France is raising taxes on flights to pay for trains: Should other European countries do the same?

France will increase taxes on flights to invest more in its railways, the country’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune announced this week.

The move aims to make train travel more appealing by closing the price gap between airline tickets and train tickets.

“Many people are shocked by the fact that it’s often cheaper to take a flight than a train,” he told French broadcaster RMC.

It’s a similar picture across the continent. 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.

It found that they are almost always cheaper by plane.

One of the main reasons for the disparity is the lower taxes that the aviation industry benefits from.

If you fly from Paris to Barcelona the airline not only pays no VAT, but is also exempt from kerosene tax. If you make the same journey by train, the rail company will pay an energy tax and passenger VAT. This means higher costs for the company which are usually reflected in ticket prices.

“In a climate crisis, giving tax exemptions to a super polluting sector is incompatible with the challenges of today,” says Jo Dardenne, the aviation director at the clean transport campaign group Transport and Environment (T&E).

She welcomes France’s plans and hopes it can go further in the future.

T&E calculated that if all of the aviation industry's tax exemptions were removed across Europe in 2022, it would have raised €34.2 billion.

“It's not the train that's expensive. It's the plane that's not expensive enough,” the CEO of SNCF Jean-Pierre Farandou said in 2021.

“I don't understand why airlines are exempt from any tax on kerosene. I pay