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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I am actually surprised that short-distance flights aren't taxed more in Western Europe. The train infrastructure in France is world class and can get you from Paris (North-Central part of the country) to Marseille (Southeast), a distance of about 500 miles, in 3 hours.

For Americans, this would be roughly equivalent to go from Boston to Washington D.C. (a trip that takes 7-10+ hours)

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Train infrastructure in France is not premium anymore, like our health system. Sure if you compare to North America like Canada, it is still better. I took the Via rail train in Canada last year from Toronto to Montreal, seats were spacious, good catering, but the journey was long and trains outdated. As for the price it was not crazy expensive but not cheap.

The high speed train in France (TGV) is really expensive if you cannot get any discount compared to flights. I live near Nice in France and leaving my car in the airport parking lots is often more expensive than the flights themselves, even for 3 days ! For instance a one-way flight from Lille to Nice with Easyjet (around 900km) can cost only 60 Euros, it can be 100Euros back and forth. Also trains in France are more subject to strikes and delays. Well any mean of transportation in France is subject to strikes but the occurrence is greater with trains.

Again the French government thinks that creating a French tax will pave the road to an European one. I highly doubt so. French airports and airlines will suffer from it compared to their European equivalent, and if an European tax is created, it won't probably make the French tax disappear. France loves taxes, we see the results.

Again

> Train infrastructure in France is not premium anymore

It still is premium compared to the average country, even if it could be far better

> The high speed train in France (TGV) is really expensive if you cannot get any discount compared to flights. I live near Nice in France

Nice is the most enclaved city in France, in the far south-east and surrounded by mountains. It is not at all representative of the rail experience you get in the other big french cities.

> Also trains in France are more subject to strikes and delays. Well any mean of transportation in France is subject to strikes but the occurrence is greater with trains.

I spend ~2000€ yearly in trains, and the cumulated delay I got in 2019 yet was 30 minutes, with 25 minutes due to a a crop fire close to the rails. Yes, delays happen, but people often overestimate them (that's my opinion).

> Again the French government thinks that creating a French tax will pave the road to an European one. I highly doubt so. French airports and airlines will suffer from it compared to their European equivalent, and if an European tax is created, it won't probably make the French tax disappear. France loves taxes, we see the results.

The 200 million € from that tax will go to make that very train system better...

The train infrastructure is not perfect, the biggest issue being travels not going to/from Paris: the lines aren't as good and there aren't a lot of high-speed lines.

And they’re expensive compared to flying the equivalent route/distance.

But save you from the pain of getting to/from CDG.

Getting to CDG...by train...is pretty easy.

Traveling by train through Paris is a PITA as it often involves a station transfer via bus.

You can always do the transfer via metro (and there will be at most one change). The metro isn't very well suited if you travel with a lot of luggage though.

When I was transiting in Paris from Lausanne to Lyon, there was no metro connection between the Gares. That was 2006, things could be different now.

Wouldn't you be more likely to make that connection in Geneva rather than in Paris?

Sorry, I meant Nantes, not Lyon. Come to think of it, I’ve never been to Lyon, not sure why I got those two cities mixed up. It wouldn’t make sense to go to Paris just to go to Lyon. :)

Aha! According to Google Maps, there are some options for making this journey today that will use the Paris Metro, but you would still have to change metro lines en route between Gare de Lyon and Gare Montparnasse (the "one change" that littlestymaar mentioned)

It's possible that these options already existed in 2006 but were complicated or inconvenient enough that no one or no web site suggested them to you.

The bus is a much quicker direct transfer, a metro transfer isn’t that viable.

I'm puzzled: the Lausanne-Paris arrives in _Gare de Lyon_, which is also the station where you take the train to Lyon. Then on a Lausanne-Lyon via Paris you wouldn't even need to change stations.

I have and idea of what could have happened though: maybe you took a cheaper train which doesn't arrives or leaves in Paris itself, but in a train station in suburbs (Marne la vallée, Massy Palaiseau and Roissy Charles de Gaulle).

I mistyped, I meant Nantes, not Lyon. I think the train did arrive at gare Lyon and we had to bus transfer to another station.

It depends, when you buy the tickets 3 month in advance, it can be really competitive. On short-notice trips, it's often too expensive indeed.

I hope they wouldn't use those agressive algorithm for dynamic pricing. This is a public service, have a static pricing! This turns the train into a luxury, at times almost three times as expensive as air travel.

static pricing leads to sold out seats and poor planning by customers. It negates the ability to add capacity in advance for busy times and leads to poor efficiency overall (even completely ignoring the inconvenience of being stranded to passengers).

True, my point of view might not take everything into account, but for trains, the ability to add capacity is limited, mostly constrained by tracks leased time.

For the train I take to go back home, the price varies between 35€ and 220€. This is excessive! And not much better than sold-out seats..

45 euro for 500 km in 2 hours, no security. I don't think flights are any cheaper; certainly not if you factor in your time.

I'm currently planning a trip where I'm considering going from Strasbourg to Toulouse. Over 7 hours on the fastest train itinerary, versus a 1.5 hour flight. Not that difficult a decision.

> For Americans, this would be roughly equivalent to go from Boston to Washington D.C. (a trip that takes 7-10+ hours)

Half of which is stops...

I would love Amtrak to start a service that is just BOS<->NYC<->WAS.

In a perfect world it would be an hour between each stop: DC > Philadelphia > NYC > Boston

Let's add in the BWI airport too. And while we're at it add Baltimore too. But that's it!

Baltimore and BWI together have 1.7 million NEC boarding per year, only modestly less than BBY and BOS’s combined 2.1 million. Philly has over 3 million.

This is why we can’t have nice things

We can’t have nice things because people in the US live in an almost continuous band of mid-density urban agglomeration from Boston to DC, and it’s hard to reach most of the population through just a few stations.

The most noticeable thing about European cities, to my American eyes, is how they just... end. Drive from Munich airport to the city, and it’s farmland in between. Drive from Dulles to DC, and it’s strip malls and suburbs the whole way.

I noticed that on the Eurostar from Paris to London. Less than 30 minutes after leaving Gare du Nord it looked like I was in the Tennessee countryside. Except for the bend through Lille, it stayed that way until we entered the tunnel.

Urban planning...green belt laws.

Land value tax and carbon tax!

The issue is the rest of the nation though.

Yes, it's obviously a winner for the North East. You guys can put as many cities as you like on the link list because you have the geography and the density.

Awesome!

Good for you.

What about everyone else?

The layout of the Midwest is actually more Europe-like than the Northeast, and arguably a better fit for Euro-style high speed rail. Unfortunately, the will and determination required to build it doesn't seem to exist.

move to a higher density area? i moved to the east coast, from the south.

I keep saying it, we need trains with sections that can detach to stop at stations (and reattach at the next passing train after leaving the station) :).

Btw, does anybody know what is the marginal energy cost of a single car added to a train running at constant speed?

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

As an american who's taken the day long (not high speed) trip from Boston to DC, I was amazed how fast and easy to deal with the French Rail was. I only took Paris->LeHarve and Reims >Paris routes. But wow! The subway in Paris worked pretty well too.

International flights are much cheaper in the UK than local trains. I paid the same price for a flight from Cardiff to Malta as for train from Cardiff to Bristol (40 miles).

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/578284/train-ai...

Because of said train infrastructure I'm flying into paris, touring Europe (on trains) then flying out from berlin. Unless they can get the whole EU to agree to it it's probably going to have that affect.

We're talking about less than 20€, and only 3€ if you're flying economy. There's no way it's worth changing travel plans over that, unless for cases where it really makes no difference.

I took the train from Toulouse to Paris last summer and it was very pleasant—especially in comparison to air travel. A few hours of picturesque landscapes with plenty of legroom, baggage space, and opportunities to walk around. I think it’s too bad that we can’t seem to get that working here in the US. (See, eg, California high speed rail project...)

I love that train! I must have took it around 20 times. But by French standard, this is a terribly long one (around 6 hours).. And sometimes much more expensive that taking the one-hour flight. Hope this tax will tilt the balance.

For comparison, Paris-Marseilles is about a 1hr20 flight. Maybe comparable given airport hassle these days, but that is on what is perhaps the best route in Europe for showing what trains can do.

I doubt cost comes in to most train-flight comparisons and I'm not sure what the point of the tax would be if not to change behaviour.

How about Paris-Bordeaux (brand new), Paris-Strasbourg, Paris-Lille, Paris-London, Paris-Rennes ? Ok, France is very centralized but Paris-Marseille is far from being an exception.

You need to take into account the distance between the airport and the city center, the security checks, on-boarding, checking in, getting your luggage back... etc. It’s both time consuming and annoying.

It takes about 45 minutes to get from downtown Paris to CDG or Orly airport though, and half an hour to get from the airport in Marseille to the city center, so by the time you've figured in getting to the airport 1.5 hours before your flight, the total trip time is more like 4 hours.

For comparison, the fastest train takes 3:15.

Is the carbon footprint for train travel significantly lower than for plane travel?

Massively https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml

About 5-10% of a flight, according to this:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-...

I was going to say that these figures ignore infrastructure and necessarily underestimate emissions, but it seems that wouldn't change much the overall picture: https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/carbon_footprint_of_railway_infrastr...

I guess it depend if the train is running on electricity or diesel, but in France I had read an article in a french newspaper stating that the carbon footprint of train was 10% of the one from planes.

This article seems to have the same numbers: https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm

France is primarily nuclear powered, so electric trains there have extremely low carbon impact.

https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=... (ElectricityMap.org: France)

Yes, it heavily depends on how the energy the trains runs on is produced.

Even with high on carbon emission electricity, the train benefits a lot from not carrying its fuel.

Yes, about ten times as low.

See (for one): https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm

Yes. This graph from "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" is a good summary: http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml

> I am actually surprised that short-distance flights aren't taxed more in Western Europe

It does seem the like tax is backwards. They barely tax the flights that could be replaced by rail, but have higher taxes on the ones that can't.

In France train is fine if you want to go to or from Paris, but connections between other cities have been closed or gimped with slower trains and less frequency.

It's really hypocrite of the government to shame people of flying while they've been destroying the train infrastructure all these years.

At least in Germany, taking the train is insanely expensive.

If you buy the ticket at the wrong time yes. If you take it more often and use a BahnCard it’s not too bad either and definitely not “insanely”.

And getting a BahnCard can be worth it for just one trip (there are short-duration ones) so it's possible even for tourists.

I think they also do direct trains from London to Marseille in about 6 hours these days.

Marseille to Berlin though, not such a fun trip. Marseille to Frankfurt, multiple hours on trains, 1 hour on an airplane. Stuttgart to Barcelona? Better set aside an entire day. Biarritz to Geneva? The train system is good on certain destinations, but it’s impossible to connect everything like airplanes do.

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