• last year
While some people prefer this mode of transport, experts have said that reducing tax breaks for airlines and subsidies was needed to make it more affordable.
Transcript
00:00 Erich Stegemann's love of trains started young when he worked at this model train store
00:07 in Berlin. Now, as a railway engineer, he's choosing trains to go across the continent.
00:14 An airliner seat just isn't as comfortable and you don't have the leg room and you've
00:20 got that on a first class train, certainly. I like the landscapes. It's just more relaxed.
00:27 He's not the only one that feels that way. A German NGO promoting train travel says there
00:33 was a big uptick in demand in recent years as night trains were being fully booked well
00:39 ahead of schedule. National rail operators and companies are adding new routes this year
00:45 and next with more direct trips connecting Germany to cities across Europe. Germany's
00:51 Deutsche Bahn says there were record sales for long distance transport this year.
00:56 This is where one of the more highly anticipated new routes will be, Paris to Berlin. But that
01:00 doesn't mean everyone's going to be jumping on board. A study by Greenpeace compared prices
01:05 between train and plane tickets for certain routes. It found that flying was cheaper,
01:11 more than 50 percent of the time. The EU is aiming to double high speed rail by 2030.
01:18 This train travel analyst says passenger numbers can massively increase, but that's being hampered
01:24 by airlines getting tax breaks. You should subsidize the mode of transit that you want
01:30 more of, not the one that you actually want to reduce. This is no level playing field
01:37 where the different modes of transit can really compete against each other. And this is the
01:42 reason why air travel is so cheap at the moment. Price is an obstacle even for Eric, despite
01:49 his preference for trains. So it's just so energy efficient compared to flying and it's
01:56 also of course motivation. Then again, it's so expensive that I cannot omit flying completely
02:05 unfortunately.
02:05 (whooshing)

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