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Living in Spain, I love trains and take them over airplane when it's an option. However, trains are often around twice as expensive as flying for may routes. I
by Fargren 4y ago
Living in Spain, I love trains and take them over airplane when it's an option. However, trains are often around twice as expensive as flying for may routes. I know nothing about trains, but intuitively I would expect the opposite, and I really wish it was more affordable, specially high speed rail.
- retube 4y agoI suspect one reason is that with trains there's a huge amount of infrastructure to maintain - the tracks between destinations, but with planes you don't have that.
- ews 4y agoRENFE (national railroad company) had no competitors until very recently, they opened the market just months ago. I am hopeful the new high speed companies (i.e Ouigo) makes the market much more competitive and lowers pricing in all tiers. Still, for same price and roughly same time, I always prefer using the train to the planes.
- Ericson2314 4y agoTrains are a very, very natural monopoly. Competition doesn't make sense, especially if your service frequency is any good.
- vladvasiliu 4y agoThis is happening in France, too. I'm not too optimistic on how this will turn out. What we've seen here is TrenItalia starting to serve one line, Paris-Lyon (and then on to Milan). The issue is that this is, by far, the most profitable train line in France. If competitors only get in on the profitable lines and leave the others to the national company, it will probably not end well. Because it's my understanding that profitable lines used to somewhat compensate for the others, SNCF was able to provide a somewhat dense service. If this goes away, they'll either have to reduce (or even stop!) the less profitable service, or the State will have to step in with even more subsidies for those lines. There's a lot of talk in France around "public service" and I think that things like good rail service, especially in the era of "climate emergency" is important for a State to have. Instead, we're now getting new bus routes - yay diesel!
- vladvasiliu 4y agoThis is actually something that comes from the European Commission, so expect to see this happen in other countries, too. https://ec.europa.eu/competition/general/liberalisation_en.html https://ec.europa.eu/competition/general/liberalisation_en.h...
- ceejayoz 4y agoThe article hints at why this is: > The fact remains that, despite the European Union’s support for rail, the bloc’s governments continue to grant enormous subsidies to airlines — in the form of bailout packages as well as low taxes on jet fuel — although that could change soon.
- Hermel 4y agoBy definition, low taxes are not a subsidy. It is the trains that are heavily subsidized. The main reason behind the price difference is that there is plenty of competition between airlines for a given flight, eg Paris-Berlin, but no competition for the same train connection.
- jhgb 4y ago> By definition, low taxes are not a subsidy. The conspicuous lack of Pigouvian taxes on a fossil fuel for just one industry is definitely a subsidy. Someone else is paying for the externalities.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xyzzyz 4y agoNo, nobody is actually paying for CO2 emission externalities. At best, you can argue that maybe someone will be paying them some day in future, but it’s a big fat maybe. Because nobody is actually paying for these externalities, we don’t have any figures of how much those externalities cost — you can come up with some estimates, but as GOSPLAN experience shows, calculating prices outside of markets is a fool’s errand. Moreover, our best estimates of these costs is rather low, especially if you do time discounting. Planes would still be cheaper than trains even if they had to pay these. Finally, since most of electricity in Europe still comes from fossil fuels, emission externalities are just as much of a problem for them as they are for trains, especially if you consider that the GHG emissions per actual passenger kilometer between trains and planes are rather similar: trains tend to be really heavy, and usually run much more empty than planes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vmception 4y agoFlying in Spain and many parts of Europe is insanely and artificially cheap. I've seen bus passes more expensive, and the bus passes were the price I expected.
- kergonath 4y agoYes. This is not sustainable.
- systemvoltage 4y agoWhy?
- __d 4y agoThe economics are quite involved, and can be easily skewed depending on what externalized costs you choose to include in your analysis. Superficially, flying has relatively lower infrastructure costs because it only needs the two endpoints (no road, no track, no bridges, no tunnels -- all expensive items). That impacts both the initial capital cost, and the ongoing investment in maintenance. Similarly, planes are fast: above a fairly short distance, it's much quicker to fly (by jet plane) than to travel by train or road vehicle. But airports are difficult to access, being unwelcome in the middle of cities, and so there's a need to get to the airport as part of your journey. That part of the trip likely requires road or rail transport, and it's the most capital-intensive bits of the road/rail (ie. through urban areas). The fuel cost of planes is also higher per passenger-distance. And beyond just simply purchasing the fuel, it's much easier (for instance) to electrify a train or car than a passenger plane. So how you account for the carbon cost will make a big difference to your result. For the last 20 years or so, short-trip flights have been superficially cheap. The most obvious missing cost is the impact of using fossil fuel (and potentially that's even worse at high altitude), but there are other factors like the (ab)use of precarious labour, government subsidies for both fuel and facilities, noise impact, etc. Whether it's ultimately sustainable or not all depends on what costs you choose to factor in.
- 4y ago
- cryptoz 4y agoSame in the US. I would love to take the train from Seattle to SF, but, it costs so much more than a flight would, and takes a very long time compared. Sleeper cars make the price nearly double, and for such a long trip, train seats without a sleeper are somehow worse than plane seats. I have taken many Amtrak short trips, like 1h, and 50% of the time the train leaves more than 1h late (and 100% it leaves late, some amount). So I leave my departure location after I was meant to arrive at my arrival location. In 2005 I took a night train from Budapest to Belgrade, but not really - the ticket I paid for, the platform sign, the ticket agent, all told me that. But once on the train passing the border, the passport checker told me that the route hadn't gone to Belgrade in some time, and that I would be dumped at 2am in Novi Sad, where I was meant to buy a bus ticket. Tickets closed and Euros not accepted. Was a difficult time to resolve, but I bought overpriced Dinars from some travellers with my Euros and got a last minute ticket. Arrived in Belgrade to find 0 hotel rooms due to a football match. I love trains. But the process needs improvement, just like airplanes. Long-distance travel without a car is honestly quite difficult in Europe and USA imo. Planes will sell you tickets that don't exist and then pretend like a night in a hotel makes up for it. They abuse you at security. They treat you like trash and everybody deals with it. Please make trains better, Amtrak, and EU. Please.
- dwighttk 4y agoEvery improvement you are asking for (except for lower prices) is going to cost more money.
- 4y ago
- simonsarris 4y agoThis is mentioned near the end of the article but the reason those short domestic flights are so cheap in Europe is that commercial kerosene is currently tax exempt in every single EU member state. Jet fuel is cheaper per gallon in the EU than it is in the USA! (or was, before the current war) In typically tax-happy Europe this always struck me as odd, agree it is sad when you find out an airplane ticket is cheaper than a corresponding train.
- andy_ppp 4y ago“Follow the money…”
- KarlKemp 4y agoI believe this is a remnant of some complications with regards to taxation in an international context, similar to duty-free shopping. Another consideration may be the consequences of possibly diverging tax rates for kerosene: if it's much cheaper to fill up in, say, Spain, than it is in France, it might become cheaper to carry the fuel for the return leg, even if the increased weight increases fuel consumption. I'm not saying that any of this justifies the state of affairs. But it's possible to arrive at it even with mostly good intentions.
- PaywallBuster 4y agoas I remember, the discussion went that if EU implemented a tariff on on jet fuel companies would simply load their planes elsewhere, e.g. Russia/Dubai where there's abundant fuel with little to no tax not so relevant for the shorter trips intra-EU, but still a factor
- dkural 4y agoIt'll be more expensive to constantly fly back and forth to Dubai to load up than to simply pay the tax. Dubai is not that close to Paris. It takes about 7-8 hours. I don't know if you've been checking the news lately but Russia is out of the question for airplanes. They won't even return leased airplanes back anymore.
- Glawen 4y agoA plane doesn't have to build and maintain km of tracks, it just uses airport facilities (subsidised usually) and untaxed kerosene. A high speed train can only go to a few destination, the tracks can hardly be repaid
- KptMarchewa 4y agoA lot of time those tracks are already paid for by freight trains. The track tax is just what governments choose to do - especially since cargo trucks barely pay any road access tax.
- hgomersall 4y agoYou can't run an effective passenger service on tracks dominated by freight.
- twobitshifter 4y agoFor the plane, the start and end of the trip requires a second form of transport to get to the airport itself. So the existence of a plane does rely on some infrastructure. Some futurists are calling for aerotropolis to be built as new city models with the airport as the center of commerce, but most old world cities won’t have this.
- panick21_ 4y agoI think the future we are looking for kind of looks like this: You leave your house and you either jump on an electric bike or a self driving car of some kind. A 1-person 3-wheeled pod car would be very efficient if you are alone. You get to a local mini-airport where electric helicopters transport you to the airport. Or maybe you just take the car to the local airport. Depends on where you live. You jump into a electric plan and fly the city center you want to go to, or you land and jump in a second electric plane (this will happen less often as technology improves). And then you do that same thing backwards to get the your destination.
- Leherenn 4y agoRail infrastructure is very expensive compared to planes. An airport is expensive, but once you've built it you're pretty much immediately connected to half the world. With a train station, you need a track to each surrounding stations, maintain them, and so on. Also, train doesn't scale down as well, it quickly becomes inefficient for the less dense routes. People are talking about subsidies (by not taxing fuel for instance) for planes, but trains are also directly subsidised to the tune of billions each year. The rail network just costs a ton to build and maintain.
- namdnay 4y agoThe major subsidy to planes is that you don’t have to clean up the CO2 you spew out
- emn13 4y agoBut even beyond that - fuel and other power sources have been taxed well before climate change was a political issue, and jet fuel is exempt from all of that. It smacks of regulatory capture.
- emn13 4y agoSure, but so are airports and so are roads. And all forms of infrastructure are sometimes prestige projects, and all are sometimes subject to political choices that while legitimate, in retrospect turn out to have been questionable. It's possible that despite all that rail has higher costs - but it's also quite possible that the dominating factor is the unreasonably subsidized airline fuel. The tax-exempt status is absurd, especially given other fuel and power duties - not to mention that a reasonable accounting should be taxing fuel high enough to cover the costs of the climate-change externalities, which would result in an even higher price (as it happens, due to cloud formation, air travel causes even more warming than ground based fossil fuel consumption, though I'm unaware of whether that's a significant difference). If indeed an honest accounting were to reveal that flight is still cheaper: great! But I seriously doubt it; and in any case it's certainly time to stop subsidizing air travel like this. Let the sector succeed or fail on its own merits, not by virtue of tax shenanigans.
- 4y ago
- gunfighthacksaw 4y agoThe train feels more civilized. You can afford to have a bit more space to sit, wider aisles to walk and can fit a much nicer kitchen. Bigger tables too so you can spread out your work/shopping/food. If you haven’t tried train food before I highly recommend it. It’s stereotypically good in the same way plane food is stereotypically bad.
- drpancake 4y agoI suspect that you haven't been exposed to the wonders of British train food. Imagine our usual delightful cuisine but significantly worse.
- devoutsalsa 4y agoFlying itself is often cheap, but the connections to & from the airport can make it less cheap. My bus to central Brussels from Charleroi cost more than the round trip flight from Copenhagen.
- closeparen 4y agoOne fun and counterintuitive effect: because it takes a train a lot longer to provide as many passenger-miles as an airliner, the per-passenger-mile cost as a share of the capital equipment value is much higher. Ditto the per-passenger-mile cost of crew wages. The fact that the equipment and the crews are absolutely cheaper doesn’t help ticket prices as much as you’d think. Time is money.
- shafyy 4y agoFucking love trains. I live in Berlin and visit Zurich often (that's where I'm from). I can just get into the train in the monrning, work, eat, drink and by the end of the workday I'm in Zurich. Extremely convenient, and not really more expensive than a flight if you book a couple of weeks in advanc, even for first class.
- panick21_ 4y agoI did the exact same thing. I would work in Berlin and I would go back to Switzerland every second weekend. I much preferred the train. Partly because airports in Berlin are shit. If you go at the right times you get a lot of space, you can put your feet up and have a nice table as well. It is more expensive then flying however.
- ricardobayes 4y agoI wish we had better connectivity between Spanish cities. Between Murcia and Alicante/Valencia there is no good option currently, just driving.