“I imagined Europe to be a lot better connected”, says Rachael Muresan, a Law in Society student who moved from the United States to the Netherlands three years ago. Every summer since coming to Europe, she has travelled across the continent, but has almost never taken an international train. Each time she considered going by rail, she was greeted by extremely long connections, high prices, and serial transfers. Trip by trip, flying became Muresan’s norm.
For a lot of students, short flights are simply more appealing than spending long hours on a train. “That’s a lot of your time, and of your day, and of your life, while you pay not really that much less”, says Dagmara Styszko, a Polish student at Amsterdam University College who regularly chooses to fly home because of the inconvenient and costly train connection between Amsterdam and Warsaw.
Last year, a Greenpeace study revealed that flying is often even less costly than taking the train. This was the case on 54% of the analyzed cross-border routes within Europe. While air travel, on average, produces five times more CO2 per passenger than trains, untaxed aviation fuel and no Value Added Tax (VAT) on international flight tickets allow airlines to keep their prices low. Meanwhile, railway operators often face full VAT along with high energy costs and track access charges.
Fear of transfers
Styszko flies home and back around five times a year. Most times, she only gets to spend a couple of days at home – in such cases she never considers taking the train. But when heading to Poland for a summer break last year, she and her friend decided to look into travelling by rail for the first time. After doing some research, she started having second thoughts. “The transfer in Berlin is super problematic”, she says. It’s the only transfer on the route, but missing the connection often means having to spend the night in Berlin. In the end, she decided not to risk it and take the plane.
For Pauline Geertman, an Italian Artificial Intelligence student, taking a train back home to Milan was never an option even though it would likely cost her less than flying, since the flight costs her around 250 euros both ways. Geertman usually doesn’t mind taking a long trip, although she wouldn’t want to lose time she could spend with her family on travel. But the main reason behind her choice to fly is the uncertainty of making the transfers, since there are many on the route. “It’s a logistical nightmare”, she says. “Everything has to piece together.”
Airports are familiar
The fear of missing a connection on a long train journey is something Gereon tho Pesch and Lorenzo Freire-Stella often notice in students who opt to fly. Pesch and Freire-Stella are part of ErasmusbyTrain, an NGO with the goal of helping more students travel by train to their Erasmus exchange destinations. While the organisation is advocating for the EU to fund such tickets, the cost benefits are far from being the only factor pushing students to fly.
“Many people haven’t planned such a [train] journey in their past”, says Pesch, adding that many students consider flying as “the easy option”. He says that, just like Styszko and Geertman, many are scared of having to transfer between trains, especially when they are carrying a lot of luggage.
There is also the element of unfamiliarity. “All airports work the same”, says Pesch. “You very clearly know where to go.” Meanwhile, train stations are more likely to differ in each country, which is something that makes the transfer more unpredictable. “The [booking] site can think you have a 10-minute layover, but then one track is on one side of the station, and the other one is a 10-minute walk away while I don’t know where the tracks are”, says Muresan.
Unintuitive booking systems
For some, the problems start before the journey even begins. Last year, a YouGov poll commissioned by Transport & Environment revealed that two-thirds of long-distance rail passengers have at some point been discouraged from taking the train by fragmented and unintuitive booking systems.
Strikingly, a report by the European Commission found that the youngest age group (15-24 years old) experiences the most issues when booking connections, which requires buying tickets from at least two different operators. Freire-Stella says that this is because the ticketing systems “are very poorly maintained”, confusing young travellers who are used to intuitive digital tools.
Incompatible booking systems also affect the cost of travel. A lot of people are unlikely to find the best price for their tickets, because they choose the first option they find. “If you stay on the surface level, you may face the most expensive tickets”, says Freire-Stella, explaining that there are many tricks you can use when booking with multiple operators to pay the smallest price possible.
The booking hurdles don’t apply to flying. Sites like Skyscanner make it easy for anyone to find the cheapest flight and book the tickets in one place. Pesch is convinced an NGO like ErasmusbyTrain wouldn’t exist if a system like Skyscanner was available for rail travel.
Meeting people
It is most likely that pan-European train travel will eventually get easier. The booking systems are soon to be improved with the long-delayed Single Ticketing Regulation that will let passengers buy cross-border tickets in one system. Travel times and the number of transfers will decrease with the construction of a high-speed train network, which EU plans on completing by 2040. But is there a way to cut our flying emissions right now?
“You need to just give people the right incentives to do the right thing”, says Pesch. He and Freire-Stella say that students shouldn’t be shamed for flying, but rather “nudged” in the right direction and helped with booking their train journey.
Pesch hopes that when students complete their first journey, they will realize that “it’s actually a good time.” Trying long-distance trains may leave students with more than just a sustainable means of transport. Booking tickets, navigating the train stations, communicating in a foreign language, are all skills you get from travelling by rail, says Freire-Stella. What he stresses the most is how railways let you meet people. “People meeting each other creates Europe”, he says. “People travelling by train creates Europe.”