Faster-Cheaper-Greener?

Many people are thinking that the train is the most sustainable way of transportation without knowing the facts. However, is it really the most sustainable style of travelling for people?

Traveling by airplane, which most people think is the fastest way, causes the problem that people have to be transferred to the airport first by private cars or taxis. At the airport, people are losing time because of the passport and security control, so that traveling by airplane often needs more time at the end. One example is the way from Frankfurt to Paris, where passengers spend only one third of the whole traveling time in the air, while the rest of the time they are waiting.

With a wide net of high-speed railways, traveling by train is a perfect option for traveling routes between 200 and 900 kilometers within Europe. The energy for the trains comes more often from renewable sources of electricity. One good example is the Swiss Federal Railway (SBB), which uses 20% renewable energy. The SBB provides 16% of all personal transportation services and 40% of all the goods traffic in Switzerland but only needs a remarkable 4% of the total energy used by the transportation industry in Switzerland.

The price for a train ticket might be expensive for a short travel distance, but for longer distances, it is cheaper. One way to find out is a tool named routerank.com where people can compare different means of transportation. It not only compares the CO2 emissions, it also compares the duration and prices for traveling. For traveling from Bern to Amsterdam as an example, it gives us the following result:

It confirms that traveling by train might not be the fastest (still faster than by airplane) but could be the cheapest and most sustainable way of transportation for certain trips.