon-neutral fuels and at the same time provide a market that stimulates investment. For many routes, if we did this, aircraft would perhaps not be price-competitive with rail. So be it.
- neoeldex 7y ago
  We should mandate taxes are paid on fuel, they dump fuel before landing. Which has a worse impact on the greenhouse effect.
  - mhandley 7y ago
    They don't dump fuel, except when they need to land in an emergency and don't want to risk landing overweight. This is a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect caused by aviation, so taxing it wouldn't make any real difference.
j7ake 7y ago
If trains can be as cheap as flights then there will be no need to coerce people to choose flying over train through carbon footprint arguments.
Out_of_Characte 7y ago
This is an easy promise to make but remains empty without mentioning the difficulties of such undertaking. Europe has the most splintered incompatible mess of a railway system in the world. They barely managed to run high speed trains between fairly local and established big cities (Paris to Amsterdam). Then there's the problem of routing and adding stops. With a plane you can almost always get a direct flight or a single transfer inbetween. With trains you end up stopping several times wasting energy and time at stations completely irrelivant to you. I applaud the effort and hope it comes to fruition but i'm sceptical wether this is going to be a terrible political undertaking or a well thought out plan for inter European travel.
- neoeldex 7y ago
  It's also the only place with such amount of trains. It is quite involved of making the infrastructure, and still it's managed. From april onwards you can travel from Amsterdam to London for 40 euro in 3 hours. There's a lot to align. Doesn't take away from the things that could be improved. Trains from Amsterdam to Germany stopping in small towns doesn't help.
  - 4d617832 7y ago
    Do you mean Utrecht and Arnhem or those on the German side? Or are you talking about using regional trains? I feel like the worst thing about the route is the lack of High Speed Lines but on the other hand these regions are densly populated so it does make sense to stop at some places.
lazylizard 7y ago
Ppl can only commute maybe 2 hours max. High speed rail between big cities a few hundred kilometers away may work to replace planes?
cranekam 7y ago
I am a big fan of rail travel within Europe but I have to admit that at times it feels like playing on hard mode. I live in Switzerland now and travel to London somewhat often. Here's a list of things that have sucked by train: * French rail strikes this winter caused: a) my Zurich to London TGV to be cut short (it started from a later station), 3 days before departure b) my connecting Eurostar to be cancelled, so I had to no-show the TGV and cancel the Eurostar to fly c) my return Eurostar was not cancelled, but d) my TGV was, 4 days before travelling, so again I had to cancel the Eurostar and the TGV and fly e) I filed claims for the disrupted/cancelled trains. Eurostar refunded me immediately but I waited 7 weeks for a reply from SNCF before calling them a few times to get my refund Sure, strikes affect other modes of transport but the hassle here was the amount of coordination I had to do to fix my travel. * I booked a Zurich -> London roundtrip on oui.sncf but later needed to change my return. I called SNCF because the site wouldn't let me change the ticket online. SNCF told me they couldn't change my Eurostar -- I had to call Eurostar for that, then call SNCF again to change the TGV. They didn't know what would happen to the fare. I gave up and bought new single returns. Next time I'll by Eurostar tickets from Eurostar and TGV from SNCF. * Changing trains in Paris is a nuisance. It's not hard (2 stops on the RER) but it adds significant extra time, particularly on Paris -> London where there is passport control. I've taken bikes from the UK to France a lot and hauling them on the RER sucks. * It's often pricier, at least for Eurostar. The TGV prices are often cheap (from €29 Zurich->Paris) but Eurostar gets expensive fast unless you book way in advance. Travel within Switzerland and the surrounding countries is great but in general making long trips with connections between systems is harder and problems have greater consequences. There's no form of alliance or easy rebooking or anything like that -- a lot of problem solving is down to you. But! When it works travel by train is relaxing, enjoyable (for me), can be more convenient (less bag hassle, train stations generally central), not to mention less bad for the environment.
ajot 7y ago
This [0] 13 year old article seems relevant to the discussion. Night trains should get much more love from Europe! [0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/High-speed-trains-planes-on-wheels.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/High-speed-trains-...
tiawaven 7y ago
Well, High speed trains don't run 300 km/h. At least not in Europe. Most of the time they run slightly above 100 km/h. Source? Experience. We would need a European infrastructure project for: * major new transnational lines * separation from passenger and cargo lines * self coupling/decoupling wagons And when you are on it, build some Thorium reactors to power them. Relevant: https://www.thelocal.se/20200116/sweden-reveals-plans-for-overnight-trains-to-several-european-cities https://www.thelocal.se/20200116/sweden-reveals-plans-for-ov... https://www.cargobeamer.eu https://www.cargobeamer.eu

102 points by edward 7y ago

Glad that they’re working on it, right now flying is just cheaper on many cases. Need to go from Zurich to Paris? The TGV Train will cost you almost twice as much as a short direct flight. Berlin to Munich? Also cheaper by plane. Being a student with a limited budget, this very much affects my decision.

sudoaza 7y ago
Yes, this is crazy!! We need action on this immediately. I suspect aviation subsides are to blame.
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  Aviation is highly taxed (about half of your ticket). Subsidies (or more accurately tax discounts) are only on fuel which is something like 10% of your flight costs. Rest goes on staff and capex. There already is form of transport that's much cheaper than train or flying which is called BUS. We can make them fully electric and even have different classes. They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate...
  - sudoaza 7y ago
    Eeww maybe once flixbus is fully electric...
  - ac29 7y ago
    >They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate... Spending on highways and roads was $175 billion in the US in 2016 [0]. They absolutely do require massive numbers of people to maintain them - for example, Caltrans, the California agency that manages the state highway system, has over 18,000 permanent staff. [0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
dbmueller 7y ago
I often find using interrail.eu to be a good option. Much more elastic, and can quickly get financially interesting, even more so for multi-hop travels.
pjmlp 7y ago
Thing is, not only it is cheaper, it is much more effective regarding use of time. Zurich to Paris just takes too long by train, and doing night trains isn't always an option.
- dbmueller 7y ago
  4 hours isn't that long, is it? plane cannot beat that by much
  - input_sh 7y ago
    Especially when you account boarding, navigating the airport, having to show up at least half an hour before the flight, security checkups... All time-consuming tasks related to boarding the actual aircraft that you don't have to go through to hop on a train.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      No, you have to run like crazy hoping not to lose the connection train, being stopped in the middle of nowhere without any information, stuffed into wagons without air conditioning and possibility to open the windows, cramped with more passengers than available seats, without any place to stuff luggage, out of order toilets,....
      - bravura 7y ago
        Okay so fly to CDG in Paris and then enjoy the annoying train ride into Paris that takes an hour and leaves infrequently. How do you get to and from the airport anyway? Many cities it’s a nightmare to get to the airport, whereas the train station is usually central.
      - Sharlin 7y ago
        None of those is somehow intrinsic to train travel, as I’m sure you’re aware. Quality of service is just a function of priorities.
      - 7y ago
papaf 7y ago
Also cheaper by plane. Being a student with a limited budget, this very much affects my decision. My tips would be: * Book at least a week in advance. * Buy a Bahn Card 25. * Get up early. If you do this Berlin -> Munich is €44.90 next Saturday on the 4 hour fast train. Also don't forget, it costs around €11 to go from Munich airport to the city.
- ArmandGrillet 7y ago
  This is the pro-tip, a Bahn Card 25 reimburses itself in 2-3 trips and trains booked 6 weeks in advance (which is what I do for airplanes) or even 3-4 weeks in advances are inexpensive (like 30€ for a Hamburg Dammtor -Frankfurt HbF which is way more comfortable than going to both airports). One thing I despise about trains in Germany and France is that the experience still feels way too old school. What happens when something is delayed or when a connection has an issue makes you feel back in the eighties. The Deutsche Bahn applications are a great way to see that, it's confused and overly complicated. I wish the UX of apps/websites like https://www.trainline.eu/ https://www.trainline.eu/ would be the standard by now.
  - pr0duktiv 7y ago
    BahnCard is great, but what we really need is an inner-European loyalty card for trains. BahnCard only works in Germany and I don’t want to buy another loyalty card whenever I go to another European country.
- pr0duktiv 7y ago
  Might have been a bad example, I was about to book the TGV from Zurich to Paris 5 weeks in advance for a weekend trip and I have the Swiss half-fare subscription (like BahnCard 50). Still would’ve been ~170€ instead of 90 CHF for a direct flight (both ways)
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Buy a Bahn Card 25 Why does buying an affordable train ticket always involve a treasure hunt of weird ticketing combinations and cards like this?
Hamuko 7y ago
A flight between Helsinki and Rovaniemi is like 1h 20min. The train will take 8 to 12 hours. Even accounting for all of the airport bullshit, you'll save so much time by taking the plane without a big increase in cost (at least if you book in advance).

WilliamEdward 7y ago

Public transportation is eventually going to have to replace both cars and planes. Yes, it will cost a lot. Yes, it probably wont make profit. This is fine, it's a moral duty we have as a society and at the end of the day railways are far safer than roads. In the long run a densely populated city benefits tremendously from trains, as seen in any major city.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> Public transportation is eventually going to have to replace both cars and planes. ...but commercial airline planes are public transportation.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  No, public means public owned and operated by government, ie: not private.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    No, in the UK, for example, the busses and trains are owned and operated by private companies, not the government. But no reasonable person would call them anything but public transport.

Darmody 7y ago

As a European I love this. Not only because it's better for the environment but I really like trains. They are confy, fast and cheap. There's no need to pay extra for your baggage, you just hop in with your stuff, take a seat, read, watch a movie, listen to a podcast or sleep for a while and you're already at your destination.

dzhiurgis 7y ago
They are not that comfortable. Sure you've got slightly more leg space than Ryanair, but difference is minimal. The only train I've really ever liked was Amtrak, but unsure whether I was somehow upgraded to their premium seats. Taking Canadian train after that was a torture. Also they are much more expensive. Which makes sense as tech itself is legacy. The cost of maintaining, lack of competition (especially with buses) is killing them. Honestly I don't see how we can't replace trains with electric buses...
- franze 7y ago
  Ok, seems like you didn't ride European trains yet.
  - lixtra 7y ago
    They are on a vast spectrum. Going from Frankfurt to Cologne second class in a train of soccer fans is very different from taking a first class ride in Switzerland.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      Or riding in Ukraine or Eastern Hungary. (Europe isn't just Western Europe...)
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Sure, and flying up front on Cathay is a bit different from flying on, say, RyanAir. https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/816431/Ryanair-flight-sex-Ibiza https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/816431/Ryanair-fli...

rcarmo 7y ago

As a former weekly train traveler, I fully support this. Plane travel has become a loathing, humiliating nuisance that absolutely nobody is excited about (sometimes not even airlines, considering the kind of service they provide).

deugtniet 7y ago

Last weekend, I took the night train from Briancon to Paris, step in at ~21:00, step out at 07:00 the next morning. My first time in a night train, pretty surreal but pleasant experience. I had to take a semi connecting train from Paris to the Netherlands (where I live), so it would be so awesome just to wake up on destination. I'm considering if it's a good idea to tax air travel inside the EU to help the trains move forward. I believe air travel is not taxed at all. The resulting money could be spent on climate change reducing policies.

mattlondon 7y ago
Not taxed at all? Is that really the case? Most tickets I get are usually £10 fare then like £50 taxes? I think those are passenger duty Vs the actual flight itself though if that is what you mean?
- deugtniet 7y ago
  Those are usually airport fees and such, I don't know where you get these numbers, but the airline pays the airport for the use of the terminal, baggage handling, air traffic control, etc. This is different from tax, as without it you would not fly.
fogetti 7y ago
While I like the idea of traveling by train, and I even took a night train from Munich to Budapest in the past, but on that specific route I had to share my cabin with a guy who just got released from jail a day earlier so I was not pleasantly relaxed. The fact that the cabin only had 2 bunk beds and I was pretty much isolated from other passengers and I had no way to keep my money and other important things in a safe, made me worried a lot. The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with. Having said that, I would still prefer to take the train when it's possible. Central railway stations are usually pretty much in the best locations of most European cities, where the connections are really good. But there is one more thing that even the article mentions: > In general, there is strong demand for reliable and frequent services between large cities I second that: even in Germany the I.C.E is notorious for the delays and the poor passenger experience. So there is a lot to improve for the rail operators.

postingawayonhn 7y ago

Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions. Hardly even worth worrying about. Results will be much better if resources are focused on the big emitters (road transport, electricity/heating, and manufacturing).

ced 7y ago
Aviation only makes up about 2% of total global C02 emissions. Because the majority of humanity has never flown at all. What fraction of your CO2 emissions came from flying last year?
- postingawayonhn 7y ago
  Fair point, though I don't see any major problem even if air travel was to increase by 2 or 3 times, so long as we make significant reductions in other areas. I took 6 flights (~3,000km each). I would start with the immediate implementation of a tax (10%?, 20%?) on all new ICE vehicle sales. Revenue from this tax would be used to subsidize the purchase of EVs.
  - morsch 7y ago
    At approximately 1000 kg COeq per 3000 km trip[1]. Your budget for the whole year was 2300 kg. [1] https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight
    - postingawayonhn 7y ago
      Where is 1,000kg coming from? I looked up one of my flights (actually only about 2,400km) using that calculator and only got 230kg (83kg of C02 and 173kg of "contrails, ozone formations, etc."). This flight was on a A321neo.
      - morsch 7y ago
        I took a random 7000 km flight and extrapolated. Sorry if that ended up off by such a large martin.

eddhead 7y ago

As someone in the UK, this won't happen until they lower the prices by a tenth. It's insanely expensive and not feasible depend on it. It's so bad that the train companies themselves ask their employees use flights instead of the network railways to save costs. They're all owned by european governments, so they have no incentive to make things cheaper in the UK.

paul_f 7y ago

If you are travelling inside of one country, France or Germany for example, it's great. However, if you want to take the train from Barcelona to Milan, it's 11 hours and 40 minutes. If you fly, it is 1 hour and 40 minutes.

alkonaut 7y ago

Cross border rail travel is a mess. We had online booking of flights across countries and airlines since forever, and thousands of booking sites seem to be able to hook into the booking backends like Amadeus and provide multi hop booking. Doing the same for train travel isn’t nearly as easy. This should be priority one. The second priority should be cost. Train travel should never be more expensive than even low cost airline tickets. Within the EU this would seem fixable by taxing and subsidies to just move money from air travel to train ticket subsidies. Tax funded subsidies is a clumsy instrument but it’s needed.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
Trainline.com does this very well in (north west?) europe, IME. Across borders and different providers.

chrisseaton 7y ago

I think an issue for trains is a lack of an international unified system for routing, timetabling, booking, ticketing, labelling and so on. Planes are the same everywhere. Flight number, gate number, time, and destination, everything available in English. Easy. I can catch a plane in Japan no problem. When I fly into a foreign city and try to take the train into the city it’s always a whole big mess. Inconsistent systems for referring to routes, express trains, stopping trains, multiple ticketing options, travel cards, peak and offpeak, is my train at platform 9 1/4 or 9 3/4, often no reservation system, announcements and signs not in English, no help available. Each city seems to go out of their way to do things completely differently to everyone else. Busses are even worse than that.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago
This so much. My biggest gripe with trains is that I am never able to actually get the logistics right. I can hop on google flights and book a multi-city trip, I get a single price, and it's basically going to steer me towards roughly the cheapest option, within a set of parameters (e.g. trip time) that I can set. With trains? Just nearly impossible. You get directed to different websites for price/departure/arrival/amenities information. It becomes a logistical nightmare to plan anything. When booking flights you sometimes get directed as well to multiple sites, but only for final booking, not the search stage. And then indeed, the websites are not in English. Or they have pricing which requires a national discount card which you don't have and can't get online, and makes the trip otherwise extremely expensive. Or you can book your train ticket, but you have to pick up the tickets at the station, which gives anxiety because googling half of these options gets you to forums which say the ticket service is closed until 10AM, while your train arrives at the station with the service at 8AM, and the next train (for which you need to pick up the ticket) leaves at 9AM. And the only reason you know this, is because of some underground travel forum with 3 posts in the past 5 years about this train station. Or you can only look up train tables online, but you can't even reserve tickets online, you have to buy at the station, but they can get sold out, and you're looking to buy tickets for a summer trip in 4 months, so there's literally just no way to plan any other trips or hotel reservations because you have no clue if you can be on that train, until in 4 months. And then you have to go to a travel company which literally sends employees to buy a hundred tickets in bulk, then resells them online to you at a huge markup. But these are just 3-man companies that come and go, lots of scams, lots of markup, and they may sell only some tickets, but not others, meaning to plan a long vacation by train, you're depending on lots of these little companies. At that point I just think, screw that, I'm just going to browse on google flights and be done with planning in 1 hour, it's cheaper, no anxiety, no stress, no dependencies, no scams, lots of insurance and assurance, all in English, mostly through reputable companies with normal UI/UX design.

mateo1 7y ago

Trains can't replace flights. You can't get from Munich to London in 2 hours with a train. Trains are often much more expensive than flights too.

koonsolo 7y ago
Going from Brussels to London is great with the Eurostar. It's fast, you can walk around to the bar, and don't have to show up too early. So it depends, but obviously there are cases where they do offer a better alternative.
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truculent 7y ago
a) Most people don't need to get there that fast b) Plane takes longer than 2 hours when you factor getting to/from the airport and passing through security. Plane is obviously still faster to Munich, but to Paris, Amsterdam, even Bordeaux? I am not so sure.

Hamuko 7y ago

I'm not sure if I can even take a train from Helsinki, Finland to anywhere else in Europe. There's a sea between Helsinki and most of Europe and the track gauge is only compatible with Russia.

Arnt 7y ago
Happily there's a world wide web that'll help you inform yourself. Or I can tell you: You have to take the train to St. Petersburg and change there. Going to someplace like Paris you'd have to change one more time, and of course the trip would be long.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Does that mean that if I want to get between two cities inside the Schengen area, I need to get a visa?
  - Arnt 7y ago
    Probably, at least if you really want to go by train all the way. You can find other weird routes if you try, too. Teheran to Bangkok by train is a weird one. You have to go west via Istanbul, then northeast to Moscow, then take the Transsiberian, then south through China, finally westwards to Bangkok. All possible but very convoluted and hardly something you'd do in order to reach the destination. In one way it reminds me of some friends of mine who went on a trip around the world for two months — on one airline ticket. The ticket was to New Zealand and back, with quite a few longish stopovers. Not the itinerary one would choose just to get to New Zealand.

znpy 7y ago

Taxation of air travel alone might not be a solution in my opinion. The thing is, you have to make trains an actually viable solution for people (speed, comfort). High speed all across the Europe would help a lot.

ReptileMan 7y ago

Central and South Europe have a shitload of mountains. Traversing them will be a total pain as infrastructure to build for high speed rail. North of the alps and south of the Scandinavian is doable, but a lot of that territory is Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. You have a natural corridor that can connect france with finland - which maps nicely with the hanseatic league territories. But from Athens to Amsterdam there is no way to build competitive train service compared to flights.

otec 7y ago

Good luck going through Italy on a train.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.

ojagodzinski 7y ago
Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not. https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/ https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/
- yostrovs 7y ago
  Wrong explanation. Jets still use more energy dollars per person flying and you're not taking account of subsidies for trains, though there are others for planes as well.
- kds3 7y ago
  Aren't EU trains electrified yet?
  - martinrlzd 7y ago
    Yes, most of them are electrified.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive They’re more expensive because they’re better.
- postingawayonhn 7y ago
  No, they're more expensive because they have higher infrastructure costs. Building and maintaining hundreds of kilometers of track costs a lot.

bonoboTP 7y ago

Sure, if you fly Düsseldorf - Stuttgart (companies do such things often), by all means switch to trains. For most of us it's not a reasonable alternative. My usual flight takes around 2 hours (7 hours door to door) but the train takes 16-17 hours including e.g. a two hour wait for transfer at 2 AM. The train also costs about 3 times as much. The climate's fate is not based on my 4 flights per year, so I refuse to have flight shame. Pushing the guilt onto normal people from industry is an appalling thing. (like fix your dripping tap, you're wasting fresh water... Ever heard how industry deals with water?)

maxcbc 7y ago

It all comes down to cost vs convenience. I don’t think rail is the answer long term. Trains are generally slower and less comfortable than air travel. Not to mention often similarly priced or more expensive. I’m more excited by the prospect of electric/hydrogen powered regional air travel. IMHO that is what will start to make a real difference.

mhandley 7y ago

We should mandate that aviation fuel is 10% carbon neutral. And then steadily up that fraction yearly. How they satisfy that is up to them - synthetic fuels generated using solar/wind, biofuels, or whatever. The point is that we're not going to be able to replace liquid fuels for long-haul aviation, so we both need to factor in the increased cost of carbon-neutral fuels and at the same time provide a market that stimulates investment. For many routes, if we did this, aircraft would perhaps not be price-competitive with rail. So be it.

neoeldex 7y ago
We should mandate taxes are paid on fuel, they dump fuel before landing. Which has a worse impact on the greenhouse effect.
- mhandley 7y ago
  They don't dump fuel, except when they need to land in an emergency and don't want to risk landing overweight. This is a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect caused by aviation, so taxing it wouldn't make any real difference.

j7ake 7y ago

If trains can be as cheap as flights then there will be no need to coerce people to choose flying over train through carbon footprint arguments.

Out_of_Characte 7y ago

This is an easy promise to make but remains empty without mentioning the difficulties of such undertaking. Europe has the most splintered incompatible mess of a railway system in the world. They barely managed to run high speed trains between fairly local and established big cities (Paris to Amsterdam). Then there's the problem of routing and adding stops. With a plane you can almost always get a direct flight or a single transfer inbetween. With trains you end up stopping several times wasting energy and time at stations completely irrelivant to you. I applaud the effort and hope it comes to fruition but i'm sceptical wether this is going to be a terrible political undertaking or a well thought out plan for inter European travel.

neoeldex 7y ago
It's also the only place with such amount of trains. It is quite involved of making the infrastructure, and still it's managed. From april onwards you can travel from Amsterdam to London for 40 euro in 3 hours. There's a lot to align. Doesn't take away from the things that could be improved. Trains from Amsterdam to Germany stopping in small towns doesn't help.
- 4d617832 7y ago
  Do you mean Utrecht and Arnhem or those on the German side? Or are you talking about using regional trains? I feel like the worst thing about the route is the lack of High Speed Lines but on the other hand these regions are densly populated so it does make sense to stop at some places.

lazylizard 7y ago

Ppl can only commute maybe 2 hours max. High speed rail between big cities a few hundred kilometers away may work to replace planes?

cranekam 7y ago

I am a big fan of rail travel within Europe but I have to admit that at times it feels like playing on hard mode. I live in Switzerland now and travel to London somewhat often. Here's a list of things that have sucked by train: * French rail strikes this winter caused: a) my Zurich to London TGV to be cut short (it started from a later station), 3 days before departure b) my connecting Eurostar to be cancelled, so I had to no-show the TGV and cancel the Eurostar to fly c) my return Eurostar was not cancelled, but d) my TGV was, 4 days before travelling, so again I had to cancel the Eurostar and the TGV and fly e) I filed claims for the disrupted/cancelled trains. Eurostar refunded me immediately but I waited 7 weeks for a reply from SNCF before calling them a few times to get my refund Sure, strikes affect other modes of transport but the hassle here was the amount of coordination I had to do to fix my travel. * I booked a Zurich -> London roundtrip on oui.sncf but later needed to change my return. I called SNCF because the site wouldn't let me change the ticket online. SNCF told me they couldn't change my Eurostar -- I had to call Eurostar for that, then call SNCF again to change the TGV. They didn't know what would happen to the fare. I gave up and bought new single returns. Next time I'll by Eurostar tickets from Eurostar and TGV from SNCF. * Changing trains in Paris is a nuisance. It's not hard (2 stops on the RER) but it adds significant extra time, particularly on Paris -> London where there is passport control. I've taken bikes from the UK to France a lot and hauling them on the RER sucks. * It's often pricier, at least for Eurostar. The TGV prices are often cheap (from €29 Zurich->Paris) but Eurostar gets expensive fast unless you book way in advance. Travel within Switzerland and the surrounding countries is great but in general making long trips with connections between systems is harder and problems have greater consequences. There's no form of alliance or easy rebooking or anything like that -- a lot of problem solving is down to you. But! When it works travel by train is relaxing, enjoyable (for me), can be more convenient (less bag hassle, train stations generally central), not to mention less bad for the environment.

ajot 7y ago

This [0] 13 year old article seems relevant to the discussion. Night trains should get much more love from Europe! [0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/High-speed-trains-planes-on-wheels.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/High-speed-trains-...

tiawaven 7y ago

Well, High speed trains don't run 300 km/h. At least not in Europe. Most of the time they run slightly above 100 km/h. Source? Experience. We would need a European infrastructure project for: * major new transnational lines * separation from passenger and cargo lines * self coupling/decoupling wagons And when you are on it, build some Thorium reactors to power them. Relevant: https://www.thelocal.se/20200116/sweden-reveals-plans-for-overnight-trains-to-several-european-cities https://www.thelocal.se/20200116/sweden-reveals-plans-for-ov... https://www.cargobeamer.eu https://www.cargobeamer.eu