2024: Europe wants you to travel by train. But why is it so complex and expensive?
Europe wants you to travel by train. But why is it so complex and expensive?
I was wondering what the prices would be so here are some numbers:
Booking 1 week in advance on the 20th, Amsterdam Schiphol - Paris Charles de Gaulle 1 way trip.
Flying: €301 for the cheapest direct flight, 1h 20m.
Train: €132 for the cheapest direct train, 3h 09m
So it takes far longer but is far cheaper too, results are about what i expected.
If you account for check in/boarding times at the airport times are not so different either. However, one datapoint does not give a good overview of the situation and I found with most of my travel plans trains were more expensive than planes for the same routes within europe.
Not only check in/boarding, also location. Most train stations are within the city, most times even in the center.
Traveling to my home is faster door to door using train, even if thee ride is 3 hours longer. Also you can carry large luggage, food, drinks, use your phones internet and usually have more comfortable seats.
YMMV.
Here you can find more examples of travel times: EU train travel map
Eu train companies should (according to EU policies) support one out of two open API standards (gtfs or netex), though they might be difficult to find.
There are a number of projecta that implement these, one of my favorites is https://direkt.bahn.guru/ which shows direct train connections for any (many/most?) European cities with the uae of DBs APIs (sadly it's currently down until new DB APIs are up again). Github: https://github.com/juliuste/direkt.bahn.guru
There is also the official EU night train map which I frequently use https://back-on-track.eu/night-train-map/
https://omio.com/ is pretty good as well.
I think that's an unusually favourable trip towards the train, tbh. Firstly, I'm finding plane tickets to Paris that are similar to the price you have listed for train here. Secondly Amsterdam-Paris is a solid connection with the old Thalys/Eurostar. Try something similar with Marseille, Lyon or any city that isn't on the direct path and you'll need to pay train fares to Paris then to wherever you're actually going, when you can probably get an easy-jet or ryanair for like 50 bucks and the total train fare is 2/300€.
Also it's still cheaper to get in my car (alone) than pay that train fare to Paris, disregarding parking fees in Paris of course since that's very expensive, but you can park& ride.
Indeed, i chose this route because i traveled it quite often.
I used google flights and NS international to find the ticket prices, the price of €301 was listed as the cheapest direct flight.
Yeah, I'm just saying that's not really typical or representative of every day people's journeys that aren't capital<->capital, then the train starts losing way too much in terms of costs, that's the shit part, I think a lot of people would be fine traveling by train more but when on top of having to compete with the speed of flight and the convenience of driving, but also costs more then that's fucked, we need to subsidize them more and tax airlines up the wazoo.
Takes longer to get in and out the airport. I bet there's not much in it overall
As a counter example, Berlin Copenhagen takes 7-10 hours instead of 50 minutes and costs less to fly. The only affordable alternative is Flixbus