Tax subsidies on avation gas? Where as none on trains (subsidies)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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no taxes on aviation fuel and no VAT on flights. Both apply for trains.
So it's the fault of the governments? What a surprise. /S
Why guessing, when the answer is in the article?
Suggesting that someone read the article in a comment section under said article…blasphemy!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
France will increase taxes on flights to invest more in its railways, the country’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune announced this week.
Last month Greenpeace released an analysis showing that taking a train is on average double the cost of flying.
The report compared the costs of flight and train tickets on 112 routes in Europe, including 94 cross-border connections.
Dardenne counters that the climate crisis is a much bigger threat to tourism and points to the example of wildfires and heatwaves in Europe this summer that have been disrupting holidays on the continent.
The European Commission has been working on an upcoming ‘Regulation on Multimodal Digital Mobility Services’ to improve the process of booking tickets across rail, bus and air.
It says this could be funded by windfall profit taxes, the phase-out of airline subsidies, and a fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
maybe don't use a Picture of the SBB, probably the best Train Operator on the entire Continent, for this Article?
anyways, i just compared SBB Zürich -> Généve: 48.- / 44.20 CHF. not even comparing the zone subscriptions you can use to save money if you frequent a route.
Airplane Zürich -> Généve: min. 94.- CHF
for any other country it probably holds up though
If you go international that stops pretty quickly thou. Berlin - Zürich is something 226€. A flight costs 209€. The issue is no kerosine tax and no VAT. German VAT on that alone would raise costs to 249€.
Why was the vat removed for flights?
For international flights, but in Europe that is nearly all of them. The idea in general with vat is that is paid for every consumption within the country. However it being international, it is no longer domestic so it does not apply. For trains it ends up being domestic travel in one country and then the other, so vat applies.
You can't use zone subscriptions on most IC connections and 48.- is also only with a half-fare subscription. So basically equal price.
Without proper info and data we are swimming in opinions and anecdotes and not able to vote for something rational.
Tax exemptions for aviation is a problem. A bigger problem yet is that the environmental costs are not charged to the user (in both aviation or trains).
But even considering that, I suspect the train tickets would still be to expensive, relative to aviation. And that is, in my opinion, due to the inherent lack of competition in trains and relatively easy to implement competition in aviation. Train and train infrastructure companies need more accountability
big vehicles in dedicated tracks should result in very inexpensive tickets, why aren't they?
