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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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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.