Numerous climate and environmentalists would like to ban travel by plane and are persistently in favor of the railway as an allegedly "climate-friendly" alternative. Now the means of transport favored by these groups are also being criticized because the tickets are far too expensive.

The Greenpeace organization compared the prices on 112 intra-European routes. Several posting times were used in each case. The result: From Germany, rail transport would have been more expensive than air travel in all cases. Travelers have to pay up to 71 percent more for journeys by train. The aircraft would have been cheaper in almost all random samples. On 31 routes from/to Germany, train tickets would have cost at least half as much as flight tickets.

Greenpeace cites the connection between Barcelona and London as an extreme example. For the same travel dates, plane tickets were found for 12,99 euros and at the same time train tickets would have cost 384 euros. Due to the significantly longer travel time by rail, the train should probably only be an "alternative" for ideologically convinced people.

But there are also exceptions: On the Hamburg-Munich route operated by Lufthansa and between Hamburg and Brussels, the prices for flights would have been exorbitantly high. Greenpeace's environmentalists found cheaper train tickets on both of these routes.

The organization is now demanding cheaper train tickets and a kerosene tax of at least 50 cents per liter. It is calculated that 46,2 billion euros could be redeemed in this way. Greenpeace then wants to use these funds to subsidize rail transport.