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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how long Europe's famous rail infrastructure will continue to be cost-effective in the era of Ryanair.

Very. Spain’s high-speed service killed the Barcelona-Madrid air route, which had been the world’s busiest.

And taken the lion's share of London to Paris, which was also huge. But a combination of high-speed day trains and low-cost air has killed off many of the very long distance trains and most of Europe's sleeper services. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Fun anecdote here. Just last month my wife and I were in Barcelona and we needed to go to Madrid. She had her company buy a plane ticket and I took the train. We left at the exact same time and I took 100% public transportation and she had a car service on both ends and a plane ticket.

I made it to our destination across the town from the Madrid central 45 minutes before she did.

Germany recently finished upgrading a good chunk of the line between Berlin and Munich, dropping travel time from 6+ hours to under 4 on the sprinter.

Train service now has a marketshare of 46-30 vs flying, and widening. I'm certain it was reversed before.

People like fast center-to-center connections.

https://www.rbb24.de/wirtschaft/beitrag/2018/12/vde8-deutsch...

I don't think this era is going to last much longer. Something has to give if we want to make any headway on climate goals, and increasing air travel prices is one of the more obvious steps.

Right now train travel is cheap if you plan ahead and have the right discount cards and some flexibility regarding time. Otherwise, not so much. But then again, this is true for flying as well.

Yeah, I don't know. I thought about going from Barcelona to Malaga by train because I love trains, but it was 10x more expensive than one of these low-cost flights.

Ryanair rarely flies directly to or from cities, you nearly always need to make additional connections which makes it pretty useless for business travel.

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