From Strange Flights to Real Choices: Making High-Speed Rail Visible
Absurdities in the Air
A plane for a 220 km journey, flying right over a high-speed rail line: that is what Condor recently announced. The German leisure airline will operate a new flight between Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. Not because their passengers desperately want to fly from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt, but because passengers and crew need to connect to Condor’s long-haul services to places like Canada and Cuba. The irony is that Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed train does the same trip in just 1 hour and 12 minutes, almost identical to the flight time, and directly into Frankfurt airport. And yet, a plane will now cover this route.
Condor’s decision is a rational one. The airline is a smaller competitor under pressure after Lufthansa restricted access to its feeder traffic and needs to secure demand for its long-haul flights. But from the perspective of Europe’s transport system, this is a missed opportunity. Such short flights could easily be replaced by rail if travelers were able to see, compare and book those options as part of their journey. The problem is not Condor, but the absence of a system that makes rail offers visible alongside air.
EU High-Speed Rail Communication
Roughly coinciding with this move, European Commission finally released its Connecting Europe through High-Speed Rail Communication today. Let’s be honest: even for rail travel enthusiasts (and there are many these days), the document is a rather dry read, looking at rail capacity management, availability of infrastructure and ultimately how to enable more companies to compete more vigorously on high-speed routes.
The underlying objective of the Plan is most interesting: how do we get more people to ditch their cars or planes and take the train for their long-distance travel; the famous “modal shift”? The answer comes in two parts:
- By increasing the number of available trains through removing relevant constraints—this is where the new Action Plan places its focus.
- By getting travelers to compare and ultimately choose rail travel, over other travel options, through increased visibility and attractiveness.
Since the Commission has laid out a solid plan to tackle the first set of problems, let us examine the second.
Missed Connections; Missed Opportunities
Europe’s rail market is still largely based on the legacy of state monopolies. These operators continue to restrict how and where their tickets can be sold, often refusing to make them available through third-party vendors. As a passenger, this leads to an obvious problem: I can’t easily see or combine all my options. Airlines and railways keep their offers locked into their own channels, which means I can’t compare flights with trains, or even mix and match across modes. The result? Most people often end up taking a flight when a train would have been faster, cheaper, or greener, simply because the information wasn’t there. That’s not just frustrating for travelers, it also drives unnecessary emissions.
This lack of openness thus does not just create booking inconveniences—it undermines multimodal travel altogether. The Condor example shows this dysfunction clearly: had rail been visible and combinable with air, a short feeder flight might never have been needed and its CO2 emissions never released in the atmosphere.
Connecting the Dots: Air and Rail side by side
At its core, the problem is that dominant airlines and railways restrict access to their offers. Passengers cannot easily compare or combine across modes. The result is fewer people choosing rail, more unnecessary flights, and more emissions.
This is why a Sustainable Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation (SDBTR) is so important. Such a Regulation would oblige operators to make their offers available in a way that allows independent platforms to show and sell them. And to succeed, the scope must cover not just rail, but also air. Only if passengers can see both modes side by side will they be able to choose a train instead of a plane for short-haul connections. This is not just about making rail more visible—it is about enabling true modal shift.
The EU has set ambitious targets: doubling high-speed rail traffic by 2030, tripling it by 2050, and making scheduled collective travel under 500 kilometres carbon neutral by the end of this decade. These goals are not achievable without making trains far more visible and attractive to consumers. By pairing the High-Speed Rail Action Plan with an ambitious SDBTR, extended to air as well as rail, the EU can make sure that the choice for rail is not hidden, but obvious. That is how Europe can turn its vision of a high-speed rail network into reality and avoid the absurdity of flying over a high-speed line.
