Travel: when bus and train are a better alternative than flying

Flying is not always the best way to reach your destination, not only in terms of eco-sustainability but also in terms of time. In particular, traveling by train on the Rome-Florence route would save 79 minutes compared to flying, which would become 77 on the Paris-Lyon route and 56 on the Madrid-Barcelona route. This was revealed by a study carried out by the travel booking platform Oh my which he analysed the 50 most booked routes by train, bus and air in Germany, UK, Spain, France and Italy. For a more realistic estimate, the average check-in times and the times related to the transfer from the airport to the city center, determined via Google Maps, have been added to the duration of the air travel.

The train the plane also beats on the London-Brussels route (saving 104 minutes) and Rotterdam – Brussels (83 minutes) while on the Lisbon-Porto and Zurich-Genoa routes it is theairplane, with a time saving of about a quarter of an hour. The plane also prevails on international and cross-border routes such as Warsaw-Berlin (saving 240 minutes), Copenhagen-Berlin (225), Berlin-Amsterdam (127) and Prague-Budapest (199).

In terms of eco-sustainability, calculating the carbon dioxide emissions expressed in kilograms related to train, bus and air travel based on the values ​​​​provided by the climate protection organization Atmosfair, it is discovered that bus and train travel produces between 70% and 88% less CO2 than air travel. Traveling by train on the Rotterdam-Brussels route, for example, produces a quantity of CO2 equivalent to 12.38% of the CO2 emissions of a flight. The emissions of a train or bus journey from Prague to Budapest or from Madrid to Barcelona are equivalent, on average, to a quarter of those of a similar plane journey (16% each). From Zurich to Paris, on the other hand, ‘only’ 69.2% is saved.