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Why are flights cheaper than trains in Europe?
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Not quite. Trains are more flexible and forgiving schedule-wise. You miss one, you take the next. No crazy airport security either. Train stations are often in city centers, connected to cheap public transport and walkable. More room and less strict.
We need more comfortable and cheaper trains though.
Well they are saying there is no taxes on planes.
Planes need taxes and externalities costs included also, to get a true price.
Yes trains use more infrastructure but that is largely a fixed cost. I wonder what the marginal cost of running a train on a near full capacity line is verse a plane.
After a certain threshold train is much cheaper than plane, but that's only true for very busy routes. And it comes with less flexibility than a plane that can serve point-to-point basically every destination.
Trains are cool, but we should also look for a way (propfan engines, less emitting fuel, improvements in fuselage ecc.) to make aviation more sustainable because it's crazy to think it will go away anytime soon
But a plane can't serve any destination point to point. There has to be massive infrastructure on both ends in the form of a gigantic airport, which is completely useless for anything but long trips.
If countries stopped giving away free airports and taxfree fuel and stopped giving away free airport security etc, and stopped externalizing all the other costs, you'd see airline tickets raise an order of magnitude in cost.
Turboprops can land on grass fields... I don't know where you live but there are thousands of very small airports with just one airstrip and a small building, if the passenger flow is not very big. Exactly as there are enormous but also small train stations.
The remaining infrastructure is flight control, which is a fixed cost indipendently by where you are 'cause for obvious reasons it needs to cover the entire country anyway. And indeed the advantages of a planes is that it has very little fixed cost, so it's way easier to reduce/increase or repurpose routes at need.
The second part is, at least partly, a fallacy. If countries stopped subsidizing all cars you would see less cars but also many people unable to satisfy their transportation needs. If countries stopped to subsidized food prices you would see food waste plummetting... But also people being able to afford less food.
If you can train is less than say 6 hours. Trains are hands down better.
They are much more reliably on time.
The station is usually much closer than to the ultimate destination than an airport.
There's little or no waiting in queues or what not, in a lot places you can roll up the platform 10-20 mins before departure.
The seats are better for pretty much every class of ticket. sans a standing ticket but Planes don't have those.
Once you factor getting to and from the airport, messing about with check in, security, and boarding at around 6 hours a train is better than a 2 hour flight.
Cries in german.
Oh man, I take an ICE roundtrip over twenty times a year. These days I have to plan a buffer of 2 hours between ETA and my Termin. These are tears well informed by experience.
Fuck Dusseldorf airport. Fuck Frankfurt airport. Fuck them right in the ass. But also fuck validating your train ticket at the other end of the platform seconds before getting on the train.
I'm an American and went to Cologne a few years back for Carnival. Flew into Frankfurt Airport, the train was right there and I was at my destination in about an hour traveling along a scenic river. Absolutely amazing!
My experience with Frankfurt has been that it's always under construction and I have to be diverted around said construction to get to my connecting flight.
Just add a 20 minute transfer time and hope for the best
Well, your username is well chosen, most of your points are epic fails.
Some people care about climate change and CO2 consumption.