And flights costing 29 EUR are simply a market (and policy) failure. In no reasonable sustainably operating economy would we ever have gotten into a situation of flights being cheaper than train trips.
That’s actually the market working as intended. In the case of flights you have competition which drives the price down, in the case of trains you mostly have a monopoly of the national operator which increases prices each year (DB, Germany). Train prices are prohibitively high, and when I face the choice I always end up driving vs taking the train (the price advantage grows larger with the number of people travelling).
They didn't need to be, the problem is that Deutsche Bahn is expected to be profitable since two decades (as a result of the failed attempts to privatize it) - and that includes the cost of physical infrastructure, which is enormous.
An airport however is cheap to build (okay, jokes like the BER aside) and operate, not to mention subsidies for regional airports whereas the EU has been pushing for de-subsidizing and liberalization of the railways for decades now.
It's not just a market failure, it's been engineered this way.
Mostly ... you don't.
To get that 29 EUR flight you have to book it WAY in advance, generally be on a trip that isn't super popular, and be willing to have no luggage to speak of.
When we were in England, France and Italy pre-Covid, we priced out moving around on the train vs moving around on planes.
The trains almost always won (sometimes by quite a lot) and had the advantage that you could buy the tickets with a day or two of advance rather than planes which required 2 weeks of advance to get a sane price.
Now, obviously, we were moving between big cities and didn't need a car (because "tourist"). Business travel would probably be a different beast.
That's a 1,160 miles / 1,870 km / ~2.75 hour flight (distance is as the crow flies). A train cannot compete with that. Not that a reasonable train itinerary between Lisbon and Rome exists.
For May 2021 [0], I'm seeing several roundtrip itineraries between Lisbon and Rome for USD$31 / €26 on Ryanair. I think the fact that such a low-priced flight can exist is actually a triumph of capitalism.
I think, it was much less of a problem, when many less planes were flying.
-- Correction in the comment, Jet-A has no lead. Cursory research suggests its nasty products are mostly organics rather than heavy metals, which is much less bad. Thanks!
Aviation is simply much more efficient.
Efficient, how? It uses much more energy, makes more noise and creates more pollution.
The speed has very little to do with the funding model. Flights were still faster in the 1970s when many state-owned airlines operated, and trains are little different when private companies run them (see: several European countries).
Planes also spend their time where there is less wind resistance to deal with.
Trains are still a win, but it isn't as clear as it seems.
I'm not sure what noise has to do with efficiency - I doubt that the energy expended on vibrating the air is physically or economically significant - but it is worth noting that trains are loud. Particularly because regulations written in blood require that they blow their horns three times at every level crossing at all hours.
At least in the US, there was surprisingly little public subsidy of railroads. The big exception is in the west, where many lines were financed in part by land grants, but this is not true all of lines (the Great Northern Railroad, for example, had no land grants)--and most of the railroads in the east has no land that could be granted to them at all. Antitrust laws in the US specifically originate from regulating the anticompetitive practice and local monopolies that railroads had. Indeed, many of those practices that motivated the law are now being repeated by airlines without a corresponding modern push to regulate those practices away.
Actual state ownership of the US is rare, both now and historically. The big exceptions are the temporary nationalization of the railroads during WWI and the assumption of the bankrupt Penn Central assets into Conrail (which was divvied up between CSX and NS in 1999). Of course, the US may be unusually competitive on the world scene for modern railroads, with US/Canada essentially three geographic duopolies (BNSF/UP, CP/CN, and CSX/NS).
most railways in Europe have been build by state programs to kickstart further industrialisation during the later half of the 19th century. prior to rail, the only way to transport bulk goods like coal and iron ore efficiently was through canalways. rails solved the issue of getting the raw goods to the industrial centers where people lived to produce goods efficiently. it also allowed for rapid expansion of cities and town and made cities and town with no access to a waterway far more viable.
privatization of rail only happenend after the cold war, and is mostly seen as a failure in most countries.