French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights
reuters.com
reuters.com
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
Aviation is simply much more efficient.
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).
Planes also spend their time where there is less wind resistance to deal with.
Trains are still a win, but it isn't as clear as it seems.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
It's not just a market failure, it's been engineered this way.
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.
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.
Planes just need infrastructure at both ends, so it's a lot easier to create a point-to-point model.
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.
Only Chalair runs a small handful of ATRs.
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).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/m...
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.
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.)
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.
https://www.railcoop.fr/ (in french)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rail-franchising-reaches-...
Even before.
> ... his directly ties into the idea of the state as an institution in French culture in a lot of subtle ways aswell.
Especially in the parisian elites disdain toward pretty much anybody else in the country.
ps: exiled french/parisian speaking.
(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 don’t know if you count them as “Paris-centric” or not, but Lyon-Lille via Marne-la-Vallée, or Lyon-Nantes via Massy are important as well.
> 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]
[1] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/environnement/convention-c...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.oui.sncf/aide/presentation-a-l-embarquement
And they outright write that some people will get an airplane experience, and not in a free drink way.
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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)
That play a role in usability. It’s a good environment to work, for instance.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have no idea how hard basic things can be until you're incapable of doing them on your own.
Even though I was already aware of just how difficult it would be to get around, living through it gave a shocking amount of perspective.
Some of the disability accommodations (disability parking) were pure bullshit. Elevators and ramps were godsends.
A large, standing shower without steps and room for a stool were musts.
A taste of what’s to come, when I get older. I don’t really see any real solution either, other than prepping.
Meanwhile, I technically didn’t qualify for disability so I still had to move through the hard way once I was able to drive again.
It’s somehow an abused system.
[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.
train journies are also far more practical if you have a toddler or small children considering trains are a very relaxed atmosphere.
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.
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.
It is the best of both worlds.
also, the line is sort of infamous for constant delays on the schiphol part of the track.
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.
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.
Marseille,Lyon,Lille; Strasbourg, Metz, Bordeaux,Nantes, Montpellier, Rennes.
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.
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 )
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.
Since last year ( or the year before that) via the LGV to Bordeaux, Toulouse is at 4h and ~10minutes from Paris.
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.
Maybe one day NYC-YUL-BOD will be a valid option to shave off a few hundred miles in the air, but that is another border.
But it ground my gears that KLM was still bussing from the gate to some aircraft to keep up their drive-through ops efficiency.
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.
The actual law (in French): https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b3875_pr...
Uh ? Since when and where ?
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.
And if you buy a ticket in advance, you are basically making a risky bet on whether or not you will have to change your plans because of a strike.
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.
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.
Short, domestic flight by itself: 100€
Short, domestic flight part of an international itinerary: +30€
It'll mostly work itself out.
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).
> in 2018, CO2 emissions averaged 88 grams of CO2 per revenue passenger per km.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_tran...
> 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
And even when you make this comparison with sensible data, the car still wins: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
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.
Trains are much, much lower. Especially considering that in France, most lines are electrified and 70% of production is nuclear.
https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht...
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.
Basically a lot of people wouldn't be able to drive anymore.
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.
Snow isn't an obstacle to trains (unless you don't want trains to be a reality).
[0] https://www.railway-technology.com/features/moscow-kazan-hig....
(Edited to fix an autocorrect correction from my phone)
>edmonton to calgary
I think think there's a slight difference between the things we're comparing
[0] https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/74614/norway-rai...
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.
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.
I can’t see building a high speed rail would be worth it for the volume of people going back and forth.
> 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.
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.
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.
that's an interesting concept.
I think that might have an unintended (good) consequence - could airports with lots of inefficiencies work on their passenger flow to be competitive?
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.
You might have seen those. Bright color, « futuristic » design. In the vein of the concord Suprasonic plane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Economics is a powerful tool.
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!
But it also helped prevent large scale wars which may have emitted loads of CO2.
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.
(original comment below)
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 seem very, very confused.
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...
Great progress ...
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.
The rich fly in expensive airlines, not with ryanair. Check this out: Paris to Bratislava, round trip for 80 bucks https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/trip/flights/select?adults=1&t...
Paris to Bratislava by train is 100 bucks one way (also taking much longer) https://www.raileurope.com/en-us/destinations/paris-bratisla...
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.
If you're in Paris, you can go anywhere easily. If you're not in Paris, some cities are hard to reach by train.
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.
> to abolish domestic flights on routes than can be covered by train in under two-and-a-half hours
It’s infuriating. But oh well, that how the country has been design.
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.
https://www.lci.fr/planete/interdiction-des-vols-courts-en-f...
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?
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.
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).
And rails need permanent upkeeping, it's not a one time investment.
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.
Of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_tax#Criticism_of_the_...
Are you saying you are on the side of banning stuff, or do you think it's a bad idea?
- 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
- less competition for the affected routes
- harder transfers between modes of transportation (physically)
- harder bookings across modes of transportation
- disappearance of entire routes made possible by hubs from flight-only OTAs (the vast majority of them)
I agree with the sentiment, but I suppose they should just be taxed higher and somehow forced to include a note like:
“A train/bus transfer between CDG and XYZ is also available with <third party>. Wanna book just up to CDG?”
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.
There's really no reason a human would try to fly instead of take a train, if the trains were functioning at high efficiency. Flying sucks. And yet...
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.
Do you have more information on this? Is the US government subsidizing aircraft manufacturing or something?
How many 737s would that buy, per year? around 40-50? This is Germany alone, the rest of Europe is just the same
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.
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.
Did you mean Boeing?
I imagine flying is cheaper because the cost associated with the Rail Infrastructure is much higher than with the open sky and aircraft.
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).Reliable certainly not.
On time even worse.
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 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.
Recently though, things are changing and making a Paris - Nice by train is becoming somewhat financially doable.
French trains, especially the high speed ones, are very comfortable and "high efficiency". They can be pretty expensive however.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So yeah, it's a non-issue. If a train takes 2:30 it would have been a short flight anyway
If you're important enough to charter, you won't be forced to slum it on the train, right?
Checking French sources, the only lines are apparently between Paris and Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.
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.
Joking aside, big government is a problem that needs to be solved around the world.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-carbon-emissions/
So you want to blame supply, and not demand (airlines in your example). How pointless.
China will continue to build more and its population will also continue to consume more.
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.
Don't try to force your pollution on me...
People are not using trains for a reason.
If they drive instead that's far less safe. It should kill a fair few people.