Will high speed rail ever become cheaper than flying?

[PTR 444]

High speed rail only captures a tiny fraction of the global long distance travel market, mostly centered on select corridors within Western Europe, China and Japan. Speed of rail in comparison to flying is a big factor but the cost also plays a significant part too. In most cases, a high speed rail journey from London to somewhere in Europe will cost three times as much as an equivalent journey by flying, which significantly sways the balance towards flying while providing no incentive for passengers to switch to the greener mode of travel.

If high speed rail was somehow made cheaper or flying made prohibitively expensive, then the share for rail could increase quite a bit as certain people don’t mind slightly slower journeys if they are still relatively fast or scenic. Do you think we will ever get to a point where catching a train from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Barcelona will be cheaper than an equivalent flight?

 

[guilbert]

I think for something like London to Paris the Eurostar is generally pretty competitive with airline fares - though what people actually pay is going to depend on demand etc. The problem is when you're comparing a flight from, say Bristol to Barcelona where the rail equivalent would be at least 3 legs, it's hard for the total to be competitive.

 

[30907]

Over longer distances, even London-Barcelona, air is competitive.

By contrast, if you want to go to Paris and back tomorrow, Business Class from Heathrow will set you back nearly double the walkup Business Premier from STP.

(You can undercut rail by flying from Luton or Gatwick, to be fair.)

 

[zwk500]

Depends how you add up all the costs. Low-cost airlines don't make money on the £20 seats, but on all the extras they load onto you having trapped you in. They also are able to bully cities and airports into giving them ludicrously good deals on operational costs, to the point of being anti-competitive.
Even if you take the various business practices out of it, Airlines have the massive advantage that nobody has to pay to maintain the sky. (Yes there's ATC but then the railway has it's own control and planning offices).

 

[AlbertBeale]

Depends how you add up all the costs. Low-cost airlines don't make money on the £20 seats, but on all the extras they load onto you having trapped you in. They also are able to bully cities and airports into giving them ludicrously good deals on operational costs, to the point of being anti-competitive.
Even if you take the various business practices out of it, Airlines have the massive advantage that nobody has to pay to maintain the sky. (Yes there's ATC but then the railway has it's own control and planning offices).

Also - under EU regulations, international air travel tickets are the one and only thing that VAT can't be charged on by any EU member state. Then there are the tax differentials on fuel as well.

In terms of not having to pay to maintain the sky, it could be said that clearing up emissions - some of which are caused by planes - does have to be paid for ... but not by the airlines of course. Everyone has to pay for the problems caused by the minority of people who fly.

In terms of the original question, long-distance rail travel might not get as cheap as flying, but for the sake of our ecosystem flying might get as expensive as train travel, if you see the distinction.

 

[stuu]

Rail needs hundreds of miles of specialist and very expensive to maintain infrastructure, often in awkward to reach places. Air travel needs ~three miles of often very intensively used infrastructure and some equally intensively used air traffic control, so has a really big cost advantage over rail. Short haul planes are also very intensively used so the capital cost is split between many users.

Clearly there is an enormous elephant in the room with air travel, but if you somehow ignore that, air has a significant economic advantage.

 

[philosopher]

Rail needs hundreds of miles of specialist and very expensive to maintain infrastructure, often in awkward to reach places. Air travel needs ~three miles of often very intensively used infrastructure and some equally intensively used air traffic control, so has a really big cost advantage over rail. Short haul planes are also very intensively used so the capital cost is split between many users.

Clearly there is an enormous elephant in the room with air travel, but if you somehow ignore that, air has a significant economic advantage.

Air travel does have quite high staff costs. A Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 will have two pilots, both on very high salaries and four cabin crew for 180 to 200 passengers. My guess is a high speed train will have one train driver, a train guard and two or three catering staff for between 500 and 1000 passengers.

 

[Lucan]

under EU regulations, international air travel tickets are the one and only thing that VAT can't be charged on by any EU member state.

As we are no longer in the EU, it is high time we started charging VAT on aircraft fuel.

It is ridiculous how much "carbon tax" I pay to use my car while people flying over my house to go shopping in Paris or Rome (a co-worker of mine often does this) pay nothing. People respond that aircraft would then do all their refualling in Paris or Rome, but it is worth at least trying out the idea, it needs someone to break the international ranks, and perhaps then even the EU could overcome its inertia do do something about this present nonsense.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

As we are no longer in the EU, it is high time we started charging VAT on aircraft fuel.
It is ridiculous how much "carbon tax" I pay to use my car while people flying over my house to go shopping in Paris or Rome (a co-worker of mine often does this) pay nothing. People respond that aircraft would then do all their refualling in Paris or Rome, but it is worth at least trying out the idea, it needs someone to break the international ranks, and perhaps then even the EU could overcome its inertia do do something about this present nonsense.

Tax-free aviation fuel is an international rule/convention, from well before the EU.
Our Air Passenger Duty (APD) was Kenneth Clarke's way of imposing an aviation tax by other means, and some other countries do the same.
There's no VAT on UK rail fares, by the way, unlike in Germany for instance.

The 3-hour limit applies to train v plane competitiveness.
On this basis SNCF has trashed Air France on Paris-Bordeaux/Marseille/Strasbourg/Lille/Brussels/Geneva.
Same with Trenitalia on Milan-Rome-Naples, Renfe on Madrid-Seville/Malaga/Leon/Alacant/Valencia/Barcelona.
All these routes are cheaper/more competitive on rail than air, which has been reduced to feeders for long-distance flights.
It's more complex in Germany, where air services are focussed on Frankfurt and Munich, but there is a closer business partnership between DB and the airlines than rail/air in the UK, allowing interlining.
Combined fly-rail is also common for international flights to Switzerland.
Fast/high speed rail also reaches the principal airports in places like Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
We don't really have a long-distance connection to airports, TPE at Manchester Airport, for all its shortcomings, being the nearest we have.

 

[duesselmartin]

Often it is cheaper. Düsseldorf Zürich for €39 is possible, same to Vienna.
Düsseldorf to London I usually break even with BA flight costs. It is really a very mixed bunch depending on route and when.

 

[eldomtom2]

Do you think we will ever get to a point where catching a train from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Barcelona will be cheaper than an equivalent flight?

Well if we do the sensible thing and introduce a carbon tax...

 

[507020]

As we are no longer in the EU, it is high time we started charging VAT on aircraft fuel.

It is ridiculous how much "carbon tax" I pay to use my car while people flying over my house to go shopping in Paris or Rome (a co-worker of mine often does this) pay nothing. People respond that aircraft would then do all their refualling in Paris or Rome, but it is worth at least trying out the idea, it needs someone to break the international ranks, and perhaps then even the EU could overcome its inertia do do something about this present nonsense.

Exactly. The even more stupid thing is that VAT is payable on railway traction electricity, that is the state owned Network Rail must hand back to the treasury a percentage of what it pays to private electricity suppliers for the privilege of maintaining what is environmentally friendly transport infrastucture…

 

[Route115?]

You have to factor in things like hotel bills and additional days of annual leave. It is fine saying that rail is quicker flying between the centres of London & Paris but a lot of journeys are not between city centres. Once you move outside the South East rail is never going to be competitive to the Continent. I think that some people seem to believe that rail is competing primarily with air when it is with the car. (Roughly twice as many people travel by car or coach across the English Channel as by train although I am still grappling with the statistics, the International Passenger Survey has its limitations.) French rules on prohibiting flying may be good if they encourage a centralising of institutions in Paris (if there was a French equivilent of GBR would it be based in their equivilent of Derby, but I must not upset residents of the East Midlands and rember that most Visiting Friends & Relatives trips are not city centre to city centre) but could also be poor if they encourage people to drive.

If you want to encourage rail use you would be far better developing a Swiss style network than worrying about people flying grom Manchester to Barcelona. The UK rail market share peaked at 11% (up from 6% in the 1990s) but has since dropped to 9% as a lot of commuter traffic has been lost. This could be increased by developing the network. (As a comparison Switzerland has a share of about 15%. Japan is around 25% but 50% in the Greater Tokyo area, although these figures may be out of date, I calculated them a long time ago.)

With flying the real culprit is any case long haul flying. I recently flew to Australia a round trip of c 21,000 miles. I (very roughly) calcated that my fuel consumption was around 320kg creating about 1 tonne of CO2 (about the same as driving 7,000 miles) - as a rule of thumb flying uses about as much fuel as driving in a car with two occupants although it can be lower for longer flights or high density charter flights. Air travel produces just over 2% of all CO2 emmissions (all not just transport). This percentage is much higher for the UK but most of that is for long haul travel.

Yes we need to develop the rail network and there is immense potential, but also to avoid the fixation with air on certain routes which is really a distraction.

There is also an issue of whether rail needs air to keep it honest. I suspect that the answer is less so where you have a Dutich, Swisas or German style public service network and more so where is operated on commercial grounds. (Eurostar certainly needs competition but I can't see it happening at least in the short term.) However this is moving on to a discussion of the EU Fourth Package which is thread drift.