European trains are highly subsidized by taxes. They are very expensive modes of transportation compared to air and car.
European trains are highly subsidized by taxes.
Actually, many Eropean passenger trains have been privatized (as have the Japanese passenger rail companies as well)
In many ways it's quite similar to the way private passenger bus companies operate on our Interstate highways.
Why? Because they're private concerns that maximizing profits (and thus economic productivity) by concentration on doing what they do best, moving large/bulky/heavy freight shipments for long distances.
Although they're nice for those that ride them or are employed by them, nationalized (i.e. socialized) European rail is a productivity failure and net drain drain on national strength....
"European auto drivers pay about 200 billion euros in gas and other highway-use taxes each year. About half of that is spent on roads while most of the rest subsidizes European rail lines. Yet those rail lines carried only 7.4 percent of passenger travel in 2000, down from 9.6 percent in 1980. European autos, meanwhile, carry more than 78 percent of passenger travel.
Ari Vatanen, a member of the European Parliament, observes that “not a single high-speed track built to date has had any perceptible impact on the road traffic carried by parallel motorways.” It seems that Europeans are actually losing mobility, paying exorbitant auto taxes to subsidize a rail system whose importance is steadily declining." economy."
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=71