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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that flying inside Europe tends to be cheaper than long-distance train. Does anyone here whether it's simply intrinsically cheaper, or whether it's all because of kerosine subsidies etc? In other words, if countries would subsidize long-distance train as much as they subsidize air flight, would the economics look different? Would train get substantially cheaper? I lack both the insight and the data to do this math.

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Air travel is extremely tax-subsidized. If taxes on airplane fuel was similar to car petrol taxes in Europe that would be a good start. I hope there can be some sort of EU-wide agreement on that soon, because the current state of affairs is pretty silly and there is no way a single country can unilaterally impose high CO2 taxes on airlines.

Yeah, but I propose the opposite: don't cut air subsidies, but add train subsidies.

Basically, my understanding is that countries subsidize air travel because it's good for the economy. Business and trade and all that.

Now that long distance train becomes more fashionable and comfortable (and it does! A 1st class ICE across Germany is like a moving office, wow), you could make the argument that (long distance) train should be similarly subsidized for the exact same reasons: a country with great international train connections will be better at trade. I wonder what would happen to price and availability if that would happen.

Still, we want people to fly less and substitute for train wherever remotely possible (since climate). So I don't agree.

trains are even more heavily subsidized so I don't understand the comment. the EU restricts subsidizing airlines and similar at all but the smallest fields and even has pursued having some airlines refund monies giving to them in violation of the rules. There are tax breaks in the form of not paying VAT for domestic flight routes but overall the cost for all air travel breaks is less than twenty billion Euros whereas subsidies for rail and worse the debts[2] for building and maintenance are ten to twenty times as much.

finally the one issue that stands out, is that while European members use rail at over five times the average of Americans it only works out to approximately 600 miles per year versus 100. Urban transport usage is only double the average use in American but that is a 120 uses per year versus 60. [1]

Then to make it even worse by focusing so much subsidies and expense on trying to convince people to take rail it has caused much more freight to end up on roads. In the US over forty percent of freight goes by rail, in the EU it is around eleven percent. So for the limited gains of moving people by rail are slaughtered by the losses in resulting environmental and financial impact of moving freight over roads.

The truth is many have this romantic view of rail travel which is not supported by facts. Politicians in the EU, where the lines are almost all government owned, love rail because its very visible and people don't look below the surface to see the reality of actual cost, debt load, and lack of real usage.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5711595/KS-D...

[2] https://re.public.polimi.it/retrieve/handle/11311/1015984/18...

> the EU restricts subsidizing airlines

I didn't mean subsidized in the sens of "tax money is given to airlines" I meant energy taxes for other means of transportation are much higher than for airplane fuel, which pay very low CO2 taxes compared e.g. to cars. That is: they are given an advantage through the CO2 taxation.

If planes paid for their CO2 emissions, we'd be closer to having the train be cheaper than flying.

Obviously we want both more passengers and freight to go by rail. To get there requires investments in infrastructure. Sweden being the most blatant example of where in the last 2 decades, rail infrastructure maintenance was the first thing cut to compensate whatever budget hole needed to be filled. It's now decades behind, and that's the main reason I can't take a train between Stockholm and Gothenburg and expect to make my meeting in time - instead I have to fly or drive this quite short bit, even though both the the time it takes and the cost is similar. The train simply isn't reliable enough to use to go to an important meeting.

Unfortunately it isn't unexpected. It has been pretty clear that the current policy is favoring older domestic businesses over the cluster based "knowledge economy". The opportunity cost of having Bromma Airport taking up useful land is enormous. So is not investing in regional development.

> trains are even more heavily subsidized so I don't understand the comment

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47783992

> Then to make it even worse by focusing so much subsidies and expense on trying to convince people to take rail it has caused much more freight to end up on roads.

Actually EU laws forbid countries to favour certain industries. That is exactly why freight go by road instead of rail despite causing more traffic and pollution.

I'm not sure it's very subsidised in a cash sense - when I look at the breakdown on a cheap flight about half seems to be taxes. Whereas most countries railways receive direct cash from the taxpayer subsidies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_subsidies).

eg in the UK

>Air Passenger Duty (APD) for flights leaving the United Kingdom, and not for inbound flights. You are charged £26 per person on short haul economy flights to most of Europe, and £150 per person on long haul flights

Though you could argue that air-travel is not billed for the damage to the environment it causes in CO2 which is an indirect kind of subsidy.

An interesting future tech may be electric airliners eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zunum_Aero which could be cheaper than both and greenish.

Kerosene (jet fuel) is not taxed (whereas fuel for e.g. cars is, heavily so). That's basically a subsidy.

Europe has extremely cheap prizes because the big airlines are trying to compete with the budget airlines. The real question is "why are budget airlines so cheap in Europe (they often cost about a third of what a budget ticket in the US would cost)?". Well, lots and lots and lots of reasons why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=069y1MpOkQY

I'd also love to see some detailed information on this. I recently flew within Germany, probably saving a few hours over the train, but much more importantly it cost half the price. Seems that for the vast majority of people who are price conscious, this is simply too significant to outweigh the environmental consequences.

Do you have a BahnCard? How much in advance did you book?

Currently you can go to most places with 30-50€ if you play it right.

I don't have a BahnCard, just looking at the site I'm really not sure I'd use it enough to justify it. Booked a couple of months in advance, and compared flight prices on that day to the train. Flights were significantly cheaper.

The test offer can be pretty useful:

https://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/ueberblick/probebahncard...

(It's important to cancel immediately though.)

That isn't very useful if you're a tourist who's only going to use the card once or twice a year.

It really depends.

E.g. people commonly compare cheap plane tickets to the "regular" train ticket price, not to a savers ticket (which is bound to a specific train) booked early, which is more comparable to how you typically book a plane ticket. Similarly, the rebate cards quickly can make sense if you're not only traveling once. On the other hand, it certainly does happen that you can find cheap plane tickets on a connection where the cheap train tickets are already gone.

Time also depends, e.g. on where you're going in the destination town etc. If you take into account time to go to the airport, waiting and security time there, time to get from the airport into the city, ..., the train often isn't that much worse than it appears at first. Especially since e.g. a 6 hour train ride means I can sit down for 6 hours and work or nap, whereas the plane alternative is lots of short trips/wait times, which I personally find more stressful. I've flown inside Germany, but think it only makes sense in exceptional cases or if it's making a connection to an international flight.

In my case I compared all options on the same day, with a couple of months' notice - plane still cheaper. I take your point though about "hidden" time costs. I'm taking a bus for a future trip because, despite being significantly longer than the alternative, it's over 3x cheaper and - as you said - I can just (try to) sleep on it.

Train infrastructure is pretty expensive. Planes need much less infrastructure.

Agree, but many railways are already there (needs maintenance of course). Not sure how decision makers count on this though.

Do they really though? I don't know any numbers, but i would imagine that the airports at least make up some if not all of the cost of equivalent railroads? I get that the airport can service a lot more destinations than a trainstation( overseas etc ), but i'm not totally convinced that rail infrastructure is that much more expensive than for air.

The cost of airport security etc should probably also be thought of as infrastructure costs.

The new high-speed connection between Berlin and Munich cost about eight million Euros per kilometer. That was a bit on the high side because acquiring the land was expensive. Switzerland spends about two billion Franks a year on maintenance of its tracks.

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