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
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Why would train companies be greedier than airplane companies?
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So wait, is the free market bad or good? Is the argument to nationalize the airplanes too? Or is it to nationalize the rails but not the train companies and let trains compete like planes?
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From the experience of the Czech republic:
Most of the trains are run by private companies on behalf of the regional governments (chosen in a public competition). This has increased the quality of trains, while price (and, sadly, timetables) remains regulated by the region.
On the major lines, private companies operate also on their own, and even though the last-minute-in-rush-hour ticket are expensive, you can travel cheaply if you book it in advance and in less used hours.
(Also, until a year ago, one of the companies found a way how to misuse the governments’ discounts, making tickets for students&seniors practically costless/paid by state, but that’s another story.)
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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Because we dont tax planes enough, obviously
i was wondering this too. was going to go switzerland to portugal. was almost 5x the price as a flight…
IMHO one of the main issue is the lack of integrated booking platform for trains. Especially for international routes. It is very easy to plan a travel by planes, because there is an interoperable platform across all companies and booking agents. For trains, this does not exist, and it prevent the fair and free competition between operators, which would probably reduce the prices overall.
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This is pointed out in the article, and was even quoted in the very post you replied to.
I was under the impression the lowest class seats barely break even and they make it up with first class and cargo or if its a low cost carrier there are all those fees you would not get added to your train ticket. So maybe if the trains made it a point to have those same fees they would be cheaper.
