George Bush, then a presidential candidate, famously said at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans: “read my lips: no new taxes”. The pledge not to tax the American people further was not kept. In 1990, faced with a growing budget deficit, Bush signed the Budget Reconciliation Act, which included increases of the top marginal rate and some excise taxes. This reversal cost him dearly politically and contributed to his defeat against Bill Clinton in the 1992 election.
Last November 5th, the European Commissioner for sustainable Transport and Tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas presented a new European rail plan, known as the High-Speed Rail Action (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The High-Speed Rail Action Plan
Source: European Commission
He said: “High-speed rail is not just about cutting travel times – it is about uniting Europeans, strengthening our economy, and leading the global race for sustainable transport. With today’s plan, we are turning ambition into action: breaking down barriers, mobilising investments for modern infrastructure, and making cross-border rail the backbone of a carbon-neutral, competitive, and secure Europe. Citizens across the Union will benefit from faster, safer, and more affordable journeys that bring Europe closer together.”. Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy, wrote on X: “We miss it. And we have to do whatever it takes”; the first one, evidently, was not enough. What neither the Commissioner nor Mr. Letta said is where will the money come from. European taxpayers probably wouldn’t have been happy to learn that the entire €500 billion bill will have to be paid solely by them.
Indeed, no private investor would be willing to put money into these lines. For a railway line to be profitable, both low construction costs and high demand have to exist at the same time. The only line in Europe that meets this condition is the Paris–Lyon, completed way back in 1983 and which broke even in 1995.
Will citizens benefit from faster journeys? Yes, but in many cases not enough to compete with air transportation.
The most important pools of demand that can be captured from air transport, over distances of about 500/600 km such as Milan–Rome, Paris–Lyon, Barcelona–Madrid and Paris–London, are already served by high-speed rail. In these cases, the train has today the largest market share. However, and with the above-mentioned exception of the Paris–Lyon route, this result depends to a significant extent on the unfair competition between the airplanes and the high-speed trains, whose users pay only the running costs of the service, but not the construction costs and only a portion of the maintenance and management costs of the network. If rail fares had to cover all these costs, they would more than double, and the train’s competitiveness would be greatly reduced.
On longer distances, the train will never be able to compete with the plane. Almost nobody will travel from Rome to Paris by train even if the journey time was reduced from 10 hours 50 minutes to 8 hours 45 minutes, or from Berlin to Paris with a seven-hour journey.
Moreover, along several new links the average speed is not so impressive: around or even below 100 km/h.
Average speed of some new high-speed lines
| Distance as the crow flies [km] | Time [hours] | Average speed [km/h] | |
| Berlin – Warsaw | 519 | 4.25 | 122 |
| Berlin – Prague | 281 | 4.50 | 62 |
| Berlin – Amsterdam | 577 | 5.50 | 105 |
| Berlin – Copenhagen | 355 | 4.00 | 89 |
| Budapest – Bucharest | 646 | 6.25 | 103 |
| Vilnius – Warsaw | 394 | 4.00 | 99 |
Despite the success of trains on some specific routes, over the last thirty years the air transport sector has grown much more than high-speed rail; passengers-km by air in the EU-27 increased by 344 billion and those by HS rail by 100 billion (Figure 2).
The real game-changer for long-distance travel has been the liberalisation of the aviation, which led to an extraordinary growth in connections and a dramatic drop in prices. Europe has already become far more connected thanks to low-cost airlines than thanks to services that are almost entirely produced within the market. The new plan will hardly change the picture.
Figure 2: Transport performance by HS rail and air in the EU27
CO₂ emissions by air transport could be reduced by around 3 million tonnes per year (approximately 5% of total aviation emissions) without even considering those generated during the construction of the lines. Using the same unit of measurement adopted by the EU, namely €100/tCO₂, this would result in an annual environmental benefit of €300 million, that is the 0.06% of the required investment.
Yet, several countries are considering banning air transport on routes served by high-speed rail, just as France has already done for connections where the train journey time is less than 2.5 hours.
To summarize, it is the usual railway story: benefits for the few users, for the producers, for the suppliers, and costs for everyone else.
But the few who benefit gain a large advantage and therefore have a strong motivation to push for this choice. Those who are harmed, on the other hand, do not perceive the cost and thus have a weaker incentive to oppose it. Perhaps, things would turn out differently if European taxpayers knew that the grand “High-Speed Rail Action” will take 1,000 euros out of their pockets.
