Apart from long distances, that’s true only if you count flight time. To take a plane, you need to drive to the airport (which is far from the city), show up at least 2 hours before your flight, go through check-in, wait in line and do the reverse on arrival; and if there’s a sudden storm or something you gotta wait on the runway for another 3 hours. Trains take you from one city center to another city centre, you need to show up 20 minutes before departure and there’s no check-in (unless you live in Canada).
and cheaper
Artificially cheaper, planes are subsidized, trains are not. When you buy a plane ticket, you’re actually paying for only a fraction of the real price.
Most commonly you want to go from city center to city center. Airports are outside, so you have to get there. that takes time. Then you have security checks, boarding and so forth, which takes hours. If trains are reasonably fast trains are faster at something like 500km, for really well built high speed rail you end up at 1000km.
As for cost, as the article explains, trains have to pay fuel taxes and VAT, which flights do not. The price difference is low enough, that that would make trains cheaper or at least as expensive as planes on many journeys.
It’s faster and cheaper than trains
Apart from long distances, that’s true only if you count flight time. To take a plane, you need to drive to the airport (which is far from the city), show up at least 2 hours before your flight, go through check-in, wait in line and do the reverse on arrival; and if there’s a sudden storm or something you gotta wait on the runway for another 3 hours. Trains take you from one city center to another city centre, you need to show up 20 minutes before departure and there’s no check-in (unless you live in Canada).
Artificially cheaper, planes are subsidized, trains are not. When you buy a plane ticket, you’re actually paying for only a fraction of the real price.
Show up 20min before? More like 2min before :)
You like to live dangerously…
Haha why? What countries does that not work in? The only time I had to be earlier on a train than its departure was on the Eurostar
I assume you’re not in the EU…
Technically not, but I traveled a lot by train in Europe
Most commonly you want to go from city center to city center. Airports are outside, so you have to get there. that takes time. Then you have security checks, boarding and so forth, which takes hours. If trains are reasonably fast trains are faster at something like 500km, for really well built high speed rail you end up at 1000km.
As for cost, as the article explains, trains have to pay fuel taxes and VAT, which flights do not. The price difference is low enough, that that would make trains cheaper or at least as expensive as planes on many journeys.
Oh, so the reason why flights are cheaper is because they’re cheaper? Yeah that makes sense.
🤡
The actual flight might be cheaper, but the airport bureucracy isn’t. The security theater wastes a ton of time.
The last times I flew it didn’t. It gets really easy and quick with an EU passport