When traveling through Europe, the climate-friendly train is often more expensive than the plane. This is the conclusion reached by the environmental organization Greenpeace, which compared Europe-wide ticket prices for both means of transport on 112 routes at several booking times.
According to the organization, the train is 71 percent more expensive for customers than the more climate-damaging air connections. Of the 31 connections with start or end points in Germany, the train was more expensive in half of the cases.
The testers registered the biggest price difference on the Barcelona-London route, which should cost up to 384 euros by train. That is 30 times more than by plane with a ticket price of 12.99 euros. The trains on the Hamburg-Brussels and Hamburg-Munich routes were always cheaper.
Greenpeace traffic expert Marisa Reiserer is demanding a Europe-wide kerosene tax of 50 cents per liter, bringing in annual revenues of 46.2 billion euros. These funds would have to be channeled into the railway infrastructure.
Reiserer explains: “More and more people want to travel by train and do without flights, but the lack of kerosene tax and other climate-damaging subsidies for the aviation industry are distorting prices. This is a crash landing for many good intentions and climate protection.”
