2023-07-22 00:00:00
A Greenpeace report shows the extent to which the unfair regulation of long-distance travel is undermining Europe’s railways, contributing enormously to the pollution of the planet, to the benefit of the airlines. According to the report, train tickets are twice as expensive as plane tickets, so the organization has called on European Union institutions and national governments to make them more affordable.
(21/07/2023)
According to Greenpeace, train tickets are, on average, twice as expensive as plane tickets in Europe and up to four times in the UK and Spain. On average, on all the routes analyzed in Spain, the train costs almost four times more than the plane. Traveling from London to Barcelona can be up to thirty times more expensive by train than by plane. However, the global climate impact of flying can be more than eighty times greaterv than that of traveling between.
Study on 112 European routes
The study has compared plane and train tickets for 112 different European routes in nine different time periods. On average, flights are cheaper than trains on 71 percent of the routes analysed. Only twenty-three of the European routes studied are cheaper by train than by plane, and only six of them are operated by low-cost airlines.
Low-cost airlines operate 79 percent of the routes analyzed and, in most cases, are cheaper than rail due to their unfair and aggressive pricing strategies. Sometimes even flights that include connections or transfers are cheaper than direct flights for the same routes, causing up to ten times more greenhouse gas emissions.
In this context, Greenpeace calls on national governments to introduce ‘climate tickets’ or single transport passes, such as Greenpeace Spain’s proposal for the T-leva pass, which will encourage the use of trains and public transport in general. These are affordable single long-term tickets, valid on all forms of public transport in a given country or region, including all trains and cross-border transport.
Climate tickets can be financed through taxes on corporate windfalls, the phasing out of environmentally harmful subsidies, or a fair tax system based on carbon dioxide emissions, among other possibilities.
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