Comment by joegibbs
1 day ago
As an Australian, why are European train prices so high? Obviously it's due to a lack of subsidies, but why are they not subsidised?
For instance, a train from London to Edinburgh (about 4 hours) is about $120 while an equivalent trip in Australia (Melbourne to Albury) is about $10 (it used to be about $40, but that's still much cheaper). Sydney to Melbourne is 900 kilometers and $80, Berlin to Paris is minimum $172.
Is there very little competition from cars and planes?
Railway is national and cross border is always expensive. For a similar distance you can check Hamburg - Munich.
Europe is too poor to subsidiase long travel trains :p EU policy is more to introduce more competitions into the system / partly privatise it (like it works in Italy)
HSR in France, Italy, Spain can be very cheap. Also, they have generous discounts for 'young people' (up to 30 I think) and 60+.
Living in NL, I have fond memories of the kind of travel enabled by Ouigo when I lived in FR.
Another reason is that these routes operate an airfare model where all tickets are for a specific seat on a specific service, with increasing prices as the seats sell out. It allows for more efficient train loading, with the downside that you can't turn up to the station and assume you can take the next train.
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There is ample competition from cars and planes, europe has one of the most dense and intensive highway networks in the world, and the most dense and intensive short-haul flight network in the world.
Rather, the trains in western Europe are so desirable that the prices don't need to be heavily subsidized in order to be fully utilized.
In most of western Europe, the main barrier to increasing train usage is the physical number of tracks and trains in operation. If prices were further lowered, there'd be nowhere to even put all the extra customers the subsidies would bring in. Therefore, if the governemnt is going to put money into the trains, the first priority is infrastructure expansions, not price subsidies