There's really no reason a human would try to fly instead of take a train, if the trains were functioning at high efficiency. Flying sucks. And yet...
My anecdote:
Some time ago I did a lot of business trips around Europe. All business travel was organized by a subcontractor. They sometimes wanted to route me through a crazy amount of short airplane hops to get me to the destination. Sometimes even when a direct flight was available they couldn't put me on it because they didn't have a contract with the operator or something like that.
For some reason they strongly favored air travel and fell back on other means of transport only when there was absolutely no way to get there by air.
One some occassions I was supposed to do 4 or 5 500 km short hops, which would mean a whole wasted day of basically waiting at airports and boarding airplanes. In such cases I just said no, paid out of my own pocket for a train ticket or took my own car. And then spent next 3 months doing paperwork to get travel expenses reimbursed.
Now, why is flying so cheap vs a train? The whole the US government essentially gives away 737s at a loss to employ people might be one part of it? Nobody is giving away free trains that I know of.
Do you have more information on this? Is the US government subsidizing aircraft manufacturing or something?
How many 737s would that buy, per year? around 40-50? This is Germany alone, the rest of Europe is just the same
German streets a build by the state, not by Volkswagen or Mercedes Benz. Airports are owned by local governments and often a loss-leader, sometimes epic disasters (with the exception of Fraport).
It is extremely hard to compare trains and argue about whether they are competitive or subsidized.
Ordinarily I am skeptical of private enterprise to serve the common good, but in the case of the public transit system here in Japan and other Asian metros it really does seem to have produced great outcomes.
Did you mean Boeing?
I imagine flying is cheaper because the cost associated with the Rail Infrastructure is much higher than with the open sky and aircraft.
In France, the answer is simple: the train company is basically a monopoly (owned via a very thin veil by the state).
They are therefore, like all entities not subjected to competition:
- expensive
- unreliable
- low quality of service overall (atrocious food, disgustingly dirty bathrooms, in-seat power supply almost never works, internet non-nexistant).This may actually INCREASE emissions as now there will me smaller “direct” flights from out of country instead of them all going through major hubs.
What you say is true (there is a train), but the quality of service is so bad (strikes, trains late or overcrowded, broken ticket machines, broken escalators, PITA to go from gate to train terminal) that most people who can afford it would rather be stuck in freeway jams in a taxi than consider taking the train.
French trains, especially the high speed ones, are very comfortable and "high efficiency". They can be pretty expensive however.
Recently though, things are changing and making a Paris - Nice by train is becoming somewhat financially doable.
Reliable certainly not.
On time even worse.
Could you explain this? I'm struggling to understand how something becoming very cheap can be considered an (economic) failure? Isn't that something the market optimizes for?
EDIT: Perhaps you mean expensive rail is a market failure?
The relative time on the airport is not high.You can literally come to the airport just a few minutes before your departure (and many people in fact do this). Also most airports are in my opinion much better organized than train stations.