One of the main reasons for the disparity is the lower taxes that the aviation industry benefits from.
If you fly from Paris to Barcelona the airline not only pays no VAT, but is also exempt from kerosene tax. If you make the same journey by train, the rail company will pay an energy tax and passenger VAT. This means higher costs for the company which are usually reflected in ticket prices.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/7Zrur
This is the best summary I could come up with:
France will increase taxes on flights to invest more in its railways, the country’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune announced this week.
Last month Greenpeace released an analysis showing that taking a train is on average double the cost of flying.
The report compared the costs of flight and train tickets on 112 routes in Europe, including 94 cross-border connections.
Dardenne counters that the climate crisis is a much bigger threat to tourism and points to the example of wildfires and heatwaves in Europe this summer that have been disrupting holidays on the continent.
The European Commission has been working on an upcoming ‘Regulation on Multimodal Digital Mobility Services’ to improve the process of booking tickets across rail, bus and air.
It says this could be funded by windfall profit taxes, the phase-out of airline subsidies, and a fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions.
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“It’s not the train that’s expensive. It’s the plane that’s not expensive enough,” the CEO of SNCF Jean-Pierre Farandou said in 2021.
i.e. no, train ticket prices aren’t going down
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The alternative is externalizing the costs (like it’s happening with airplanes) and we all pay the consequences of irresponsible overuse.
Also trains don’t run at night currently in Europe. But France is looking to run trains at night too (mostly by private companies). More volume, lower per ticket price can be justified.
There’s a bunch of trains that run over night in Europe, fewer than there used to be but it’s making a bit of a comeback. SNCF have their Intercités de nuit network, there’s a few in Italy, and the ÖBB run a bunch including some that don’t even touch Austria, and there’s still more beyond that.
Take a look at European Sleeper, no France yet though
Taking a sleeper car on a tour of Europe seems like a wonderful vacation. Spend a day in the city, get on the train overnight, wake up in the heart of a completely different city, rinse and repeat. No flight check ins, no hotels to deal with, no driving anywhere.
Other than subsidies, the air market in EU is under one Open Skies agreement, while there isn’t an equivalent system for rail.
Maybe the cost of building hundred of thousands of kilometers of tracks has to be financed somehow?
I think the point is that the governments should be subsidizing rail costs to encourage train travel over flights, if they want to fight climate change. So yes, it’s expensive, but maybe money well spent.
And the tracks serve multiple purposes. It’s the same track running local commuter services, intercity sleepers, and freight.
Roads have no big problem being financed though
Airplanes are efficient?
