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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Restrict how? You'll never restrict it to Eastern Europe, for example. Eastern Europe has almost no high speed rail, so if you cut off "short" flights, travel that would take 4 hours by plane (1 hour to the starting airport, 1 hour in the airport, 1 hour flight, 1 hour from the destination airport) would become 8-12-16+ hours by train for many places.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/flight-rail-four-hours-...

Right now it's still only France, but German politicians are talking about adopting a similar strategy.

The French model actually aims to ban flights that have a sub 4h train connection. Meaning the Eastern European nations without high speed rail would have fewer flights affected if this becomes EU policy.

It would cut a lot of flights to neighboring countries, and domestically in Germany.

Spain has also a similar policy in the works. For travels that are covered by train and are 2.5h or less, no plane travel is allowed.

That's the minority of flights, even today

Quite simply, if you're under 4h train connection you're far enough to justify a flight.

BER is pretty safe on flight numbers.

It's actually amusing because the airport lobbyists were responsible for cuts in train infrastructure funding in Germany. Reminds me a bit of how Germany killed it's fiber investment to accomodate for private cable TV back in the day.

Or nuclear power plants for the benefit of gas traders and entrepreneurs of heavily subsidised green energy technologies.

Interesting that this model incentivizes railroads to build more.

A railroad investor could look at existing flights and accurately project how many passengers they can expect, since flights would be blocked the second they open their carriage doors.

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