This is the best summary I could come up with:

France will increase taxes on flights to invest more in its railways, the country’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune announced this week.

Last month Greenpeace released an analysis showing that taking a train is on average double the cost of flying.

The report compared the costs of flight and train tickets on 112 routes in Europe, including 94 cross-border connections.

Dardenne counters that the climate crisis is a much bigger threat to tourism and points to the example of wildfires and heatwaves in Europe this summer that have been disrupting holidays on the continent.

The European Commission has been working on an upcoming ‘Regulation on Multimodal Digital Mobility Services’ to improve the process of booking tickets across rail, bus and air.

It says this could be funded by windfall profit taxes, the phase-out of airline subsidies, and a fair taxation system based on CO2 emissions.

I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Without proper info and data we are swimming in opinions and anecdotes and not able to vote for something rational.

Tax exemptions for aviation is a problem. A bigger problem yet is that the environmental costs are not charged to the user (in both aviation or trains).

But even considering that, I suspect the train tickets would still be to expensive, relative to aviation. And that is, in my opinion, due to the inherent lack of competition in trains and relatively easy to implement competition in aviation. Train and train infrastructure companies need more accountability — big vehicles in dedicated tracks should result in very inexpensive tickets, why aren’t they?

Because trains require far more infrastructure