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And multiply those costs for a family. Trains receive more subsidies per km in Europe but cost far more for the distance. I say this as someone who prefers trains. They’re just not that efficient compared to planes. There are solid use cases like local commuter trains and for shipping. For longer journeys, planes are a clear winner for time and cost.
Artificially so.
Yes true but the range of how far train can be preferable above plane can be expanded if network better run on a European level and some big strategic investments (not that different from what France did in the 80's and 90's) on quite a few very often travelled routes. Amsterdam-Berlin is an easy example, but there are many like that. Currently on many routes the plane>train is like ~300 km, while on many that could become 600-700km with either high speed tracks or more sleeper train options or better connections. On some big routes the train>plane is up to 700-800 km already.
I think I agree directionally but I keep coming back to the efficiency issue. The longer the journey, the more inefficient the cost becomes relative to planes. It scales linearly. More and more money would need to be poured into a less and less efficient transport method. Once you hit 4-600km, flying is almost always faster. Faster tracks and trains for direct routes are INCREDIBLY expensive to build and maintain and staff.
From a fuel efficiency point of view, trains are still way more efficient, and a dense coverage of airports is also extremely expensive to maintain.
But it is also a bit unfair to compare prices of low cost airlines that use subsidized airports and tax exempted fuel to mostly state owned rail companies. A fairer comparison would be Lufthansa prices or vise versa Flixtrain.
Trains are more fuel efficient, but there is a lot more which goes into the cost of these transport modes than fuel.
I'm comparing these modes of transport because they both receive subsidies, including tax exemptions for avgas. The EU subsidises air travel (in many ways) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a “subsidy.” Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.