There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center. However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears and those 1.5 hours start making a difference.
I think forcing companies to advertise more honest flight durations and prices could make a huge difference. If the airline tells you that you need to be at the airport 90 minutes before the flight, add it to the flight time. Require airlines to prominently show total time and cost from city center to city center with luggage.
If you're comparing a 59 EUR, 2.5 hour train ticket with a 29 EUR, 1 hour flight, the choice seems obvious, even though the flight will likely cost you more time and money in the end.
UX matters, and I believe this would be a very powerful nudge. I bet many people would take the train if the flight had to be advertised as "typically 3.5 hours, 82 EUR from city center to city center (fine print: 29 EUR flight, 29 EUR baggage fee unless you fly with hand baggage only, 12 EUR ticket to the airport, 12 EUR ticket from the airport at the destination; 1 hour flight duration, 45 minutes for getting from airport entrance to the gate, 20 minutes boarding, 30 minutes to get to the airport with an average 7 minute wait, 10 min to get out of the airport, 30 minutes to get from the airport with an average 8 minute wait)"
I used to regularly travel from Edmonton to Calgary for work. When you add up the extra time required for flying, it's about a three hour trip (45 minutes in the air, the rest is getting to the airport, checking in, etc). Coincidentally, it's also about a three hour drive.
My reasons for driving vs flying were usually to do with how long I'd be there. If I was going for one day then flying was preferable since falling asleep on the way home isn't a big deal. If I was going for multiple days then driving was preferable so that I'd have a car and be able to go places after finishing at the office. Flying was preferable in winter in case the roads were in bad shape. Driving was preferable on Fridays so that I could visit friends afterwards and come back the next day. Flying was preferable during the Calgary Stampede to avoid having to deal with the excess traffic in Calgary (plus WestJet did a cowboy-themed safety lecture during Stampede which was kind of neat).
The Red Arrow bus line from Edmonton to Calgary is the best of both worlds. Pick-up/Drop-offs from city core to city core as well as other stops along the way, Free wifi and beverages on the bus, decent seats for working during the stress free commute.
The difference in relative risk is high, but the absolute risk of dying in a car is still pretty low if you're sober, wearing a seatbelt, and not speeding. Oh, and apparently if you're not driving in the U.S. Geez, didn't realize we're such crappy drivers here.
It's mostly not that people in the US drive worse, it's that people in the US drive more. Similar risk multiplied by more miles leads to more fatalities.
Sadly that isn't the case: The actual fatalities and accidents per billion km driven is higher in the US than many other industrialized countries, so it's not about more km/miles being driven in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
In terms of fatalities per billion km the US is between Belgium and New Zealand. Not really up there with Somalia.
And the ranking there is kind of misleading because the types of countries that collect fatalities per unit distance at all are the ones that tend to do really well on it. We don't have the data for Russia or China but guesstimating based on accidents per 100k vehicles, it's bad.
Whereas e.g. Germany does really well. But fatalities per unit distance for the US isn't even twice the number in Germany, whereas in terms of fatalities per 100k population, the US is 335% of Germany. Consistent with the bulk of the difference being explained in terms of more miles traveled.
I'd be curious to know what exactly makes the difference so pronounced.
My pet theory is that people don't know how dangerous their actions are _and_ feel entitled to break laws they deem useless. About 4 times out of 5 when somebody nearly hits me blowing through a stop sign and crosswalk they'll stop and apologize profusely, indicating they probably didn't intend to put me in harm's way. That's not a huge dataset though (at most a few times per week), and it doesn't say anything about tailgating or other forms of dangerous driving.
Several things will need to change for that number to be lower. Licenses needs to be much more difficult to obtain, and a lot easier to lose. There are things allowed on American roads that could cost you your license in countries with lower numbers. Cars should have higher safety standards.
Basically a lot of people wouldn't be able to drive anymore.
Flying is actually much more dangerous than driving. The risk is to destroy the environment that sustains life on earth. This does not even compare with the risk of a car or plane accident.
> In Europe, the European Commission enforced that from 2015 all new cars registered shall not emit more than an average of 0.130 kg of CO2 per kilometre (kg CO2/km). The target is that by 2021 the average emissions for all new cars is 0.095 kg of CO2 per kilometre.
0.088 < 0.095
That said, the 88 grams figure might not be accurate for short flights. But we'd still be in the same order of magnitude as a car
I think you are comparing unrelated things. The average car ride is thousands of times shorter than the average flight, and transports more than one person. You cannot just compare the average emissions of cars and planes and make the conclusion that it makes sense to choose a plane over a car to reduce your carbon footprint.
when comparing driving to flying between destinations, it's highly likely that the flight will have a shorter duration.
The big wrinkle in this comparison is that planes burn most of their energy in the ascent to cruising speed/altitude. Energy consumption per mile is likely to be much higher on a short hop flight where cruising altitude is never reached than a 12 hour transoceanic flight.
On the other hand short-haul flights don't climb to as high of altitudes. They only climb about 2/3rds as high. But then again the air is thicker so cruising is less efficient. Oh gosh, for want of data.
You have to assume that airlines have chosen a decent compromise here. Every wasted joule of energy translates to a higher fuel cost and a lower profit margin.
Incidentally I think Calgary and Edmonton would be an ideal pair of cities to have some kind of high speed rail between. Would be a great alternative to air travel.
I'd agree in terms of distance and traffic between the two cities. However, the long, relatively severe winters would probably add some complications to high speed rail.
There are plenty of high-speed services (up to 350 km/h) in northern China, Korea, Japan and Russia, all of which have severe winters and (on the west coast of Japan) some of highest snowfalls on the planet.
A quick search on Google tells me that train goes at 160 km/h. Not exactly high speed. It looks like they don't run into too many problems with weather related cancelations or delays though [0].
High speed trains in snow are indeed more difficult as the speed creates under pressure between the ground and the train. So much that even stones have to be remove otherwise they hit the train all the time.
This under pressure sucks up the snow and plasters it to the train.
In Germany at least ICE train speed is reduced (despite their name ;-) if there is snow on the track.
The Edmonton to Calgary route is straight, flat, and has a mostly sparsely populated path. I'd hope that high speed rail under those conditions could do significantly better.
I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater.
> I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater.
This sentence can be interpreted in multiple ways. Maybe they mean that half of their trains could theoretically ride at 160 kph, but that doesn’t mean that they ever actually reach such speeds on their routes. Or, maybe, that half of their trains reach 160 kph on some fraction of their route, maybe very small one.
What I would be more interested in is their average speed according to schedule, weighted by the frequency of trains on a given segment, and same average but for actual ride times, including delays etc.
Most of Amtrak's routes are likely to be on the NEC, where the top speed is I believe 140 mph (~200 km/h). Outside the NEC, the newest of the diesel fleet can probably reach 100mph (or 160 km/h), but the actual routes are unlikely to support that kind of speed with any amount of routine. Instead, the effective speed limit (again outside NEC) is going to be closer to ~60-70mph.
The trans siberian railway isn't high speed. There are plans to make some of it high speed but the only article I could find was from 2018 and at that time it was still only in the early planning stages and expected to cost billions of USD [0].
It’s been discussed but always seemed questionable to me. That corridor has <3M people living in it and is isolated from another other major city in Canada.
I can’t see building a high speed rail would be worth it for the volume of people going back and forth.
I remember traveling by train, from Calgary to Edmonton, on return trips for the weekend. It was great fun, relaxing, with good food.
Hard to beat that by driving in crazy weekend traffic. Or driving to the airport at each end, security theatre, cramped sitting, long walks, tired and hungry, at each end.
(Train stations were down town, and at the ends of the city. Very convenient.)
> There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center.
In France. In nations like the US (outside the DC-to-Boston corridor anyway) without a well-designed and -maintained rail infastructure, 1-2 hour flights are routine and not really replaceable with other options. Infrastructure investment pays off for decades and decades, and Europe has done really well here.
> However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears
That's an infrastructure problem too, though! There's no reason rail service directly to and from airports can't be integrated with the system. It's true in many places already, though I know nothing about France.
The problem is hub-and-spoke approach of many national carriers (Air France included). Covid travel restrictions aside, one can buy an air itinerary that gets them from NYC to Bordeaux (or Nice, or Nantes, or Toulouse, or Marseille, or Lyon, or Strasbourg) all via CDG.
That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.
Air France is right to complaint - banning all those short flights just shifts the juiciest international city pairs to a nearby hub, and what used to be NYC-CDG-BOD will become NYC-LHR-BOD or NYC-MAD-BOD, served by a different airline.
That's not fully correct. CDG and ORY have integrated (or close enough) high speed rail stations that serve other large cities, although that's probably not a great bet.
Most importantly, however, the law being discussed doesn't ban connecting flights. So a NYC -> Le Mans (say) would be allowed to fly through CDG, even though Le Mans is at around one hour by high-speed rail.
However, as there would be less traffic on these routes, I do expect some of them to be more expensive or even dropped altogether.
There's also a provision for "zero carbon" flights which would be allowed to operate on short distances.
CDG (North of Paris) is on the railway that joins Brussels, Paris, Rennes, Tours, Bordeaux and a number of other major places in France. ORY has a connection with Paris suburban railway network, no direct access to one distance train.
Right. ORY is very close to Massy TGV (2 stops or so on the suburban train) which goes to the west (Rennes) and south (not sur if Bordeaux or Lyon or both).
> That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.
Which is why in France and other countries, train stations at airports have high speed rail service to other cities. It's the case at CDG( Paris), Lyon St Exupéry, Amsterdam Schiphol. That way you get there via plane, switch to high-speed rail, and get to your final destination.
AMS is currently a very typical option as there are links between Amsterdam and all major French cities. I used to take the LAX-AMS-BOD quite often before the pandemic.
Yeah, it’s an EU route from Toronto that was never cut during the pandemic. I think it hasn’t dropped from daily. I guess there’s enough freight (or bailouts?) to keep it afloat.
But it ground my gears that KLM was still bussing from the gate to some aircraft to keep up their drive-through ops efficiency.
If you have a disability changing modes of transportation mid-trip is an extreme hardship. I suffered an injury and needed a wheelchair for about a year while I still had to travel for work three times.
You have no idea how hard basic things can be until you're incapable of doing them on your own.
I think it’s important to remember that accommodations accommodate a wide range of people and so they’re not one-size-fits all. A parking spot might have been a “bullshit” accommodation for your situation but for others it might be absolutely critical. If an accommodation isn’t necessary for someone’s disability they’re free to leave it open for someone who does.
Grew up with a father who was in a full-time wheelchair. Issue one was availability of spaces. It was amazing to watch people park, hop out of their car and jog in to the store (Dad would say, "being brain dead is a disability, too.). Second issue was having enough space to open the ramp (I'll never forget the time someone parked next to the ramp side door as we were leaving the store. I asked the guy to move and he said no. Fortunately, on my way out a police officer was coming into the store... the county impound moved the car). Third issue is that sometimes the distance between parking and store entrance was quite far.
You don't even need to be disabled for this to become a serious problem: just take a trip where you need to carry more than one large, heavy, or delicate item of luggage. Switching modes is easy[0] if you're able-bodied and able to travel light. If either or both of those things becomes untrue it's a different story.
[0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.
> [0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.
When I land at SFO from an international flight, I’m on BART way before anyone could board a second flight after clearing customs.
Switching modes doesn’t have to cost any more time than switching vehicles within the same mode. You just have to design the systems to do it well. Train to bus isn’t magically less efficient than bus to bus. Neither is Airbus to train.
Switching to and from cars is pretty bad and usually inefficient though, that I think we can all agree on.
Changing transportation modes is also quite difficult for parents with small children. Especially if they have to haul multiple car seats for the flight.
flying with a toddler in and of itself is already hell on earth, both for the parents, toddler and everyone stuck in the metal tube for the duration of the flight.
train journies are also far more practical if you have a toddler or small children considering trains are a very relaxed atmosphere.
Responding to your 2nd point, kind of and kind of not. It's not just that air->train is hard, it's also that air->air is easy. You don't pay the cost of an additional security check or the cost of an additional drive to the airport. Even with a train directly connecting to the airport, the flight option may come out ahead.
Sorry, this is totally not true in Europe either. Yes high speed rail is great for a few routes (I'm a huge supporter of it!). But outside of these key routes flying will always be better.
Europe has absolutely enormous levels of flying. The amount of city pairs in Europe which are a 1-2hr flight and more than 4 hours on trains are very high. Outside of maybe some routes in UK/France/Netherlands/Belgium/(western) Germany basically flying will always be vastly, vastly quicker going between different European countries.
I had jobs where I had to visit clients in Uk, France, Germany and Italy.
It was often plan kinda last minute.
I’m French and was living in Paris at the time.
Of course, for all abroad stuff beside london ( Eurostar ), the plane was preferred.
But for national travel, only one city was too far to reach with a early morning train ride. All other major cities are reachable by a 2 to 4h train ride ( city center to city center )
The city is question is Toulouse. It’s just take too long from Paris. I Had to fly for this one.
All those cities, I was able to take the first train in the morning. Do the fucking thing. Have dinner there on the client. And fall asleep in the last train. Waking up a midnight or so in Paris.
I had the choice to take a plane. But for the route in question in the article, it was consistently suboptimal.
AFAIK the French rail system is set up so that Paris-X is a good connection for most X, but travel between city pairs that don't contain Paris is much more difficult... because you have to travel via Paris.
That's correct. But as others have noted, Paris is the "center" for most anything. There's very little demand for travel between any pair of two (major) cities other than Paris.
I should look this up for details, but I seem to remember that there's a train route running parallel to the southern border that was abandoned for lack of demand. And there are some major cities there (Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse) which aren't all that far apart.
Why do you think I was living there? Why is 1/5 and more of our population living there ?
It’s the economical center of the country. And it’s been design intentionally this way dating back to before the revolution.
It’s infuriating in many aspect. But it’s not relevant to the conversation of fly travel for distance under 3h in train. ( you can do Paris-Marseille in exactly 3h with fast train. It’s 80% of the nord-sud distance of the country. And it take 6h by car )
The US is pretty exceptional in its lack of rails. There is also a Seattle-San Diego. Enjoyable as a tourist, but probably not suited for business purposes except in the last portions.
In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO). So it is becoming possible to chain a plane and a train in a few scenarios.
It's not really that the US lacks rails, we have the largest rail network in the world. The problem for passenger rail here is population density. France is three and a half times denser, and Japan is nearly 10x. I think they would also struggle a bit more to justify rail costs if they were as spread out as the US.
For freight[1]. Putative high speed rail might go to the same places but generally can't share the same tracks with 30mph long haul trains. And the big gap is the plumbing of rail and transit into the urban cores, which in most US cities is highly decayed and in many of the newer metropolises was never built at all.
[1] Which is unsurprising, because we have the biggest per-capita need for transcontinental land freight transport in the world. The US has been perfectly fine at building out infrastructure it thinks it needs, it's just been making poor choices about what it "needs".
Looking at gross population density misses the mark completely. The US has a large land area where approximately no one lives: most of Alaska, the Great Basin region, even the High Plains are thoroughly devoid of population yet take up millions of acres of land. Cut out that area and focus on places where people live, and the density is now much more comparable. The Midwest is about the same density as France.
The evisceration of the passenger rail market was in large part caused by intentional urban planning. White flight moved a lot of people from city centers to suburbans where nary a black person could be found, and urban planners in turn abetted the process by building freeways straight through urban cores and turning every other city block into a parking lot in all but the very largest cities (well, except for LA). Uncoincidentally, the cities that didn't get turned into massive parking lots retained much more functional commuter rail systems than those cities that did.
Indeed. Even most of the states with low density tends to have most of their population in much smaller urban areas with density comparable to European countries with decent systems.
E.g. Utah has a population density of 14km^2, similar to Norway. But like Norway, Utah has most of its population in a small portion of the area - the Salt Lake City–Provo–Orem Combined Statistical Area makes up 82% of the population.
Nebraska has a density of 9.63km^2, but Omaha-Council Bluffs + Lincoln makes up more than half the population (and that's ignoring the Iowa side of Omaha-Council Bluffs)
There are plenty of metropolitan areas like this in the US that may not have the density to justify much of an expansion to rail between them, but that are dense enough that a more rail oriented infrastructure within them would be possible.
And as you point out, this is with current US urban planning. If an expansion of rail is combined with adjustments to urban planning to encourage construction aligned with expanding transport systems, it'd become even more viable (e.g. near automatic planning permission for higher density near stations would probably in itself do a lot)
I don't think the population density alone explains it. The part of the Finland that is covered by rails is a bit less dense than US, but the overall inter-city train usage is about 3x more than national air travel (2019).
There a lot of second tier cities in the US with sufficient population but still have shitty rail service because freight gets priority, slowdowns from track maintenance is constant, and the stations are in unsafe locations.
Population in the US is not uniform. Out east we are as dense as Europe. Even the Midwest isn't much less dense than France for selected areas the size of France. Then there is the vast amount of nothing out west.
> In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO).
... The trains departing from there are mostly low-cost trains rather than trains meant to be connecting with flights, and people taking them have to move to CDG instead of a better location.
It seems to be a service aimed at salvaging the infrastructure rather than an actual useful service.
One of the best examples of air/train integration is Frankfurt, which has the high-speed trainstop underneath the airport. You are much faster on the train than getting into your car and you pretty much have an ICE going to Cologne, Hamburg or Munich (not sure about direct ones to Berlin), going every 45min or so.
> That's an infrastructure problem too, though! There's no reason rail service directly to and from airports can't be integrated with the system. It's true in many places already, though I know nothing about France.
That's an infrastructure feature. Trains are designed to serve city centers, and they do it well. Moving high speed train infrastructure to airports just for the sake of fliers would kill train experience for everyone else. Moving airports to city center is an obvious no-go. Duplicating train infrastructure for the few connecting trips is probably economically unviable.
> Trains are designed to serve city centers, and they do it well. Moving high speed train infrastructure to airports just for the sake of fliers would kill train experience for everyone else.
Would it?
If you ever visit Netherlands, take a note on how well Schiphol airport is integrated to the rail network. Its underground railway station, Luchthaven Schiphol, is just yet another station on the Rotterdam - Den Haag - Amsterdam main line, so for many trains (including the high-speed Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam line) the airport is just yet another stop on their route.
I also think you underestimate how close schiphol is to most major cities. it is actually becoming a problem because the airport has little to no room for expansion.
also, not all trains going the breda - Rotterdam - the Hague -Amsterdam route stop at schiphol airport.
also, the line is sort of infamous for constant delays on the schiphol part of the track.
What Toronto has done, with a dedicated express to the airport on the outskirts to the downtown hub rail station, is probably a sensible infrastructure pattern for many places. But it was a happy coincidence an early 20th century line ran most of the way there already. Otherwise, it would have meant laying a line through upper middle class suburbs. That's a showstopper, politically, whatever the merit might be; rail lines almost never get built in areas that are already heavily developed.
In nations like the US (outside the DC-to-Boston corridor anyway) without a well-designed and -maintained rail infastructure,
The U.S. has the world's best designed and maintained rail infrastructure. It's simply that, unlike every other country with a national rail network, America's rail system is designed for freight traffic, because now and historically passenger traffic in America has always been such a small portion of trips that it has never been worth the investment to prioritize people over goods. If transporting people had ever been more profitable than transporting cargo, America would have more rail lines dedicated to transporting people.
You can't put a 100mph high speed train on a freight line, and those freight lines don't cross with other transit arteries nor enter the urban cores where people are. What you say is true, but other than the fact that they are both "trains", it's not the same infrastructure we're discussing.
Speaking as someone who lives near a rail hub (and indeed, one of the busiest transshipment rail hubs in the world) freight rails absolutely do cross other transit arteries, and enter urban cores where the people are. Indeed, in the U.S., most passenger lines actually run on freight lines (including almost all of the Amtrack network excluding a few lines in the Northeast).
100mph is not a "high-speed" train. It's just a train. Freight engines are capable of going up to 80pm with cars, and over 100mph without (but don't for safety and operational reasons). Freight lines are designed for cost efficiency, not speeds, but generally unless your 100mph train is using specialized wheels, it will run just fine on a freight line, though it will need to slow down for turns due to the shortened turn radius on most freight lines.
How exactly do you propose running high speed transit and freight on the same tracks when one is moving 70+mph faster than the other? You know trains are on rails, right?
> The U.S. has the world’s best designed and maintained rail infrastructure
I don’t think you can really compare the infrastructure freight trains use with high speed rail. Designing and maintaining a rail network where trains go at up to 350kph is a much tougher job.
So, I’d argue the US rail infrastructure isn’t even close to being one of the best.
The U.S. rail system is different from Europe's rail: we chose freight over passengers, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons if (as other HN commenters are) your rubric for superiority is train speed.
But in a nutshell: (a) the US rail system is cheaper. The entire freight rail system costs less than what France pays for its significantly smaller system each year, (b) more throughput. Millions of tons of goods travel by rail every day. It's cheaper, faster, and more ecologically friendly to ship by rail than by air, water, or truck, (c) America's rail system is designed to withstand weather features that would obliterate most of Europe's rail lines, like tornadoes and hurricanes.
One issue with France is that their train system is very Paris-centric. Want to go from the Rennes northwest to the Toulouse in the southwest? Yeah, you’re going to go through Paris in the centre of the country.
Same with Bordeaux to Lyon. Takes about the same time driving as high-speed rail takes a horseshoe route.
> One issue with France is that their train system is very Paris-centric.
I mean it's not just the rail network; it's _all_ of France. Some of that is unsurprising given a 1/5th of the population live in Paris and the surrounding area. A significant amount of business travel from outside of Paris resultantly ends up being to Paris.
There's definitely an argument that investing in infrastructure that isn't centred on Paris may help change how Paris-centric the country generally is, but that's a much harder sell politically.
(And something like Bordeaux to Lyon needs to cross the Massif Central, which will significantly increase the cost of construction, which potentially makes it even less likely to happen.)
« (And something like Bordeaux to Lyon needs to cross the Massif Central, which will significantly increase the cost of construction, which potentially makes it even less likely to happen.) »
Indeed. Currently by train, Bordeaux to Lyon would either go via Paris, or via Toulouse/Montpellier. Building train lines across the Massif Central doesn't really make economic sense due to the sparse population density.
Though note from Wikipedia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_de_Lyon_à_Bordeaux) the projected journey time is 6h47, whereas going via Paris (and crossing by Metro) takes around 5h52, and there are a few connections via Massy TGV taking around 5h31.
That said, I think this exactly shows one of the benefits of liberialisation of the rail market: it allows other companies to serve routes that the nationalised operator does not want to.
> That said, I think this exactly shows one of the benefits of liberialisation of the rail market: it allows other companies to serve routes that the nationalised operator does not want to.
It really does not. Private companies won’t invest in the un-profitable routes that are the most important for half the country. Instead, they’ll eat into the margins of the established companies on high profit main lines, which are used to subsidise secondary lines at the moment. So either we’ll need more public subsidies and incentives, or these routes just won’t be served. It’s good if Railcoop can keep the route open (supported by local councils, so public money), but this won’t redeem the privatisation project overall. Doing this for all important secondary routes will be more expensive than a well-run public operator
Train service is a public service.
Is cross-subsidy really the best way to fund unprofitable routes, though? It makes sense if you view the state's rail budget as something that needs to be balanced in and of itself, but that's a matter of government accounting, moving where the revenue comes from, rather than a business in its own right.
Relying on cross-subsidy you're essentially overcharging those taking the profitable lines, versus raising the subsidy required through general taxation. At least in the majority of cases, I'd expect cross-subsidy to be a form of regressive tax, quite possibly skewed towards middle-income groups.
And it's not like those taking the profitable routes are getting disproportionate benefit from the unprofitable ones; the benefit from maintaining the unprofitable routes is derived from both the local economy and through benefiting the national economy, and as such it makes sense that it come from general taxation rather than fare-box revenue from profitable routes.
> Is cross-subsidy really the best way to fund unprofitable routes, though? It makes sense if you view the state's rail budget as something that needs to be balanced in and of itself, but that's a matter of government accounting, moving where the revenue comes from, rather than a business in its own right.
I think you’re right. It’s just that we’ve been brainwashed into seeing our state-owned companies as normal companies that need to turn a profit. From that point of view it makes sense for high-margin routes to subsidise unprofitable ones. But a state does not have to balance the books the same way.
Subsidising smaller routes directly from the State budget works as well, and results in lower fares overall, at the expense of a bit more in taxes.
Subsidising private companies operating these routes, however, is a recipe for disaster. These companies expect a profit and would cut any corner to pocket the subsidies instead of doing their job. This is how it (mostly) works in the U.K., and it is terrible and expensive.
> Subsidising private companies operating these routes, however, is a recipe for disaster. These companies expect a profit and would cut any corner to pocket the subsidies instead of doing their job. This is how it (mostly) works in the U.K., and it is terrible and expensive.
While I might defend the EU's push for rail liberalisation in general, I'm certainly not going to defend the historic GB model (Northern Ireland was never privatised, and the model of franchises carrying the revenue risk is gone from GB[1], killed slightly sooner than it would've been due to the pandemic).
That said, note a significant part of the reason why GB ends up with higher fares is much higher cross-subsidy and much lower reliance on the State budget than elsewhere in Western Europe. We've year-on-year had above inflation fare rises (and note that the rises have always been limited by Government; had there been a desire to set a lower (or no!) fare rise Government could have done so) combined with decreases in subsidy. This is highly unlikely to change even with the demise of franchises as we currently know them, as the Government desire to reduce subsidy is likely to continue.
So the GB model did achieve its stated goal: moving revenue risk to the private sector and decreasing subsidy.
The failings of prior franchises—and whether or not they're terrible—is a long and varied topic. Ultimately, they by and large delivered the service they were contracted to. There's ways in which this is an issue with the specification of the tender, and ways in which it's inherently a downside. Many of the complaints have some of their origins in Government intervention, it must be said: rolling stock acquisition was very tightly controlled from the 2000s onwards, inconsistent and often changing electrification plans, and infrastructure in many places running near capacity.
That's not to say the franchisees did nothing wrong, but often they had their hands tied in many, many ways: and often much tighter tied than British Rail ever did.
I'll argue to the end that the biggest mistake was selling off all of British Rail; elsewhere in the EU having the incumbent survive has almost certainly provided a more beneficial competitive environment.
also, France has been Paris centric since well, forever? the French bureaucracy and political system is very centralised and has been since the French revolution. this directly ties into the idea of the state as an institution in French culture in a lot of subtle ways aswell.
This is kind of an intrinsic problem with transport that needs infrastructure along the whole route (i.e. trains and cars). You need a minimum amount of travel along a route for it to be worth it to construct and maintain that infrastructure. The system naturally evolves to a hub-and-spoke model.
Planes just need infrastructure at both ends, so it's a lot easier to create a point-to-point model.
It's far from just the infrastructure, if you're looking at HSR; Bordeaux to Lyon as an aviation route is mostly served by E190's, each seating 100 people, whereas a TGV Réseau seats 377 (which I believe is the lowest capacity of any current TGV). Clearly the train can have the advantage of intermediate stops, but you're starting off with much higher capacity to fill.
And sure, you could build a very short train, but a lot of the efficiencies of rail are built on transporting large numbers of people at once.
Air France Hop and easyJet, the two operators of the route, only fly jets. In the Hop case, post-pandemic they'll be operating ERJs and E-Jets; in the easyJet case, they'll be operating A320 family aircraft.
Note that Hop did have various ATR 42/72s until 2019/20, when they got rid of their (fairly recent) ATR 72-600s. It is perhaps surprising that they now are jet-only, but at least pre-pandemic the plan was for them to long-term be operating only CRJ1000 and E-190s, both of which are notably larger than the largest turboprops on the market. I don't know what their average sector length is, but it's certainly not implausible that the fuel efficiency per passenger isn't that much worse (and easyJet's A320s almost certainly beat any turboprop on a per passenger basis given their average loadings).
You’ll end up main connections and smaller ones to reach smaller destinations. This doesn’t mean it needs a single center like Paris. Compare the map to Germany where there are roughly 3 parallel fast North-South lines not focused on a single center.
Population in France is much more concentrated around Paris than population in Germany is. The Paris metro area accounts for 20% of France's population, while you need the biggest three metro areas in Germany to get to that percentage. Also Germany has double the population density, so even the less dense parts have more people.
It's actually not just population density. A big part of it is economic and bureaucratic activity. In France everything is centred around Paris, in Germany that's very different, e.g. Berlin is not a very big economic hub (although that's changing somewhat).
> Also Germany has double the population density, so even the less dense parts have more people.
That is not causal.
Some countries have a higher population density, but the population is mostly concentrated in one area and the low density areas are really low density.
I presume there is a standard way to compare density distributions between countries.
This is caused in large part by the French economy and transportation needs largely being Paris-centric--the Paris metro is larger than the next 10 largest cities combined.
(Admittedly, a Bordeaux-Toulouse-Montpelier-Marseille-Nice connection in the south is probably a viable TGV route. But at a quick glance, that's probably the only viable non-via-Paris route I see.)
I did Rennes-Toulouse multiple times (it was actually the example I was going to give in this thread). It's 10 hours by train, 2 hours by plane. So as long as there are no direct trains, if flying was to be banned, there would be no short way to do Rennes-Toulouse anymore.
Interior flights will be banned only in case of a train alternative inferior to 2.30h.
> Nous avons choisi [le seuil en train de] 2h30 car 4 heures, ça vient assécher des territoires souvent enclavés comme le grand Massif central... Ce serait inique sur le plan de l'équité des territoires" [1]
> We have chosen 2.30h instead of 4h, because of enclaved territories like Massif Central. It would have been inequal for the territories equity. [approximately translated]
Moscow and St Petersburg are ~700 km apart. It takes 4 hours by high-speed train, 8 hours (a night basically) by low-speed train you can sleep in, or about an hour by plane. And none of these are optimal. You have to spend those 4 hours awake if you're taking the high-speed train, you might get annoying neighbors if you take the low-speed one (and some people also don't fit into those berths), and all 3 airports in Moscow are in the middle of nowhere, so it essentially takes the same 4 hours if you fly.
And I'm not taking price into account, it varies a lot. I'm just ranting that there isn't a good option for this kind of distance. Not long enough to fly, but a bit too long for a train.
Oh and you're only left with the slow train if you want to spend a day, including the evening, in Moscow, and return at night.
If you use Google Flights, you can specify the number carry-on/checked bags you want and Google will include the pricing info in its rankings of flights which is handy.
I don't agree that airlines (or really any travel provider) should be required to include travel time to/from city centers though because not everyone is going to go into city centers. However, that'd be an interesting feature to implement: a feature that lets users specify their actual destination to get a fuller picture of travel time.
I think including the travel time to town centre is a good idea. At least it gets rid of the shenanigans that Ryan air does, where they say Frankfurt and the airport is in the middle of nowhere (1.5h from Frankfurt).
Also many travellers (except for locals) need to go to the town centre anyway if they need to access other modes of transportation. And if not, they likely would have looked up their itinerary anyway.
When we compare train and air travel here in Sweden, the issues are far away from being about time, UX or advertisements.
The rail system has been stagnated in the last 40-50 years and maintenance neglected. The rail is not straight and gives a lot of lateral movement, vibration and noise. The train departments are not sound isolated or have air condition. The speed limit (as a result of the neglect) makes the trip slower than on the highway, with around 30m in favor of the car on a 3hr trip. Motion sickness is an obvious problem. Because of the lack of maintenance, there is almost never alternative rail tracks which mean that when they do maintenance they have to shutdown the whole track and switch to bus, often doubling or tripling the total traveling time. Train tickets is also about 100-200% the cost for distances above 3hrs.
I don't know if the French rail is better, through I do know the German one is. Getting into a train department with sound isolation, air condition, plenty of space and almost zero lateral movement was amazing (sample size of one trip I made between two large city centers), and if that was the option I would pick that ever time even if the train was slower or costed more. It is the 50 years old black tin can of motion sickness that makes me pick a plane over a train.
Main French lines are (for the time being at least) in fairly good shape and there's new investment being done. They've opened two new high speed lines relatively recently: Paris - Strasbourg (near Germany in the east of the country) in 2016 and Paris - Bordeaux (near Spain, in the south-west) in 2017.
Generally speaking, taking the train in France is a rather good experience. The trains are quiet and confortable, especially the high-speed ones but even regular trains are fine. Newer carriages have power outlets at the seats and are well ventilated.
The issues people here fear the most are strikes (which is the national sport, particularly in public transportation) and the creeping-up of prices, especially now that there won't be any more competition from planes.
I think for travelling to/from Paris the French train system is absolutely amazing. I mean the TGV from Bordeaux to Paris takes 2h for ~550km, nothing can beat that. That's the advantage of the fact that France is very centralised around Paris. Germany has the ICE which is also fast, but it needs to stop much more often, because the way Germany is structured means trips are much more spread out and not so much of a star shape (like France).
To the OP complaining about Sweden, I actually don't find the train service in Sweden so bad. Sure it's not on the same level as France and Germany, but the trip between Stockholm and Gothenburg is still fast enough even discounting the added time of getting into the center, parking etc. you have 3h for the train vs 5h by car. And the cost is ~30 euros. I also find the complaint about motion sickness funny, compared to planes and cars the Swedish trains are still very smooth.
I have taken the Stockholm and Gothenburg several time, both the black tin cans that are used as night trains and built somewhere around 1970, and the state of the art high speed train x2000 built during the 1990s. It takes me about a whole day to recover from the motion sickness, especially the x2000 which is well known for it lateral motion problem thanks to the non-straight rail and high speed.
The more rapid but shorter lateral movements on a plane does not trigger my motion sickness, and neither do turbulence. That could be a personal aspect. I have the same issue where if I am on a boat that goes up and down then I am usually fine, but not if the waves comes side to side.
Between large cities, the French state has roll out special fast train since the 80s.
They are pretty fancy. ( they keep being updated, the 80´s one are gone now )
You might have seen those. Bright color, « futuristic » design. In the vein of the concord Suprasonic plane.
The German rail system has also been detoriating in the last decades due to lack of investment of the Deutsche Bahn after being privatized. You don't see it on the main lines, but you see it on the lesser used ones.
Yes and in this case this could achieved very easily by simply increasing taxes on kerosene, in a way that does not affect existing and future 'green' aviation fuels.
That would kill what Google Flights call Hacker Fare (& many others too before Google). Essentially you buy a local leg ticket, & another leg ticket, international in your example. Both airlines does not know about other legs (although thus not responsible for any delay or missing nezt leg).
The above idea specifically discourages split tickets (buying one ticket for each leg). You'd end up with an extra 70€ fee if you buy the two tickets separately. So unless buying a multi-leg tickets adds more than 70€ to the total price it's not worth the trouble.
"Planes take longer to travel city centre to city centre" always gets trotted out in these discussions, but it's the wrong comparison. People don't all live in the city centre. Airports are usually outside the city, but well served by motorways and public transport. I wouldn't be surprised if more people can reach Charles de Gaulle or Orly within 45 minutes at rush hour than can get to Gare de Lyon.
> I wouldn't be surprised if more people can reach Charles de Gaulle or Orly within 45 minutes at rush hour than can get to Gare de Lyon.
Actually, I would. The highways around Orly (A6 and A86) tend to be extremely congested during rush hour. Add to it that the areas around those airports aren't that densely populated and are sufficiently far out so that public transportation has to go through Paris if you're not close by, and I don't think that more people are able to reach the airports quicker than Gare de Lyon or Gare du Nord.
Charles de Gaulle is even further out in the "country" so I think there are even less people able to reach that quickly, especially via the A1 and A3 which are also congested all the time. Then once there, the airport is so huge that just getting around it may take you a good 15-20 minutes.
Note that for some destinations south of Paris there are TGVs departing from Massy, which is a couple stops away from Orly. The same applies for CDG and the north.
Also, Paris is only one end of the journey. On the other side, the public transit situation isn't always as great. It's either some sort of bus, which takes forever (especially during rush hour), or some taxi which may be somewhat quicker than the bus but will cost an arm and a leg.
> I wouldn't be surprised if more people can reach Charles de Gaulle or Orly within 45 minutes at rush hour than can get to Gare de Lyon.
Gare de Lyon sits on the RER A and 1 stop away from the RER B. Plus local suburban trains that terminate there. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that is dead easy to access, and connects an awful lot of people. Gare du Nord is similarly very easy to get to (and the busiest station in Europe). Granted, Montparnasse or St Lazare are annoying.
The US cities with the best transit have poor transit by world measures. Sure, most people don't live in the city centers, they live in the suburbs. But for much of Europe, suburbia means easy access to high frequency regional rail transit systems that gives you easy 45-60 minute access to city center at all times of the day. Even in the US, where I've lived in cities that had what the US thinks is good transit, getting to an intercity rail station has often been as easy, if not easier, than getting to the airport, even though I'm originating in the suburbs.
And flights costing 29 EUR are simply a market (and policy) failure. In no reasonable sustainably operating economy would we ever have gotten into a situation of flights being cheaper than train trips.
> And flights costing 29 EUR are simply a market failure
That’s actually the market working as intended. In the case of flights you have competition which drives the price down, in the case of trains you mostly have a monopoly of the national operator which increases prices each year (DB, Germany). Train prices are prohibitively high, and when I face the choice I always end up driving vs taking the train (the price advantage grows larger with the number of people travelling).
The basic problem is that the market does a poor job of accounting for externalities, so indirect costs (pollution, subsidies) are dumped across whole populations over a long period, thus becoming effectively invisible, while profits are scrupulously accounted for and distributed to a far smaller group of recipients.
They didn't need to be, the problem is that Deutsche Bahn is expected to be profitable since two decades (as a result of the failed attempts to privatize it) - and that includes the cost of physical infrastructure, which is enormous.
An airport however is cheap to build (okay, jokes like the BER aside) and operate, not to mention subsidies for regional airports whereas the EU has been pushing for de-subsidizing and liberalization of the railways for decades now.
> And flights costing 29 EUR are simply a market (and policy) failure. In no reasonable sustainably operating economy would we ever have gotten into a situation of flights being cheaper than train trips.
Mostly ... you don't.
To get that 29 EUR flight you have to book it WAY in advance, generally be on a trip that isn't super popular, and be willing to have no luggage to speak of.
When we were in England, France and Italy pre-Covid, we priced out moving around on the train vs moving around on planes.
The trains almost always won (sometimes by quite a lot) and had the advantage that you could buy the tickets with a day or two of advance rather than planes which required 2 weeks of advance to get a sane price.
Now, obviously, we were moving between big cities and didn't need a car (because "tourist"). Business travel would probably be a different beast.
Counterexample: in Summer 2019, I took a one way flight from Rome to Lisbon via Ryanair for $57.40 USD / ~€48.77 (current conversion rates, my receipt was denominated in USD).
That's a 1,160 miles / 1,870 km / ~2.75 hour flight (distance is as the crow flies). A train cannot compete with that. Not that a reasonable train itinerary between Lisbon and Rome exists.
For May 2021 [0], I'm seeing several roundtrip itineraries between Lisbon and Rome for USD$31 / €26 on Ryanair. I think the fact that such a low-priced flight can exist is actually a triumph of capitalism.
Yes, the sort of "triumph" that got us into this catastrophically unsustainable situation. Flights are not cheap. It's just that the hidden costs are paid by all of us, including yet unborn humans. This cannot continue.
Work out the fuel costs per passenger mile and that’s a subsidized ticket. Now, airlines often have a surplus of seats on a route and will sell some of them at a nominal loss over flying empty seats, but they couldn’t operate the route if everyone was paying that.
Every retailer will tell you that cutting prices (or even accepting a small loss) on goods or services that don't make a big profit brings in customers whose happiness with finding a bargain is a more effective advertisement than any the business can issue itself.
It would be more of a triumph if those $30 flights were not using leaded fuel, or if there was at least some lead pollution task to encourage people to take different transit options until the airline industry figures it out.
I think, it was much less of a problem, when many less planes were flying.
-- Correction in the comment, Jet-A has no lead. Cursory research suggests its nasty products are mostly organics rather than heavy metals, which is much less bad. Thanks!
Railway systems usually dont play well with capitalism as there is very little competition (given that infrastructure and the train operator is usually a state owned company).
Efficient, how? It uses much more energy, makes more noise and creates more pollution.
The speed has very little to do with the funding model. Flights were still faster in the 1970s when many state-owned airlines operated, and trains are little different when private companies run them (see: several European countries).
Tying up capital equipment and personnel for much less time to serve the same journey. Consider San Francisco to Chicago, a route I have done both ways. The flight is 5 hours, the train ride 50 hours. A 737 is more expensive than the California Zephyr trainset, but not by 10x.
I'm not sure what noise has to do with efficiency - I doubt that the energy expended on vibrating the air is physically or economically significant - but it is worth noting that trains are loud. Particularly because regulations written in blood require that they blow their horns three times at every level crossing at all hours.
(Among developed countries I'm familiar with) it's only the USA that has the excessively loud train horns at level crossings, and a lot of crossings. In Europe, lights, bells (or a beeper thing) and automatic barriers are used instead, sometimes with automatic or manual infrared/visible cameras to confirm the crossing is clear of road vehicles.
Knowing the history of railroads, this comment is truly spit-take worthy. Railroads are my go-to example for what the "model" capitalistic industry looks like. Historically, the investment boom/bust cycles were driven in large part by railroad mania--most railroads in the 19th century were funded by public stock offerings to raise the capital to build them, producing and popping investment bubbles with almost decadal frequency.
At least in the US, there was surprisingly little public subsidy of railroads. The big exception is in the west, where many lines were financed in part by land grants, but this is not true all of lines (the Great Northern Railroad, for example, had no land grants)--and most of the railroads in the east has no land that could be granted to them at all. Antitrust laws in the US specifically originate from regulating the anticompetitive practice and local monopolies that railroads had. Indeed, many of those practices that motivated the law are now being repeated by airlines without a corresponding modern push to regulate those practices away.
Actual state ownership of the US is rare, both now and historically. The big exceptions are the temporary nationalization of the railroads during WWI and the assumption of the bankrupt Penn Central assets into Conrail (which was divvied up between CSX and NS in 1999). Of course, the US may be unusually competitive on the world scene for modern railroads, with US/Canada essentially three geographic duopolies (BNSF/UP, CP/CN, and CSX/NS).
to give you a bit of history from the European perspective.
most railways in Europe have been build by state programs to kickstart further industrialisation during the later half of the 19th century. prior to rail, the only way to transport bulk goods like coal and iron ore efficiently was through canalways. rails solved the issue of getting the raw goods to the industrial centers where people lived to produce goods efficiently. it also allowed for rapid expansion of cities and town and made cities and town with no access to a waterway far more viable.
privatization of rail only happenend after the cold war, and is mostly seen as a failure in most countries.
I believe that's largely a Central/Eastern European perspective, and doesn't apply as much to Western Europe. Countries like the UK, France, Switzerland started out with entirely private systems and nationalized them later (early 20th century).
I like your idea of forcing sites selling airline tickets to be honest about their cost and delays, but… after the fiasco of cookie-warning pop-ups, that’s a particularly promising can of worms.
> if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears
About connecting flights: most major French airports have a high-speed train (TGV) station for that reason. They typically have fewer trains than central stations, but they have good connections to nearby cities with small regional airports.
I think your experience may be jaded from the one side as much as mine is from the other side.
Your example assumes the same level of quality and guarantee of timely arrival.
Maybe it's just me but I've had such bad luck with trains in Germany that if I need to be somewhere I will fly or take a train one hour earlier. Or two. It was a running joke at my former company that every single time I visited our other office my reserved spot in an ICE was cancelled or the whole train was changed to an IC (yay, working with a laptop on your lap).
I think of all the times I've taken a plane in my life there was major delay twice - and one was at the other end of world, so a single time starting from here.
And no, I'm not one to regularly fly (and I hate to do it) but if you for example take Munich - Berlin or Munich - Hamburg, if I need to be there in the morning I'd need to take a train the day before and pay for a night in the hotel, or I fly in the morning. Proper night trains would solve that but then it might still be a wasted evening in a hotel room whereas I have no problem getting up at 4 am and catch a plane at 7.
For clarity: while part of my story doesn't apply for "train rides of 2.5h" the gist is the same. If I don't trust that the 6:30 train will make me arrive on time at 9:00 I'd need to take one at 5:30 or 4:30.
Also I fully support this ban. I'm just not buying the time+stress argument.
And that’s why I believe self driving cars will kill public transport as well as short leg flying. I already prefer the Tesla autopilot on longer highway drives to trains. As soon as I can really take my eyes off at the motorway I have not much reason to fly anymore (before Covid I had 30-50 flights in one year), except long distance.
remember that now you're supposed to be in the train 20min in advance, and connecting across stations in Paris with heavy luggage and kids is a shit show (and a non-starter for foreigners, they just call a taxi, and as the most visited country in the world, this detail should matter)
But I hope it increases the frequency of bullet trains to and from CDG TGV, this train station never had a useful train time for my airplane. Lyon Airport is very easy to reach by train, too bad it has almost no airplane.
> now you're supposed to be in the train 20min in advance
Oh, why is that? Never heard of it or had to do it anywhere. My last train trip starting from France was about 15 years ago, though. And most trains have several stops so you couldn't possibly be so early except at the initial departure, not without slowing down the whole trip unacceptably.
So a train driver closed the doors 2 minutes early once, letting a lawyer who could prove he was on time stranded in the train station instead of appearing in court, and now our world has changed. This is a true story, and this is really the beginning of the change. They also hired people from the airplane industrie, so they now control some stuff in the station instead of during the travel, robbing everybody of more time. It just baffles me that I can't rush to the train and buy my ticket inside, where I have nothing better to do anyways.
> remember that now you're supposed to be in the train 20min in advance
That is not true. They show the platform on the screens at the station 20 minutes in advance. I think they recommend being 5 minutes in advance, but they let anyone board as long as the doors are open.
$former_job used to pay “pro 1ère” TGV tickets. Those came with free drinks and nibbles, I quite enjoyed it. It was much better than a plane in terms of noise, stability, and legroom. No idea how much they cost though.
> However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears and those 1.5 hours start making a difference.
There is a workaround for this. For long distance flight, take a company where the international/local connection takes place outside France: KLM through Amsterdam, Lufthansa through german airports, Brussels Airlines through Brussels...
This is already what I always do when I have to make a long distance flight because Paris Charles de Gaulle airport is horrendous and Air France is prone to mass cancellations when there is a strike.
But this is doable because I live in Toulouse which has bad train infrastructure but is well connected to the rest of Europe by plane.
There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center.
I used to travel quite a bit between two cities where the option was a 3 hour high speed train and a ~45 minute flight. And while the train was great in theory (fast, comfortable, free wifi etc.) it wasn't quite reliable enough. Being 1-2 hours late was common enough that you basically had to take it into consideration when making plans.
If it was an important meeting I would normally fly in the morning to increase the chance of being on time, and take the train home in the afternoon when I could just chill with a glass of wine and watch a movie and being an hour+ delayed wasn't a big deal.
I would not be surprised if airline companies lobbied for unrealistically short pre- and post-flight times - much like how they often sell really tight connections that result in you having to run halfway across O'Hare for some reason.
Absolutely, I'm almost certain it could be as efficient as a train as most of the security is pointless theater. When I was flying more often I would leave much less time and usually not miss my flight. Sure, something could go wrong and I would miss it but the hours saved not sitting at the airport outweighed a potential occasional missed flight and the extra time that would take to re-book and come back.
UX is also being neglected by train companies, and especially between train companies.
I think it would be a great enhancement if we had a European booking system that'd provide single-ticket journeys no matter which operator, and a Google-Flights-like UX.
Right now, the German DB got me into a mindset of adding an extra hour between transits, and assume that the train might skip my destination entirely. And if I file a complaint? Well, that's already part of the price!
If you're a frequent flier, and on the right route, most of those times go right down. I've walked into an airport 15 minutes before the flight, boarded the plane and gotten out of the airport 10 minutes after landing
I'm not an economist, but wouldn't it have been better to tax the carbon emissions?
If you could offset the carbon emissions for 10 EUR, maybe add 12 EUR to the price of a ticket and use that money to buy carbon offsets? That way those who still want it can still fly, and we're at net negative emissions.
Carbon offsets are not a structural solution though. Most offsets right now reduce emissions elsewhere, where it's either cheaper or technologically more feasible. However, eventually we'll run out of those, and offsets will actually need to capture carbon from the atmosphere. Since there's no feasible synthetic carbon sequestration process invented yet, practically that means you have to increase biomass, and ensure it remains biomass in perpetuity. That can only be taken so far, at a certain point you'll run out of space to plant forests.
Well, then carbon offsets raise in price as it becomes more expensive to offset a given quantity of CO2. This makes various schemes relying on purchasing offsets more and more expensive, until they become unfeasible or are spending so much that really radical advanced techniques can be developed or become realistic to implement.
You're missing the point of the offset market: as we exhaust the low hanging fruit of planting forests, and carbon becomes more and more expensive to offset, increasingly complex and expensive carbon capture schemes become feasible
It was a carbon tax on gas that was going to affect the lower classes disproportionately. I don't think we'd see an uprising for a carbon tax on intra-national flights, which are much more of a business travel mode
Because their train travels are heavily subsidized. And more recently, it became easier to carpool easily for long distance trips in France with Blablacar (before the pandemy).
The riots were because filling a car tank would get expensive. I’m not sure people would not notice, until a majority of the population is driving electric.
That's my thought as well. But I'd be most concerned with the complex calculation that people have to do around mobility, that dilute these subtle price nudges.
There's no apples to apples price comparisons that can be easily made, where say car vs plane is say 30 vs 42 euro, and this 12 euro tax clearly doubles the price difference. Car trips are typically priced as a per-trip cost that only counts fuel and sometimes parking, whereas air tickets essentially include everything from airport to airport.
But what's left out for the car trip is the cost of ownership (depreciation/maintenance), taxes, insurance. It can't be compared to a flight ticket very easily for most people unless they make a quick Excel sheet and plug in some numbers. And even if you include all those other costs of ownership, how much can be attributed to that single trip by car to replace that flight, if the car is used for other trips, too?
The same calculus goes for time as it does for price. An airport to airport travel time cannot be directly compared to a door-to-door car trip. You'd have to include trips from and to the airports as well as the boarding/security/checkin stuff, as well as a safety buffer not needed for car trips.
Not to mention the experience differences, which are difficult to value. Should a plane ticket be compared to a taxi, because it includes the price of the chauffeur in both cases? Obviously not, yet we also can't just ignore the cost of having to drive concentrated for hours yourself versus sitting in a plane.
In short, while raising the price by 12 euro tax of course does have an impact, but it may not get the impact an economist or policy-maker would expect. It may just go into a very muddy calculated comparison between car/plane (or otherwise).
Second, the tax shouldn't even be such a granular thing. Domestic flights have far greater greenhouse gas emissions than bus, train or car travel. If air was say 30% more poluting than a train, then nudges with taxes would help. But if it's the equivalent of 250gr of Co2 per km travelled [0], and the Eurostar train is 6gr and coach is 27gr then banning seems to be the quickest solution. There's good reasons to say that if mobility option A pollutes 40x more than option B, that you ban A instead of trying to nudge consumption via taxes.
The last thing we need is the insights of an economist when it comes to solutions to climate change. It's thanks to economists that we're still dealing with the problem in the first place!
Human greed isn't a result of economics, it's just what economists study. Carbon taxes and carbon capture are absolutely the best solutions to climate change.
Not sure about that, I think it's more industry lobbyists and politicians listening to them. There are lots of economists with good ideas about this. A carbon tax or emissions trading might well work if they didn't give out exceptions to polluting industries for fear of them moving elsewhere.
EDIT: Thanks to commenters below, looks like my concerns aren't valid after all -- CDG has a train station and airlines there sell air tickets with a train connection. I didn't know about either of those -- seems like France has this figured out in a way other places haven't.
(original comment below)
---
I can appreciate the logic behind a ban on this for single-hop trips.
But if you're flying into a hub and want to connect to a smaller city -- e.g. Paris to Lyon -- switching to a train is massively inconvenient. You've got to travel into Paris (an hour?) and then take another 2-hour train, after you're already tired from your transcontinental flight.
So... do I have this right that I won't be able to fly from New York to Lyon, it just won't exist even though they both have airports? I'll have to fly into Paris and add 3 hours to my already-long trip and make a totally separate train booking, and worry about if lose the train ticket if the flight is delayed?
Or because Paris as a hub is out of the picture, will I just book a flight via Brussels (New York -> Brussels -> Lyon) because that will still be fine...
...and burn a ton more CO2 because I'm forced to take a longer flight because France banned shorter ones?
> I'll have to fly into Paris and add 3 hours to my already-long trip and make a totally separate train booking, and worry about if lose the train ticket if the flight is delayed?
I don't know if you're American, but I think you've just got funny ideas about how trains work. You don't really need an advance booking - you just turn up, buy a ticket, and take the train. It's not a big deal - they go every hour or so between major locations so you don't have to wait long. Trains are more like busses than aeroplanes in most places - Amtrak is an outlier in trying to be like an airline.
I am American, but having traveled around Europe and Japan, I can say with confidence that if you're traveling between cities you very often need to buy your ticket in advance and it's valid only for that departure. Your seat is reserved because the train can sell out, and they do. Plus, fares often go up significantly the closer the train is to being sold out (so days/weeks early can be a good idea). It's no "funny idea" of mine, and it's certainly not just Amtrak.
Of course it really depends on the individual train line and time of day and direction and if it's a holiday etc. If you have enough local experience to know for sure it won't be sold out in advance, then that's great for you, but if you're traveling somewhere new you won't know that.
I'm not talking about commuter rail, which is like what you're describing.
I've definitely seen TGV sell out in France, and would recommend buying your ticket in advance, depending on the trip. SNCF is sadly taking the airline fare route, with intricate pricing and non-sensical fare (sometimes 1st class is cheaper than 2nd class, and I'm not sure two people riding the same train pay the same price...). I hate this system with passion.
But unless it changed recently, it's not quite like that with the shinkansen in Japan. I would usually buy a ticket in advance for a late time trip around 10pm (with reserved seat), just in case all shinkansen are sold out (never happened, but I'm the anxious kind). On the date of travel when I'm ready to leave I just go to the train station, and ask at the counter to change my ticket for the next shinkansen. It's completely free, including the reserved seat, although maybe that's only for the Nozomi shinkansen? Not sure for Kodama/Hikari. Never had an issue with the next shinkansen being full, but maybe I've just been lucky.
I was mostly traveling between Osaka and Tokyo, where there is one shinkansen every 6 minutes at rush hour, and at worst one every 20 minutes. So in practice the waiting time was practically nil, and I loved the flexibility of being able to decide until the last minute to either dine out in Tokyo with my friends, or simply head back home earlier.
I live in Japan and you absolutely do not need to book trains in advance, ever, for any reason. It's a good idea if you're planning to travel during peak hours on the first and last days of a major holiday period, but there is a free seating area that you can ride. The only downside is that you may need to wait a bit on the platform until you're squeezed onto the shinkansen. You're sacrificing some comfort this way, but it's not a strict need.
But that problem only occurs 3 weeks out of an entire year. Also, the normal free seating tickets don't have a reserved time. They're only limited by day.
And my experiences in Europe are similar. Show up, buy a high speed rail ticket, hop on a train and go to the next city.
I've only ever needed to reserve tickets in two countries: one was dealing with Amtrak in the US, and the other was trying to take a train in China between two cities in the midst of the biggest holiday of the year. Other than that, it's always been a show up, get a ticket, and hop on 5 minutes later sort of deal.
> But that problem only occurs 3 weeks out of an entire year.
Which is, of course, when you're statistically the most likely to be traveling.
And the fact that a ticket is valid the whole day doesn't help much when your flight is delayed overnight or by a day.
Some people tend to travel precisely when others are not, and might not run into this problem, seems like that might be your case. Other people travel precisely when others are too, and will run into it all the time. As far as China, every hard sleeper I ever took was sold out in advance, zero holidays.
As far as I can tell, you're entirely confirming what I'm saying.
If you book in advance and your plane is delayed by a whole day, your ticket is void. That's it. You're done.
...In which case you can just show up to the station and buy an unreserved ticket and ride, like everybody else and like I mentioned is the better idea.
My point is that reserving in advance has no purpose because of reasons you're giving to somehow justify it. If you don't book in advance, there is zero chance of missing your train due to a delayed flight since you're buying it 5 minutes before riding.
You may expect a situation in Japan to use both flight and shinkansen, but such use is rare for Japanese locals. Flight or Shinkansen + local train (or rent a car) is used in most cases, not both.
For a overseas tourist arriving by flight, anyway it's better to avoid the three weeks. I believe it's on May, August, and end of the year, but former two is Japanese local holidays so you can easily avoid. Then you don't always need reservation shinkansen because free sheets are available (but YMMV).
Oh, you arrived without a ticket? Sorry, covid restrictions, only one person per wagon and the tickets have been sold out a few days ago. Enjoy your indefinite waiting for a free spot. I feel like you might not have taken the train anywhere within the last year or two.
If you take Paris as an example, CDG has a train station in it. The airline will sell you the train ticket together with the plane tickets so you just get a second ticket which looks like a plane ticket except for the train. You literally go to the basement of CDG and get on the train. I've done this many times in CDG and also in FRA (Frankfurt) and the tickets are issued as valid on any train between the two destinations, so even if your flight is delayed, you just wait for the next train and get on it. The train thing is really a non-issue.
Your second point does however seem valid, I guess the airlines will reroute around French airports and fly to nearby countries in Europe to get around this regulation. Hopefully this law doesn't cause more harm than good...
> will I just book a flight via Brussels (New York -> Brussels -> Lyon) because that will still be fine...
Or Amsterdam flying KLM which is a way better airport than Paris Charles de Gaulle anyway (and arguably a better airline than Air France). Or any German airport flying Lufthansa.
Combating climate change will cause massive inconvenience.
> So... do I have this right that I won't be able to fly from New York to Lyon, it just won't exist even though they both have airports? I'll have to fly into Paris and add 3 hours to my already-long trip and make a totally separate train booking, and worry about if lose the train ticket if the flight is delayed?
This is FUD. If you search airfrance.com for flights from New York to Lyon, the fastest connection you get is indeed two flights connecting at CDG (11 hours total time). The second fastest connection (11:30) is also a connection at CDG... taking a direct train to Lyon. Such flight+train combinations have existed for a long time.
> If you search airfrance.com for flights from New York to Lyon, the fastest connection you get is indeed two flights connecting at CDG (11 hours total time).
And if you search an aggregator, chances are that Brussels Airlines (via Brussels, obviously) is faster. And more convenient since you can drop your luggage at your starting point.
At that point, one criteria that comes into play is if you are living closer to the Lyon train station or to the Lyon airport.
While the reason is honorable, I can't help but think this is an attack on poor/middle class people. Traveling by train in France is quite expensive, and very annoying some times (I live in a lost country-side, and if I want to travel to my parents, it's a three to four train ride, taking about 8 to 10 hours). Ok, plane wouldn't help in most cases either, but the train offering got a lot gutted over the years and it's not going to improve.
I never really bought this argument. Poor people aren't taking regular flights or driving SUV's. Climate change is a problem caused by the consumption habits of the wealthy, not the poor.
Banning domestic flights won’t stop the habits of the wealthy; they fly private personal planes. What the ban likely will cause is an increase in the cost of travel, which hurts middle class people.
Flights can be quite cheap in Europe if you can take a low cost airline: ryanair, wizzair etc.
They won't connect every city, and connection flights are a no-no, but direct point to point flights are cheaper than anything else. Cheap flights across Europe is what allows a lot of low wage migrants to find seasonal work, students and young workers to travel and visit the cities etc.
Fuel taxes tend to hit rural people pretty hard, because they drive a lot of miles and most of it is non-optional. If you live in Paris you can just decide not to drive, which won't work as well for you in rural France.
They were talking about consumption taxes, SUVs being an oblique reference to fuel consumption, and I’m pointing out that these sometimes are a burden on the rural poor who are least positioned to pay.
Often they are cheap because airlines open their bases in exotic places and the regional local govs, who invested heavily in an airport as part of muscle flexing, subsidize the carriers to avoid having a ghost airport. Modus operandi or Ryanair for a while. (But also connections between major airports in EU can be cheap if booked in advance).
To be noted : we have a extensive fast train system.
As a user, I prefer to take the train. It’s faster, more confortable and overall less hassle.
( you get from city center to city center, no security check; you can move around, use your mobile hotspot or the train wifi )
The one use case is going from Paris to Toulouse for instance. It’s take a day of train. But even Paris-Marseille is less than 3h at this point.
Paris, Lyon, Lille; Marseille, Nantes, Strasbourg; Those are our « top » cities and they are all connected with fast trains.
Looking at timetables, it's actually 7h30 or 6h30 by train (I'm seeing two different itineraries, and I'm not sure where the hour difference comes from). Even then, the Bordeaux-Toulouse link is not full HSR speed, and adds an extra ~2h of travel time because of it. When LGV Bordeaux-Toulouse is built, that should cut off another 2h to a 4h30 trip.
You might theoretically cut off another 1h if there were a more direct Rennes-Bordeaux line, but most of the delay over the plane isn't caused by the detour to Paris but by the quality of the current rail line to Toulouse.
For context for US readers, the California High-Speed Rail will probably be completed before the end of the debate on the construction of the LGV Bordeaux-Toulouse.
Maybe it improved since the time I had to do Rennes-Toulouse, which is good (although it should be better). FWIW the SNCF website still says that the average is 10h30, 6h30 being the best.
Thank you. I’ve been commenting a few time that yes. All train go thought Paris first and it’s fucked up. But also it’s not relevant to this particular conversation
Add the time it takes to go to the airport, and go through security gates, and all of that and you get more like a 5-6h flight. Also Rennes toulouse 10h by train? I have a hard time believing this.
I wonder what the unintended consequences are with this measure. Here are some:
1) I can imagine weird situations where a multi-leg flight could be broken up by this ban, especially if you are traveling from the middle of nowhere (connected to a smaller airport in France) and you are flying to another middle of nowhere place (connected by _another_ smaller airport in France). Instead of having one flight, you now have two flights with a train trip in the middle, which can of course be inconvenient in case the first flight is delayed and so on.
2) Say I live in one of the larger French cities, but not Paris. I want to travel to northern Japan, for example. Previously I could go to my local airport and transfer in Paris CDG. However now there are two other options viable for me because I can no longer fly to Paris: I can either take the train to Paris (Charles de Gaulle), hauling my checked luggage on the train and possible taxis (skis, travel gear, lots of duffels)... Or I can just go to my local airport, dump the luggage on that airport, and transfer in Frankfurt.
I grew up in the UK and from a late teen until my mid twenties I travelled by train across the country every week or so. I took the train as it was convenient for my route (no changes) and it didn't make sense to have a car for the rare times I used it (I'd commute to work by train or bike). There were long distance busses, but the times weren't convenient and they had even less leg room than aircraft.
The one thing that still makes me wonder is how expensive trains are, or maybe more accurately how cheap budget airlines are. I'd usually pay ~£25 each way, and I'd book in advance and had a youth discount. Full price tickets if I'd just turn up on the day would be over £100, and closer to £200 for first class (which on this route was just a slightly bigger seat, no food). For the same price I could have flown to the other side of Europe for the weekend and paid for a hotel. During peak times often the trains would be completely full up (500 seats, and maybe another couple hundred standing), so the routes are not exactly under-utilised.
Do trains just cost more to build and run than airports and aircraft or what is going on here?
Unfortunately yes, airplanes have less infrastructure costs than trains. Once you airport is built, you are potentially connected to any other airport. For trains you still need to build thousands of miles of rails, with complex infrastructure to allow them to change directions.
And rails need permanent upkeeping, it's not a one time investment.
Besides the points all the other commenters made, there is an issue of congestion.
Trains and train tracks in the UK are _massively_ over-capacity. The West Coast Main Line, which is the main connection point between London and most of the Midlands and the North is the most congested train track in Europe.
Trains in the UK are expensive because we are decades behind in rail infrastructure spending while airports were targets of massive spending thanks to the boom in international low-cost flights in the 2000s and 2010s. HS2 should make train prices slightly more palpable, and hopefully more projects will follow.
Also, advance open-return tickets bought 24h in advance are massively cheaper than tickets last-minute tickets.
I think this has to do with privatization. If trains were run by the government (sure, less efficient but also no need to feed greedy shareholders), it would be much cheaper.
Ironically it’s other way around. The reason why flights are so cheap is because they are privatized and there is heavy competition. US used to have heavily-regulated air travel. Once it was de-regulated prices went down.
Since railroads require very expansive infrastructure, have natural competition limitations (two companies can’t send two trains on the same path at the same time), they are heavily regulated, and as such there is less competition, and thus no invisible hand of the market helping to lower the prices.
Whilst there might be some gains from bringing everything under one roof, cutting out the need for shareholder returns isn't going to do much for the average ticket price - IIRC most train companies in the U.K. have long-run profit margins of 2-3%.
In denmark trains are run by the government, but its still cheaper (at least pre-covid, dont know at the moment) to take a plane from Copenhagen to Århus (capital to next biggest city).
The ban is kind of the equivalent of a quick, hacky fix of some bug. It is better than nothing, but in general I'm against banning stuff as the problem is that the flights are too cheap, partially due to reasons like tax exemption on fuel.
There are also two bugs related to people, and they're hard to fix:
- short term costs are more noticeable than long term costs: saving money VS saving the planet
- tragedies of the common are hard to fix: we all need to save the planet, but others are not minding it, so I might as well ignore it and at least save some money too
> French lawmakers voted ... as the government seeks to lower carbon emissions even as the air travel industry reels from the global pandemic.
I'm trying to reconcile with the stuff I've read and heard recently about how France (a country where 80%+ of the electricity comes from nuclear) is trying to move away from nuclear. It makes zero sense; it makes absolutely no sense at all.
Germany has also been shutting down its nuclear plants, and switching to (freaking) coal power in the interim instead. It's horrid beyond words.
The value of transportation isn't ticket sales, but the economic value of the trip made possible as a whole. Just as people drive cars to go from point A to point B, few people ride trains just because they like trains so much - the value lies in the fact that you got to point B. So whether or not train companies run at a loss is largely irrelevant to their societal value.
In France I would never consider flying, when I could take the TGV. The level of comfort of a 1st class train ticket vs an economy airflight (space and positioning of seat) + ability to move around + enjoying the scenery + no worries about the airport hassles / security checkpoints / luggage check-in and check-out, and transportation from airport to the center of the city, always made the choice very easy fo me.
Overall I am for this, but I do wonder if most short domestic flights are business trips. I can definitely imagine a situation where if I was taking frequent day trips for work and that extra 30 minutes to an hour is the difference between me seeing me kid before they go to sleep or not choosing to take the flights.
> There's really no reason a human would try to fly instead of take a train.
My anecdote:
Some time ago I did a lot of business trips around Europe. All business travel was organized by a subcontractor. They sometimes wanted to route me through a crazy amount of short airplane hops to get me to the destination. Sometimes even when a direct flight was available they couldn't put me on it because they didn't have a contract with the operator or something like that.
For some reason they strongly favored air travel and fell back on other means of transport only when there was absolutely no way to get there by air.
One some occassions I was supposed to do 4 or 5 500 km short hops, which would mean a whole wasted day of basically waiting at airports and boarding airplanes. In such cases I just said no, paid out of my own pocket for a train ticket or took my own car. And then spent next 3 months doing paperwork to get travel expenses reimbursed.
Because light rail/bus to airport is cheap, and $25 fares are cheap. And the trains are expensive.
Now, why is flying so cheap vs a train? The whole the US government essentially gives away 737s at a loss to employ people might be one part of it? Nobody is giving away free trains that I know of.
In France, the answer is simple: the train company is basically a monopoly (owned via a very thin veil by the state).
They are therefore, like all entities not subjected to competition:
- expensive
- unreliable
- low quality of service overall (atrocious food, disgustingly dirty bathrooms, in-seat power supply almost never works, internet non-nexistant).
After living in various Asian metros it really does seem that private markets have done wonders for quality of service - I live in Japan now, but while it isn't cheaper per se, it's definitely a phenomenal quality of service, and far from the only great system I've seen in the region.
Deutsche Bahn has a (quasi) monopoly on German long-distance trains and is state owned. It has to operate some connections at a loss. It also maintains the railways.
German streets a build by the state, not by Volkswagen or Mercedes Benz. Airports are owned by local governments and often a loss-leader, sometimes epic disasters (with the exception of Fraport).
It is extremely hard to compare trains and argue about whether they are competitive or subsidized.
I find it silly that people think that train fares should cover a train's value. Few people are riding trains just because they really love to sit on a train. The value is in that you got from point A to point B. Unsurprising that East Japan Rail is super profitable, given that they're only partially a train company - rather they're a real-estate play that builds human conveyor belts into shopping/apartment/office complexes they control.
Ordinarily I am skeptical of private enterprise to serve the common good, but in the case of the public transit system here in Japan and other Asian metros it really does seem to have produced great outcomes.
It's hard to believe we are successfully giving Boeings to France when the only major competitor to Boeing is a French company (Airbus). If we actually are I am curious about the story behind it
Boeing "is the largest U.S. goods exporter" and represents, pre 737-MAX fallout, about 5% of the US GDP. This might come as a surprise to east-coasters as for most of their existence they were based out of Seattle, and only recently moved their HQ to Chicago. Boeing sells a lot of civilian airplanes, but depending on the year/conflict 35-49% of Boeing's income comes from arms sales, either jets, cruise missiles, spy satellites or what have you. Boeing's manufacturing capacity plays a significant role in US wartime capability. Between Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, those two companies (and their cottage industries) prop up the lion's share of Washington State's economy, or at least it did pre-Microsoft/Intel/Amazon
The most common reason to take a short domestic flight is that you just arrived on a longer international flight - hub and spoke. Fly into LA and the fly to San Diego kinda thing.
This may actually INCREASE emissions as now there will me smaller “direct” flights from out of country instead of them all going through major hubs.
LOL, you clearly haven't had to travel CDG <=> center of Paris by train very often.
What you say is true (there is a train), but the quality of service is so bad (strikes, trains late or overcrowded, broken ticket machines, broken escalators, PITA to go from gate to train terminal) that most people who can afford it would rather be stuck in freeway jams in a taxi than consider taking the train.
I was replying to the above comment's reference to connections. It is fairly easy to fly into Paris and take a train to Lyon, for example, without having to go into Paris proper first.
The plane industry is heavily subsidized and manages to get (IMO absurdly) low prices for some rides, and there are some situations where it's more convenient to take a plane than the train (for instance if you arrive from a long distance plane trip and are already at the airport).
French trains, especially the high speed ones, are very comfortable and "high efficiency". They can be pretty expensive however.
In France, it mostly comes down to a price issue. On one hand, flights are massively subsidized and can be extremely cheap. On the other hand, train is not subsidized at all and can be pretty pricey.
Recently though, things are changing and making a Paris - Nice by train is becoming somewhat financially doable.
It's not always a rational choice. Among other things, there's some social status associated to flying compared to taking a train. So the professionals tend to take the plane even when it's neither cheaper, nor faster, nor more reliable.
The only answer is price in France, that's it. Time-wise that's about the same, trains are very fast and planes have a longer travel from the city center so that's even it out.
Any source on this or it's just your assumption that trains are faster and more reliable? I doubt that would be the case in France especially when it comes to trains.
Not if the speed comes with a price tag that properly accounts for externalities. Cheap flights are a market failure, plain and simple. Besides, on short flights the relative overhead of getting to/from the airport, and spending time on the airport waiting, is especially high, whereas with trains the overhead is minimal.
Could you explain this? I'm struggling to understand how something becoming very cheap can be considered an (economic) failure? Isn't that something the market optimizes for?
EDIT: Perhaps you mean expensive rail is a market failure?
The same way as cheap gas is a market failure. Externalities are not properly paid for (or they're paid by the public rather than the parties of the transaction). To be fair, things like jet fuel being VAT free is a policy failure rather than market failure.
What does it even mean to account for externalities?
The relative time on the airport is not high.You can literally come to the airport just a few minutes before your departure (and many people in fact do this).
Also most airports are in my opinion much better organized than train stations.
Well, the most topical externality right now is CO2 emissions, of course. Airlines don't have to pay for their emission rights – indeed, jet fuel is artificially cheap because it's VAT free because of reasons.
Semi-related: Do you think we’ll ever see a substantial reduction of pre-flight times? Why can’t we go through check-in and board directly, after an immediate security check? (Needless to say, this requires a brand new type of airport)
Some airports are in a good position to implement this already: Singapore airport has security checks right at the gate so you go through them and wait a short time in the seating area. When the plane is available, boarding happens immediately. What’s missing here is that the check-in desk is still way before this point.
I think the problem here is security checking, and not just because it adds time, but because it adds a highly variable AMOUNT of time.
Queueing theory says that unless you massively overprovision on available security screening stations, there's always going to be a long tail of latency for getting through security. For example, if a burst of people arrive all at once then you could take an hour to get through, whereas if you arrive at just the right moment you might only need 5 minutes.
The second part of the puzzle is that the plane costs a lot to be sitting around while people board. So it's important the plane spend as little time boarding as possible, which means passengers need to all be available to board at the same time.
I don't really see any other solution to these requirements except for passengers to arrive early enough that the worst-case security latency still gets them to their boarding on time, which means a long seemingly-useless wait for the vast majority of passengers who don't get unlucky.
Of course, the real solution to all of this is to discard or streamline the security theater that happens at airports, but that's a political problem, not a technical one.
It might be different outside of Europe, but we did go through a significant reduction in pre-flight times in our lifetimes: I remember scrambling with my family to arrive to the airport 3–4 hours in advance and spending all that time queuing.
Now for most of my flights I just check-in online, arrive to the airport an hour before departure, and spend 45 minutes and jaywalking around the airport while drinking overpriced coffee.
This may also seem like a nice cover up for French gov messing up economy and having companies go bankrupt / close destinations. "Looks, the flights disappeared not because we fucked things up, but because we are proactively saving the planet here!"
Canada kinda did this by banning flights from EU except through 4 airports at the beginning of the pandemic. But flights to those non-4 airports from EU were doomed anyway, but now airlines wouldn't owe compensation.
Is short domestic flights in France that much of a carbon producers? I mean is the measure just a fig leaf or is it a real step in the right direction?
Checking French sources, the only lines are apparently between Paris and Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.
A large proportion of the carbon emissions from flights come from takeoff (you have to haul the plane, full of fuel, up through the gravitational potential)
Most of France is Nuclear powered, and they haven't outlawed breeder reactors (which recycles spent fuel) for regan-esque cold war reasons, so with electric cars on the horizon soon and electric trains now, they're well positioned to Nope right out of the global fossil fuel race/struggle.
How strange it will seem to our grandchildren that some governments were willing to subject their population to a technological regression to reduce emissions, instead of taking the conveniences and productivity of modern society as beyond compromise, and determining how to push forward new technology to maintain it while eliminating carbon emissions.
Once you decide it’s worth receding back to the caves to reduce emissions, however slightly, you have to wonder how slippery the slope is.
Edit: To the downvoting conservationists: I support a carbon tax. I don’t support us clipping our own wings out of fear.
Essentially all this is is a tax on quality of life.
Quality of life will decrease for rich nations for nothing as all the environmental gains will be offset by emerging economies.
China will continue to build more and its population will also continue to consume more.
Those living in the rich nations can hardly blame the people in emerging economies for trying to achieve a similar standard of living (well, not without being huge hypocrites). And yes, large countries like China will have a large impact. But that is going to happen regardless of whether the rich nations make a change or not. So why wouldn't we try to reduce our own impact? What alternative do you suggest? Do nothing and make the problem even worse?
In the end preserving the environment helps everyone. We all have to live here on this earth, as will our descendants (for the foreseeable future at least). Perhaps you don't have many years left, and have no children? Otherwise your attitude seems rather shortsighted.
It's a good thing most rich countries are democracies where the majority actually can force altruism on others, no matter how selfish they are.
I wonder if this was actually the best way to accomplish this. From some of the other comments it seems like the reason the flights are less expensive is because of airline subsidies. Maybe the lawmakers didn’t have the powers to affect the subsidies but had the power to enact a law? I also wonder if this will have the side effect of clogging the trains routes with too many people. It’s been my experience that when lawmakers bend to environmentalists and special interests it always negatively affects the common folk who’s focus is providing for their families or simply surviving and don’t wield the necessary political influence to make their voices heard.
I think forcing companies to advertise more honest flight durations and prices could make a huge difference. If the airline tells you that you need to be at the airport 90 minutes before the flight, add it to the flight time. Require airlines to prominently show total time and cost from city center to city center with luggage.
If you're comparing a 59 EUR, 2.5 hour train ticket with a 29 EUR, 1 hour flight, the choice seems obvious, even though the flight will likely cost you more time and money in the end.
UX matters, and I believe this would be a very powerful nudge. I bet many people would take the train if the flight had to be advertised as "typically 3.5 hours, 82 EUR from city center to city center (fine print: 29 EUR flight, 29 EUR baggage fee unless you fly with hand baggage only, 12 EUR ticket to the airport, 12 EUR ticket from the airport at the destination; 1 hour flight duration, 45 minutes for getting from airport entrance to the gate, 20 minutes boarding, 30 minutes to get to the airport with an average 7 minute wait, 10 min to get out of the airport, 30 minutes to get from the airport with an average 8 minute wait)"