> I just wish they were more financially competitive.
I'm doing Paris <=> Wien, and it was financially competitive to airplanes. 100€/person/way (ok cheapest seat rate, that's probably very uncomfortable... I'll see) I had 240€/person/2 way with airplanes. I just checked airplane prices again and that's still pretty much the same prices (a bit lower than train if you accept going to the FarAwayAirport, much higher if you take the Airport on a train/subway station)
It does take a lot more time because it's one train every 2 day and arrives a bit late to do train => home => workplace, so if you value being where you want to be when you want to be, you could probably say that airplanes is more competitive)
> To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300.
That's because you are comparing standard railway companies with low-cost airlines. I believe that it would also cost around $300 to fly from London to Barcelona and back with British Airways or Iberia.
The era of low-cost railway companies in Europe is just beginning: FlixTrain[1] (Germany), OUIGO[2] (France), RegioJet[3], and LeoExpress[4] (both Central Europe) are now all offering long-distance train tickets from 10€.
Stories are plenty of people that get their baggage stolen while they are sleeping
Your comment is loaded with romantic idealism (which I won't say I don't have as well) but is sorely lacking on the practicality of it
Yes, I like getting to the city center. In Wien this cost me around 4€. In Paris, 17€ (the more expensive bus) or 10€ for the cheapest bus (you can take the RER as well), yes, if you take Ryanair it's probably more to get there.
But staying in a train all night doesn't make me enthusiastic anymore. I'd rather cope with the hassles of air travel but it will still get me somewhere faster.
> But while point to point routes have grown, hub and spoke routes have grown far more.
I wish trains were lower priced. I'd much rather, say, fly to Paris then take a train to Brussels rather than take a technically shorter flight that might get delayed, or I might miss if the customs line is long.
But my choices are often expensive direct flight, cheaper hub and spoke flight - plane+train is often more expensive :(
> I use rail when I visit multiple European cities. It’s great.
I'm going to counterargument this.
Certain rail corridors are great--Naples to Rome, for example, was wonderful. But somehow when we were visiting Europe, we often found that air actually did better in both price and time.
The cheap rail fares often require quite a bit further advance purchase than air fares. This strikes me as ... odd.
> Keep in mind that European trains are typically more expensive than flights even on richly priced air routes
I have a lot of experience taking trains all over Europe. In almost no case was a train cheaper than flying once I included transportation to the airport. The few times a train costs more the difference is marginal and you'd end up flying Ryanair or Easyjet --- no thanks.
> And then the profitability of short distance routes is a direct product of the density of population.
Not a problem in the Northeast in the US. Only Amtrak can fail to offer a service that works everywhere else in the world.
>How can it be cheaper to fly from Berlin to Munich than taking the car (or the train)?
I can't answer that specific case, but in general it's pretty simple, especially if you're comparing cars and planes: when you drive yourself in a car, you're not only transporting yourself and luggage, you're also taking a 3000-pound hunk of steel. On a plane, it's just you and some bags. You can pack a bunch of people and their crap into an aluminum tube when you give them sardine-sized seats. You get big economies of scale when you do things at larger sizes. And with an airplane, you don't have to take windy, indirect routes and stop at stoplights.
With trains, it's not so clear-cut: trains are generally more efficient than road-going vehicles, because they have lower friction (steel on steel rather than rubber on asphalt), less acceleration/deceleration (no stoplights), and economies of scale (lots of people can fit into a train). One possible problem is the tracks don't go the best route, as they have to conform to both local geography and also history, and tracks are expensive to build (airplanes go directly between airports and the only infrastructure they need is the airports, nothing in between).
Google Maps is ridiculously slow where I am so I'm not going to try finding the driving time between Berlin and Munich, but I'm guessing it's around 3-4 hours? Why a plane might be cheaper (I'm taking your word for it) probably comes down to differences in regulation between airlines and trains in Germany. I agree, it shouldn't be that way; trains should generally be cheaper. Here in the US, trains are generally terrible. Amtrak is actually OK in the northeast corridor, but outside that it mostly sucks: it's very slow, and typically very expensive compared to airfare. The trains frequently don't even have WiFi (outside the NE). They're really comfortable, though, I'll give them that. The coach seats are like 1st-class seats on airlines. But there's probably a bunch of reasons for all this: airlines are largely deregulated here in the US, and there's a ton of competition driving prices down. There's only one Amtrak, with zero competition. Amtrak has to rent space on the tracks from freight companies that own the tracks, and their trains take last place on the tracks (yep, freight gets priority here over passenger rail!). And their trains are generally horribly slow, since we don't have anything resembling high-speed rail, so they're not too attractive to anyone that values their time: no one really wants to spend 3 days (not exaggerating) on a train trip that they can do in 4 hours by airplane.
The competition thing alone is probably one big reason you're seeing that different in Germany. Government-owned agencies just cannot compete against private industry in most cases. When there's no competition and it's nearly impossible to get fired, that leads to an organizational culture which is bloated, ineffective, and overly expensive. I don't know if it's this bad in Germany, but here in the US, if you work at a government agency and need to just buy an office chair, it can take almost a year. Private companies don't work that way because they'd go out of business if they did.
> So 3 to 6 hours we take the train. More than that we tend to fly.
Yep. I could tolerate the longer travel times, but long distance train travel gets really expensive really quickly. For the price of a round-trip train ticket across Germany (Berlin to Cologne, around €100), I could also fly to London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.
> Should you tax the flights? But then you basically say that rich people can take the plane.
Rich people will pay premium for a superior experience. If the train is faster than the plane they would like to use it I think. Could railway companies add a very expensive business class to help fund cheaper tickets? They could try a pilot project where they deploy this kind business class between two major cities.
Trains do not have that great of an internet connection as well. Why not provide a yearly internet subscription for a fee? Businesses might pay for this for their employees when they travel between cities and they can keep working.
> But it is complex: first, it works in such a way that the plane tends to be cheaper.
Currently yes that is the case a lot of the times. With renewables getting cheaper and the ever increasing electrification of trains why could trains not become cheaper in the future? Maybe it is not possible but I feel like by banning it we are giving up before really trying.
Airlines have international competition which forces prices down. On the other hand railway companies often face little competition because the states maintain a public monopoly. Public monopolies have little incentive to keep prices low as they are the only game in town.
I would like to see them try more things to increase efficiency, convenience and push prices down to become closer to planes. Maybe they could try to sell more services to fund the rest of the system.
Maybe as you say it is impossible to match current planes prices no matter what improvements we make. I just have not seen evidence that it is impossible to make a system where you can sell train tickets at similar rates to planes. But before doing it I need to see at least an honest attempt at bringing in more revenue.
> the perception is different: people tend to trust the plane more (even though planes have delays, too) and underestimate the commute time for the plane (I often hear people compare the time between two train stations against the time between two airports, completely forgetting all the time to the airport and back, checking in, fetching the bags, etc.
Ok then maybe try to change the perception. If you tell people how much time they waste, you could convince at least some people to change. Do they already have some advertisements that try to change this perception? I have not seen any but maybe they already have.
> 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.
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 the one that surprised me the most. I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, given that even Amtrak is quite expensive compared to air travel, but I was a little shocked at just how expensive trains in Europe can be. Especially the good ones.
> the cost of the tickets plus the additional travel time will not be worth it to most who are making this trip
If they get the beds and service right, it would be because it’s convenient and fun. Like, have a Michelin-class meal, good wine, reliable service that knows the regulars and comfortable beds and good shock absorbers and you’re trumping planes as the first-class option.
It doesn’t have to bear flying in all cases to be successful. Cheaper always seemed like a weird niche for passenger rail to target versus amenities.
>> On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying.
That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train...
Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands).
Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...
> That appears to be about 650 miles (1050km). That’s around the point where many people will still prefer to fly.
Not sure that is true.
When you have a high speed train, going from the centre of a city to the centre of another city... and can subtract time to get to airport, time in airport security, time to wait to board a plane, time to taxi, time to circle before landing, time to get to the city, time to safety margin most of the above... the train comes out at least comparable on time (not an order of magnitude off), cheaper, greener, and centre-to-centre.
For me... European trains are so nice in comparison to flying that unless there is a time penalty of more than double to triple the real time spent flying (which in this case does not feel true)... then the train wins.
It's also a very productive journey. I can't do meetings on a train, but 6-7 hours uninterrupted in a comfy chair with power and internet is still coding / making slides / etc.
> Would it make Madrid - Paris train route competitive? No, not at all.
Just to provide some data points:
Madrid-Paris by train takes about 17-20 hours and costs between 261 and 350 Euros. By plane, it takes about two and a half hours and costs (in your example) around 170 Euros.
Also take into account that for many international travellers, the time saved aspect is more relevant than the money saved aspect, as lifetime is a very limited and non-regenerating resource, and planes will win pretty much always. The idea of Europeans going from Madrid to Paris by train happily is a green pipe dream outside train enthusiast circles (for our American friends: How often would you say you take Amtrak from Chicago to New York, roughly the same distance, before you get bored of it?)
>Even in Europe where trains are icons, try taking a train from Marseille to Geneva. It’s an 8 hour trip requiring two connections. It’s a 45 minute flight at a similar cost.
While I’m sure you could take that long and transfer that many times, I see a direct 3.5 hour trip for €65
You can’t really compare train travel in the US to that of Europe. The US is gigantic in comparison, Amtrak doesn’t own many of the rails they use and get delayed as a result, and airport security is atrocious to say the least.
If you’re looking at the total time to fly, getting to the airport early, going through the funhouse of “security” and then waiting for your luggage, I would imagine it’s not just 45 min.
> I have travelled through Europe quite extensively. IMO cheap flights like Ryanair and Wizz beat train hands down
Europe is fighting hard short haul flights, many of which are now just plain down illegal. Several countries, including France, have already banned short haul flights of less than 2h30.
I see this "high speed trains" push as related to the attack by the EU on short haul flights.
So no matter if we find that cheap flights do beat trains hands down or not, in a near future there may not be any choice: and the choice seems like it's going to be train.
I'm doing Paris <=> Wien, and it was financially competitive to airplanes. 100€/person/way (ok cheapest seat rate, that's probably very uncomfortable... I'll see) I had 240€/person/2 way with airplanes. I just checked airplane prices again and that's still pretty much the same prices (a bit lower than train if you accept going to the FarAwayAirport, much higher if you take the Airport on a train/subway station)
It does take a lot more time because it's one train every 2 day and arrives a bit late to do train => home => workplace, so if you value being where you want to be when you want to be, you could probably say that airplanes is more competitive)
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