Traveling by train in Europe is, on average, twice as expensive as flying. On some routes, trains are even 30 times more costly than planes. This is according to an analysis by Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe.

The organization argues that European railways are disadvantaged by unfair taxes in favor of airlines, to the detriment of the climate. “This report shows the extent to which European citizens are encouraged to fly,” says Herwig Schuster, mobility expert at Greenpeace. “Airlines benefit from unfair tax breaks. Low-cost airlines, in particular, exploit all loopholes to offer flights at outrageously low prices.”

Belgium expensive for train travel

Greenpeace compared air and train tickets from 112 different European routes nine times. Flight tickets are generally cheaper than train tickets on 71% of the routes analyzed. For example, a train ticket for the Madrid-Brussels route costs 15 times as much as a plane ticket. This is the fourth largest price difference from the environmental organization’s survey.

The route with the most significant price difference is between London and Barcelona: the train can be as much as 30 times more expensive than the plane. And only 23 of the 112 European routes surveyed are (almost) always cheaper by train than by plane. And it should be noted that 16 of these 23 routes where the train is more advantageous do not benefit from a low-cost air link.

For routes from Belgium, train tickets cost, on average, 2,6 times more than plane tickets. That makes Belgium the third most expensive country for train travel, after the UK and Spain.

Especially low-cost carriers are responsible

Low-cost carriers operate 79% of the routes analyzed and are usually cheaper than trains with their “unfair and aggressive pricing strategies.” Sometimes they even offer more affordable transfer flights than airlines operating direct flights for the same routes, emitting up to 10 times more greenhouse gases. For example, travelers are given the absurd option of flying cheaply from London to Brussels, with a stopover in Denmark.

Another striking example: in 2019, 4,7 million people used planes for the Amsterdam-London route. Although the journey takes only four hours by train, the ticket is almost twice as expensive as the air ticket. Scrapping this air link would save 216 000 tons of CO2 emissions a year.

According to the environmental organization, 10-euro flights also exist because offers pay the actual costs: insecurity for employees, customers spending a lot of extra expenses, and local governments subsidizing with taxpayers’ money.

And that Greenpeace’s analysis does not just find a stick to beat the dog is also evident from an ING report last year. With the rise of low-cost airlines, intra-EU air traffic grew much faster than rail traffic between 2014 and 2019.

In 2019, about a quarter of European flights were 500 kilometers or shorter. And in recent decades, aviation has been Europe’s fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, increasing 29% between 2009 and 2019 – air traffic is even now reaching its pre-pandemic levels.

Climate tickets

To make rail more affordable than airplanes, Greenpeace is calling on politicians and national governments to reverse this trend and introduce climate tickets. “These are affordable and simple tickets that are valid on all forms of public transport in a country or region, including all trans and transport across borders,” Schuster says.

Climate tickets could be financed, among other things, by taxes on the excess profits of oil and gas companies, the phasing out of environmentally damaging subsidies, or by a fair tax system based on CO2 emissions. “At the same time, subsidies to airlines and airports must be ended, starting with the phasing out paraffin tax exemptions,” Schuster argues.

Also, no VAT is levied on air tickets, while travelers in Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, pay 9% VAT on their train tickets. Last week, the environmental organization Transport & Environment calculated that European aviation benefits from these rules for over 34 billion euros a year.

According to the European Union environment agency, air travel creates almost five times more C02 emissions per passenger per kilometer than a train journey, and Greenpeace even calls that a “very conservative estimate.”

‘Train nationalism’

At the same time, Europe’s various train companies also should sweep in front of their own doors. According to the Dutch newspaper Trouw, international trains are packed.

For example, Dutch state-owned railway company NS sold as many as 339 000 international train tickets for the holiday months, some 20% more than last year. However, the growing demand is too hard to take for railway companies like NS or European rail in general.

The railway should play an essential role in the European Green Deal and is considered the backbone of its mobility strategy. For example, Europe wants to push for more competition on the railways and a more extensive international rail network for high-speed and night trains, but not all countries and rail companies feel the need for this.

Faster railway lines and extra trains are coming, but only by 2030. Moreover, the often nationally heavily subsided railway companies in Europe invariably prioritize domestic timetables.

The result is fewer international train journeys and poor connections, i.e., long transfer times. The European Commission already spoke of “train nationalism” in this context, which is why it favors a kind of Eurocontrol for rail.

Greenpeace, therefore, calls for a more straightforward system for train travel. For example, those who now book an international train journey often have to order tickets from more than one company, and securing a few months in advance is often impossible.

Greenpeace says to provide a Europe-wide valid ticket for all public transport, although an EU legislative proposal is now in the pipeline to create one standard ticketing system.

Overall, only 7% of passengers and 11% of goods in Europe are now transported by rail, one of the most sustainable forms of transport.