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Then problem of price still remains before wide popularity for sleepers or even just long daytrips. I'd love to use trains more often, but I'm not willing to pay through the nose. A trip in Central Europe I recently booked would've been over twice the price with a train, with maybe a couple of hours longer travel time when accounting for airport trips and waiting. Second class, just a daytime journey without sleeping.

Timewise this would've been fine, but price is not competitive. I'm not sure if the problem is too cheap flights, or too expensive trains.

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The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.

This is really the only solution, asking people to cut down on their travel within Europe, switch to the (sometimes more expensive) train is just not going to work without a proper incentive.

I'm always comparing the travel times between train and plane. I even account for the time going to the airport, airport transfer etc and if it's roughly the same (which it sometimes is) I'll get on a train but if Ryanair can offer 9 Euro flights (Berlin -> Brussels) this is not going to be a real competition.

Or just add the same taxes to airplane fuel as is done for fuel used for ground transportation.

That would be the most obvious level to set the tax at, yes.

The saddest part of this statement is that the European rail system is MASSIVELY subsidized even at the price points that the person you responded to described as "paying out the nose", which of course is a somewhat subjective position for a European to say, because their already lower salaries are massively taxed and to pay for the subsidized rail systems the gleeful Americans can gush about being so cheap when they return to the USA and demand socialism.

I'll take Austin's local light rail train as an example to illustrate what I mean. I once looked into the finances and financing sources to get the system stood up, and I worked out that it would be around a $30-$35 trip from one end in the middle of the city to the outskirts of Austin's Leander township if the actual cost of the system were paid for by the rider.

It is immensely deceptive and rather dumb that these realities are simply ignored, especially by seemingly otherwise rather intelligent people that congregate here.

At the very least, there should not only be the direct cost per ticket if it were not heavily subsidized by taxes of Europeans, which non-Europeans should have to pay, and the price that is subsidized that Europeans pay. It is really rather immensely immoral to ride on the train at a cost that is heavily subsidized by wildly immoral tax levels (e.g., 100% on gasoline, 20% on sales of goods, ~35% of income that is also 70% of what it is in places like the USA).

Indeed it's subsidised, IIRC "about half" is a decent ballpark figure. This is worth bearing in mind when people complain about Ryanair getting not-full-price landing spots, not paying road tax, or whatever.

Tourists pay 25% VAT on everything, so it's not like they pay no taxes. I think literally having to prove residence (or citizenship? or tax-residence?) sounds like the sort of bureaucratic hell I'd rather not encounter at the ticket machine. But note that some countries find a way, e.g. Switzerland has 50% discount cards which are far too expensive to make sense for tourists, but make it cheaper for locals.

City transport is a different game, and harder to calculate down to individual levels -- you need all those 10%-full 11pm trams so that people can get home, on some days.

I'm curious what massive subsidies you're talking about, do you have numbers or examples of what upsets you in particular?

I really don't think European public transport is the major force driving young Americans to the left. I hear a lot of young Americans who (quite rightly IMO) look at socialised healthcare in the EU and wonder why on earth they can't have it back home ... but that's a separate issue altogether

Air travel is massively subsidized too (airport construction, airline and manufacturer bailouts); as is highway travel (automaker bailouts, free trade supply chain, environmental externalities, health costs associated with driving and sprawl, plus gas taxes which cover only a small proportion of actual construction and maintenance costs).

It's difficult to do a true apples to apples comparison, especially when highways are also justified in part as a national security asset. But it's a little much to clutch pearls about subsidies for rail ("immoral", really?) without acknowledging how subsidized the alternatives are as well.

>free trade supply chain

free trade is hardly a subsidy.

That really depends on your perspective. A "conventional" subsidy can be understood as a reverse tax— instead of paying money into the general pot for the privilege of engaging in some harmful/productive/profitable activity, you are paid money out of the general pot as a benefit for engaging in some activity seen by the government as desirable or beneficial.

Cutting taxes in any form is a subsidy relative to what went before, whether or not the end state is above, at, or below the zero point.

More concretely, if an automaker previously bought widgets from a local supplier for $10, but now buys them from overseas for $8 because of free trade, that's effectively a $2-per-widget subsidy. You can argue that it's a market efficiency and that most of the benefits are passed to the end consumer anyway so whatever, but when you get far enough down that path, then there are no widgets being made locally any more, which is the real cost of having subsidized the import of them by cutting taxes to zero.

This is crazy misleading. According to OECD taxing wages 2019, only single tax payers on significantly above median salary pay more than 35% tax and social security contributions combined in Austria. This places Austria far in excess of the OECD average.

Rather than being some low tax paradise, the US is around the OECD average in most categories.

As for things like vat, they look far worse than they are when you realise a lot of goods are zero rated, and most people spend only a s portion of their income on good due VAT. Last I checked in the UK it adds ca 3 percentage points to my tax overall tax burden. I don't pay much more tax here than I would in any number of US states at my income level.

When factoring in health insurance, it gets even closer. Having spent time both places, I'd pick European tax levels over 'US conditions' (a term frequently used to scare voters in many European countries) any day.

As for being immoral: we've voted for these tax levels. Surveys in the UK often show us prepared to accept increases as long as they go to the right things, like the NHS.

Feel free to enjoy our trains - I've never met a European that is as concerned with subsidising foreigners travelling on them as you are on our behalf.

> The EU should force a carbon tax on plane fuel for intra-EU flights and subsidize rail with the money.

You are aware that most of Europe produces electricity by burning fossil fuel right? So by all logic we should apply a strict carbon tax on rail as well.

Speaking of logic: Trains are way more energy efficient than planes. So even with the same "strict carbon tax", it would be cheaper to go by train and better for the environment alas.

Except that train ticket prices are artificially set in the first place since Rail is heavily subsidized in most of Europe.

An actual carbon tax on carbon would tax both trains and planes fairly. Planes use much more co2 per capita and so the result would be comparatively cheaper trains nonetheless.

Though I don't think most trains are electric, and I think they do have a fuel tax.

By usage, most trains used in Europe probably are electric. It makes sense to invest in electrification where usage is most intense.

For example, in Britain "In 2006, 40%—3,062 miles (4,928 km) of the British rail network was electrified, and 60% of all rail journeys were by electric traction (both by locomotives and multiple units)".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre...

In Europe most trains are electric. Even where trains run on diesel they are probably 10x as fuel efficient as flying.

I don’t think it’s an issue given how little CO2 is emitted by trains per passenger/km, and hopefully the electricity used already has CO2 taxes on it. Plane fuel doesn’t.

I think Switzerland is doing it well. Train travel is far more popular compared to countries with equally good (but not as punctual) trains in France and Germany.

I think there's probably some crossover point that makes it more expensive to house people for longer amounts of time with more space required on a train, compared to burn a bunch of hydrocarbons to boost them to 800kph and get rid of them as soon as possible. Not sure whether physics make cheaper pricing possible as long as externalities aren't fully factored into the price of fossil fuels (i.e. flying gets more expensive and trains stay the same).

Considering the melting arctic sea ice, the answer is easy. (Of course flights are not the only reason and I'm not saying that an individual shouldn't choose what is right for him/her, it's a policy/tax matter).

I take plenty of trains in Europe, and booking well in advance, I never pay the "full" fare. It is usually quite easy to take advantage of early booking offers.

This booking was half a year before the travel date. It would've been cheaper than full price but flights, too, had the early booking advantage.

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