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They tested the difference between flight and train from city center to city center on German television (sorry clip is in German: https://youtu.be/KyYNqndtCSk).

The flight ended up being 3 minutes faster.

But because I‘m super paranoid about missing my flight I would never show up at an airport „just in time“. So I‘d definitely go by train for this route.

Why aren't you super paranoid about missing a train?

Arriving at an airport - even last week in Moscow where's there's convoluted immigration, security, and I was checking a bag, more than an hour before take off seems crazy. An extra hour a flight adds up to days of wasted time hanging round at airports.

> Why aren't you super paranoid about missing a train?

There is no need. You just turn up at the platform before departure time and get on.

For me, there are two reasons:

1) The trains go every 30 minutes to Munich, so I don't have to wait that long.

2) The price structure of trains vs planes. The standard DB train ticket is flexible, i.e. you can use any train at the given date. Booking a flight on the same day is very expensive (and might be impossible if all seats are taken). There are discount tickets that are not flexible, but the price of the flexible ticket doesn't increase to enormous sums just because I book it on the same day - it's always the same.

On the other hand, in my experience the cheaper inflexible advance tickets stay cheap for longer for flights than for trains. I guess it depends on whether you travel for business or leisure.

Here in London my biggest concern is getting to the airport on time. Once I'm there I know that getting through security and to the gate is going to be roughly the same each time.

I regularly take flights that only fly directly from Luton or Stansted, both of which take around 1 1/2 hours of travel time from our office in Central London. But that involves multiple connections, each of which could be missed or held up.

Being anxious and paranoid about such things adds up to higher stress level, worse mental condition, and a less enjoyable and shorter life overall.

Some folks here are misinterpreting paranoid in this context; perhaps it's a language thing. Read paranoid about being late for a flight as wanting not to cut things close. In my case, it's a significant stress reducer. Get to the airport 30+ minutes earlier than I probably have to and relax/have a coffee rather than cut things close and be potentially looking at my watch constantly in traffic/in the security line/while rushing to the gate.

Arriving just 60 minutes before takeoff seems rather crazy in a lot of airports. For example in CMN and AGA that gives you 10 to 12 minutes per security check (assuming you check in online and have only cabin luggage).

The problem is with plans you don't know how long it will take to get from arrival to bring at the departure gate. There are multiple opportunities for large queues and delays, and the cost of missing a plane is much higher than that of missing a train.

With a train it basically never takes more than 10 minutes from arrival to walk to your platform, so you don't need to waste so much time just in case there is a delay. Also if you miss it you might be able to get the next train for free depending on your ticket.

You have to account for a buffer, I always plan to be at the airport at least an hour earlier than the flight for unknowns such as: slow traffic on the route of the airport bus (or delays for train service, traffic for taxis, etc.), slow/long security and/or luggage drop lines, etc.

With trains I just factor how long takes for the subway right across the street to take me 8 stations to the center.

Apart from the fact that being „paranoid“ or more general being afraid of something has no rational basis there are a couple of things that make me feel more comfortable going by train.

Even an inner german (or inner Schengen for that matter) flight has a lot more unknowns than a train:

1. public transport times are often a lot longer to airports. So you usually have to factor in more buffer. 2. what‘s the waiting time at luggage drop? 3. what‘s the wait at security? 4. how long do I need to go through security (I travel with lots of electronics which I usually have to take out)

If any of these things don‘t go as I expected my stress level increases because my calculated time buffer goes down. That‘s why I factor in an insane amout of time before boarding and usually end up hanging out at airports for hours.

For trains: The only unknown is the time that it takes me to get to the station. Every other time is practically zero.

And as someone else pointed out in this thread: the cost (in terms of money and time) for missing a train is a lot smaller.

I'll also add that flight prices fluctuate whereas train ones are fixed, which gives extra peace of mind when planning a trip.

That is actually not true, train prices (in Germany) are fluctuating based on demand as well. But you are not tracked individually and generally the prices are simply rising the closer the travel date gets. So the situation is better than with air travel.

Except they don't fluctuate, there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date and depending if all tickets of that category were booked already). This is know in advance, and the maximum price is always fixed. So quite different.

> Except they don't fluctuate, there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date and depending if all tickets of that category were booked already).

This isn't true, or at least that's not true in a general sense. IIRC ticket prices of all high-speed services offered by Spain's high-speed train operator, Renfe, increase as we get close to the travel day. In some cases, I assume due to low demand, sometimes prices drop a couple of weeks to the travel day. I assume all prices follow a predetermined progression accompanied by ad-hoc adjustments depending on demand levels.

Source: I've scraped price data out of Renfe's site for fun.

But the parent comment explicitly mentioned that case, it's not fluctuation as it is implied to be quite predictable.

> there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date...

Well I take almost every week the ICE from Frankfurt to Paris and it always costs the same: 125,40€. No matter how in advance, no matter the day I travel. Try that with a flight... Even if this is not true for all trips, for those that it is, it is another advantage.

I just searched for a random Thursday in August and found a ticket for 54,90 EUR.

But the real question is: does a booking in that timeslot cost the same every Thursday, with a ficed price? Or does it fluctuate?

I don't understand how that's "the real question". It's a Sparpreis. They fluctuate. You can buy a full price ticket that doesn't fluctuate if you want to.

>train prices (in Germany) are fluctuating based on demand as well

That's true for saving fares (Sparangebote). The train price for Flexpreis (an offer without a binding to a certain train) does not change that often.

The main reason I'm paranoid about missing a flight is the unpredictability of the length of the queues before security. This is partially because I seldom take a plane[0], so I simply don't have enough experience and data to go on.

[0] for all the reasons cameldrv mentioned, plus the impact on the environment. It may be noted that high-speed trains are worse on the environment than classic ones, although still in a different league from air travel.

> I seldom take a plane[0], so I simply don't have enough experience and data to go on.

I fly frequently but I'm also unable to predict how much time I need. It varies greatly. Security/check-in can take anything between a few minutes and 30+ min each. Usually, late passengers can cut the line, but I wouldn't take the risk.

I flew from Geneva to London City Airport the other day. Check in closed 45 minutes before the flight, and it's so convoluted to get through the airport that after checking in right at the deadline, I had a brisk walk through the airport for 30 minutes to arrive halfway through boarding. I would not want to arrive any later, and anyone who didn't want to rely on short lines at security moving fast would be well off to arrive at least an hour before takeoff.

City centers are ideal for trains though, but on the other hand I'd gladly trade 3 minutes in exchange for the same 4 hours of travel but with the lower stress you get on the train.

I also love working on trains -- train rides are perfect for a few hours of distraction free coding.

The best thing about trains is that you end up right in the city center, and you can often just walk wherever you need to go.

Glad it works for you, but I feel really nauseous after an hour or so of coding or reading while in a moving train, bus or car. I think this is quite common.

What kinds of trains are you talking about? Coding on the bus or in a car makes me nauseous as well, but the train routes I usually take are an incredible smooth ride and don't induce nausea at all. (I'm in Austria, and we have the Railjet, which is similar to the German ICE)

Good point - I'm in the UK, and our trains are shit.

Myself living in Berlin I'd still take the flight (and I did usually).

First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).

Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.

Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.

On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.

The CO2 emissions of trains are significantly lower, though.

You might want to reconsider if slightly more convenience is worth ~80-90% higher emissions.

The government should be enforcing this. Nobody should be expected to make a personal sacrifice to do the right thing.

If only we had a uniform, slowly ramping global $100/ton carbon tax. From the models I've seen it would fairly abruptly correct all of these "two methods are vastly different in carbon emissions but otherwise fairly comparable" situations.

abdolutely. Industry is known to lie about its ability to cope with even slight changes in price structure when asked. Even though things like tripling of oil prices mostly change if people buy v4 or v6 engines. A small yearly increase that that companies can price into their plans will absolutely not destroy our economy

The carbon tax should be tied to the price of extracting a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.

In Norway there's taxation on drinks containers that is set high enough that it's cheaper to participate in a return scheme. The audited return/recycling/reuse rates are then used to provide a discount against the per-unit tax.

I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.

There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.

The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.

Aircraft fuel should be taxed to a similar level as that used for ground transportation.

I would love to make the carbon friendly decision every time, but unfortunately price comes into it. I’m travelling to London this weekend. For two of us the flight, including a bus to the airport and the tram on the other side is less than half the price of the train for the same journey. The train is more expensive than our accommodation in London!

I'm looking for a good way to offset the carbon emission from the 20+ flights I take a year.

Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.

Atmosfair (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/) has received positive press and reviews (https://www.test.de/CO2-Kompensation-Diese-Anbieter-tun-am-m...) in Germany.

Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.

> In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.

But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.

Thanks but no thanks. I don't have this overwhelming pressure to always be "on" or even squeeze every bit of work out of my day.

I use this time to organise my thoughts and take a breath.

Huh? I really don't understand why people don't read and comprehend entire sentences. You got to the word "work" and just stopped reading and left a reply?

Partially why I believe short haul city-to-city flights should have more taxes applied to them if viable alternatives exist. And ways to further ease the tax burdens more for the alternatives if possible. (A stick for using flights and carrot for alternatives)

Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.

Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?

Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.

Ah, so you are one of those who voted to keep Tegel open I guess?

I couldn't vote but I campaigned to keep it open indeed.

The decision to close it is just a way for insincere and short-term thinking politicians to gain some cheap points.

How does it gain cheap points when the majority are against it?

>Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there.

Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.

The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.

Regarding Frankfurt airport's strictness: It's Germany's biggest hub with the most international connections, some of them more "targeted" than others (say El-Al flights...).

Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.

Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.

For some people, sure, it's faster to get to Tegel. If you arrive by car, Tegel is an awesome airport, built before airports were designed as shopping malls with a small aviation division attached, and without a strong eye towards making sure that low-paid security personnel's time wasn't wasted.

Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.

Isn't arriving one hour before the flight already pretty tight since boarding closes 30-40 Minutes before. If there is some kind of queue at security you will have trouble getting in. For me it's usually 1 hour before boarding closes.

And for the regular travelers among us it’s 40min before departure - using the fast lane and knowing that boarding won’t close earlier than 15min before take off

Depends how much you trust the trip to the airport. I used to be a 7 minute taxi/30 minute walk away, so I'd leave home at t-45, if the taxi didn't turn up I'd still have time, if it did turn up I had time for a coffee in the lounge.

Now I live further away it's much more variable. If I'm travelling from Heathrow T5 you have to be into security at t-35, so off the train at t-40, so out of Paddington at t-62, add a bit of leeway means leaving Paddington at t-80 to t-90 depending when the trains are due.

If it's a long haul where there only one flight a day I may well push it out to plan to arrive at an airport as early as t-75, which while excessive, is just in case there are problems like punctures or whatever.

Boarding closes 10 minutes before. If you only have your carry-on luggage, and if you're lucky with lines at metal detectors, it takes ~20-30 minutes from the time you enter the airport to get to the plane (YMMV for some of the larger and busier airports).

IME the "boarding closes" time is usually the time that boarding opens in reality (at least on budget airlines in Europe).

I've had conversations with people on planes, I've never had groups of conversations though like I've had on trains.

You make it sound like it's a good thing.

Yeah, god forbid we interact with other human beings. We might learn something, or feel something!

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. Thankfully, the internet is here, everready to explicit things for those who might have, heaven protect us, misread it :)

>It was a tongue-in-cheek comment

Heaven forbid someone invoke Poe's law!

This heavily depends on who you meet and your personality. I’ve had multiple conversations on German trains (and also in planes).

My experience is the other way around. I would assume it is just luck where you meet the type of people you start a conversation with.

Night trains are especially good for conversations, at least if you have a few hours before the seats are converted to beds.

This came just too late for me to benefit from. I was doing a project in Munich last year and traveling back and forth when Air Berlin went bankrupt (I was on their second last flight) and Lufthansa flights became a combination of stupidly expensive and unavailable. Door to door the plane took about 3.5 hours, which is pretty good. Most of that is waiting, dealing with security, and public transport, etc. The flight itself is less than an hour typically.

So, I took the old ICE a couple of times which took over 6 hours and indeed never really gets anywhere near it's maximum speed. They had a particularly slow variant taking nearly 7 hours. The new one should be a bit under 4 hours. So, the new line is very competitive with air travel and I'd prefer it over taking a plane. It's a much more relaxed way of traveling. German trains are pretty comfortable.

They could improve things further by eliminating stations from the route and improving the track. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice visualization of the speed limits on different routes. There are only a handful of segments where trains can go full speed in Germany. If you look at the Berlin-Munich track, it only goes full speed about half of the route. IMHO, Berlin-Munich could get to about 2.5 hours but it requires a lot of investment. Faster if they get proper high speed trains. Compare this to France, which has proper high speed tracks and trains ride at 300 km/hour there.

Eliminating stations is nearly impossible, for political reasons. There are ICE stops that are widely known to be just because an influential politician lives in that town.

That‘s also what happened with this new Berlin-Munich connections. The route makes little sense when you want to connect both cities as fast as possible. The detour only makes sense if you understand that the route needed buy-in from the states in goes through, and it was galling to state governments not to have their biggest cities connected, as well.

But it‘s not just influential elites. When Deutsche Bahn recently mulled killing the IC stop (not ICE - a category lower) stop in my town I was very unhappy. Fortunately they decided against it. But just from the plain numbers I can believe that it shouldn‘t have an IC stop.

Afaik most european train companies get their biggest share of money from the cities the trains stop at. Without this they would make big losses.

As a frequent MUC-TXL traveler, I’d say that now the train connection is finally en par with flying. It’s has now become a real alternative.

The hidden times you mentioned depend heavily on where you live and what your destination is. Going to the train station can be painful in the first place.

Another thing to consider: I regularly feel sick when I work on trains not so when flying. That’s why I prefer a long plane flight to a train ride.

I experience exactly the opposite, never sick in a train when reading/working and from what I’ve heard it is the same among the people I know. Flying is way more bumpy and the pressure changes don’t help. Lack of space in planes makes some people uncomfortable also.

The downside is the price, Berlin-Munich costs ~100€. The same will cost you ~25€ with bus.

Yeah, because Flixbus knows that they can only compete on price. Trains tend to be more comfortable, and connections tend to be way faster because a train can enter and leave cities faster than a bus can. Bus really only wins for me when it's a rather short and direct connection, otherwise the long journey times kill it for me.

The cool thing about the ICE trains and NS trains (Netherlands) is that you can get to the station and just walk on the train. Unlike in Spain where there are long security X-ray lines.

True about hidden time fees, though if you don't depart from center and arrive at center (where train stations are), you'll also add substantial hidden time when travelling by train.

I've got <20 minutes by car to airport, about an hour by public transport to central train station - even though the train station is closer as the bird flies, and this is Europe with "good" public transport.

True, for me in Berlin its about 25min to go to the Train Station and 30-40Min to either Airport, so not a big difference. But, considering i would arrive at the airport 90Min before take-off and it takes another another hour (including walking) to get from the Munich Airport back to the City Center (where the Train Station is), the difference is still small and I fully agree that a train (as long as its not overcrowded) is the more pleasant way to travel.

> Still, the ICE is an excellent train. It's very punctual (Germans will complain when it's five minutes late)...

I've personally never been on a German train that was on time. Of course this is anecdata, but still...

Actually, of the long-distance trains in Germany, only 78% is on time (less than 6 minutes late). Local trains are a lot better.[0]

[0] https://www.citymetric.com/transport/are-german-trains-reall...

> Air travel is the king of hidden time fees

Especially if you're flying into Berlin. I spent an hour in the air from Munich to Berlin, and then an hour waiting for my baggage to be unloaded and placed on the conveyor...

In case anyone was getting their hopes up: food on ICE trains is about as bad as airline food. You've been warned.

As a frequent user of both: I can't echo that.

On a scale from 1 to 10 (being the best), airplane food ranks -5. ICE restaurant brings home a solid 0.

ICE's bigger cooking compartments (relative to the everything cramped airplanes) allow for better options. Plus, you have real tables to eat from and elbow space.

The ratio of "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other" vs. "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other because of the ridiculousness of the food" is way higher in ICEs than in planes.

Long story short: In an ICE you have to know what to order. Most meals will be optimized for their type of kitchen (stews; the most ordered item must be Chili con Carne). At least ICE meals don't shy away from their humble origins of being heated-up like airplane food does ("Sansibar Airplane Currywurst...").

From what I've seen, flying is cheaper in Europe.

I agree that the ICE is an excellent train, but people in Germany are looking at the French counterpart, the TGV with envy. Where a ICE rumbles quite consiberably at speed 300kph the TGV is still as smooth as the ICE at 100kph. Not to mention the greater overall comfort and better food.

I didn't know our TGV was envied! I never really thought about it, but this train is impressively smooth for a metal beast moving at 300kph.

The food is known to be quite expensive and not great thought, I wouldn't recommend it

In Germany you now take the bus, which is about 20 eur for this direction, and with the same speed as the "high-speed" train, and faster than the plane. Only with the car is faster, but you cannot work in the car. A ticket to Amsterdam is even 14 eur, but this takes 10hrs, compared to a 2hrs flight.

How would a Bus do Berlin - Munich in under 4 hours like this highspeed train ? Even by car it is over 5 hours. Bus is an okay low cost alternative, but just very slow.

Flixbus takes around seven hours, traffic jams on that heavily-travelled route notwithstanding. Another example: Hanover -> Munich is ten hours by bus last I checked and 4.5 hrs by train. Bus is only usable for the price-conscious, i.e., no business travellers.

In some asian countries like myanmar there are very comfy airconditioned night busses. are there similar offerings in the bus system in germany?

There are buses that travel at night, but they're not comfy. i.e. they are not designed to be comfortable night-mode travel. In general, distances are too small to consider overnight trips. Since there aren't many good roads in Myanmar, trips take forever, which makes overnight travel sensible.

I used a bus to go from Dresden to Wien (and back) overnight a few years ago. This experience convinced me to never ever do something like that again.

1. I absolutely could not sleep on a bus that makes frequent turns on country roads.

2. On the way back to Germany, we got stuck for 2 hours in a passport check, because customs found a Bulgarian family on the bus that had previously been extradited, and there was a long argument before they left the bus.

- The only reason anyone takes a bus on such a long route is because they train or flight is too expensive.

- "same speed as the "high-speed" train" - are you deluded

- "Only with the car is faster" - yeah, if I drive the kind of car that can average 180 km/h.

>if I drive the kind of car that can average 180 km/h.

I mean, there are no speed limits on Autobahn so nobody would stop you...

There are ten thousands of other cars and trucks. I'd call it lucky when you can get an average over 100 km/h if not in the middle of the night.

I'd never be able to do substantial work on a bus. A train, easily. A plane, maybe.