France bans flights between cities linked by trains
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(Maybe it says that in TFA, but unfortunately I can't speak French).
But the law only seems to talk about Lyon, Nantes, Bordeaux et Paris-Olry
It was always puzzling to me how operating expensive, fuel hungry airplanes could be cheaper and faster for the consumer than fast electric trains. But that's due to the intense competitive landscape in Europe for carriers (where any company from any European country can operate in any other country. Think Singapore Airline operating JFK-LAX). Now the state monopoly effectively regulated away competition.
They don't need to offer a better, faster product. Guaranteed consumers.
> I wonder if the government will follow these rules or it's just for regular people.
The Président de la République is notorious for never taking the train, instead flying on a private wide-body A330. These laws are just for regular people.
There is already competition on the Paris - Lyon - Milan route, and more will follow.
… which is a mixed blessing, because with railways, competition runs into the capacity limitations of the underlying infrastructure much sooner than is the case with planes or buses.
SNCF also technically operates at a loss. Despite posting 2.4B euros of profit in 2022, they only paid for 3B of their 10B investments, the rest paid by the state.
Regardless, this legislation is not about promoting state-backed trains, it is about that air travel is an ecological disaster especially when the train is available. The only gripe i have with it is that some of these trips are currently more expensive via train than via air, which sucks for the consumers. People making these trips by plane often are not consumers though, they are corporations. In france, nobody in the bottom 60% of income would even consider taking the plane for pretty much any of the routes being cancelled. Some routes make sense (for example, Lyon -> Bordeaux still requires going through paris by train) but these are more than 2h30, so will still be operating.
I've read somewhere that Germany closing its last nuclear power plant will raise Europe's CO2 emissions by more than all of the country's air travel emissions in a year.
Most people wouldn't fly if the ticket price was like 2x compared to the train.
What this tells you is that flights, as they exist, are a net positive even including negative carbon externalities. Neither banning these flights nor making them absurdly expensive is a net benefit for society.
When we consider the marginal negative environmental externality compared to rail travel, it is even smaller or perhaps negative.
I'm sure you will reconsider in a couple of years once the effects of emissions are more obvious.
Market pricing is not an indicator of the cost of externalities; it is an indicator of the cost of internalities. They're called "externalities" precisely because they're not represented in the price curve.
Your second paragraph is already known to me and consistent with my comment - not sure what you're aiming to communicate.
Even if there are exceptions, the flights just might become unprofitable and go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airport_railway_stati...
But I suppose the majority of overseas travelers coming into France by air with the intention of connecting to a smaller city do so via Paris or Lyon. As European travelers seem to enter by car or go directly to their destination. At least that’s my impression from reading a few articles about tourism in France.
Looks like the two Paris airports together get 10x the traffic of Nice.
If we want lower CO2 emissions then just tax those and let the free market sort out specific solutions.
(I don't mean to completely discount the notion of carbon offsets. If you spent money to build solar panels sequestering carbon, then yeah, at least in theory you could genuinely offset your carbon. But right now there are too many dubious ways to count an "offset".)
So yeah, it would be better to give people the single rule and let innovation find ways to use it. But if it's just accounting innovation, and not actual technological innovation, it's worse than just dictating specifics.
Or take two connecting flights passing through a city not connected by train from the two endpoints.
You know some people will do that. Enforcing policies in spirit is not as easy as banning things in letter. That's always the issue.
Also what happens to medical patients, say after surgery? Travel by train? That would've probably killed my grandmother. Only time she travelled by airplane in her life by the way.
Indeed, and this rule is so ham-fisted that there basically can't even be exceptions, since there wouldn't be enough of them to make a flight economical to fly.
If a medical condition mysteriously doesn't allow for train travel, but going by car and plane is fine (odd), than travelling for 400km by car is fine too. Most people live quite a distance from the nearest commercial airport in any case (200km in my case, and that's in the tiny Netherlands).
Rail has pretty smooth acceleration, no sudden pressure changes, more accessible in case of emergency and no risk of turbulences
If I want to travel from Paris to Marseille (500mi - like San Jose to San Diego) via TGV, it takes 3.5 hours.
When factoring flight prices and time to commute to the airport, it evens out. The only way you're trying a €40-50 flight ticket from Paris to Marseille is driving an additional 1.5 hours north of Paris to BVA, at which point the entire travel time is the same as TGV, with the added downside of dealing with Ryanair.
France is the perfect size to leverage rail transit nationally.
Edit:
Why the salty downvotes? Transit in France is different from Transit in the US.
No reason to downvote your comment btw.
Eurostar services do though (but they are mostly international services).
Adding to comfort: trains don't have a maximum bag size nor liquid limits.
Example: no security check when taking the train from Paris to Amsterdam.
Fun fact: you have a security check to go from Paris (France) to Calais (France). This is because the train continues in the tunnel to UK.
Also at a higher level view, the intercity flights presumably existed because some rational actors found them to be the best choice for their situation -- it shouldn't be a surprise that people are pissed off about being regulated into sub-optimality.
Unfortunately we're talking about primitive politicians, trying to virtue signal in primitive ways.
The nodes are integrated in France.
Regional rail lines, the TGV, and subways all have shared nodes to allow you to transfer between lines.
As I pointed out in a couple other comments
1. This is a solved problem already - the downsides pointed out were already considered and optimized against in the 1970s-1990s
2. France =/= US. North American public transit experience cannot be applied to that within Europe and Asia.
Lyon to Paris, I agree with you that the train trumps the plane. The problem comes from Lyon to New York. Now they have to add a connection in Paris from the train station to the airport as well as have multiple tickets which always risks a misconnection.
It's a solved problem.
Most of France's international airports have TGV (high speed rail) stations with TGV trains every 10-30 minutes.
All this was already considered back in the 60s and 70s when France began embarking on the TGV and Rail Modernization project.
Could you make train travel more comfortable and convenient for folks with medical circumstances? If so, how? If not, why not?
Not doing this at all, and letting everyone continue to be allowed to fly regardless of wealth or medical conditions?
> Could you make train travel more comfortable and convenient for folks with medical circumstances? If so, how? If not, why not?
I'd guess that maglev instead of conventional rail would probably do it.
If climate change is a collective action problem, this doesn't work. Only changes at scale move the needle. This is a change at scale, although iterating when improvements can be made should be considered (wrt the discussed situation).
Yes?
Unlikely. You've got to beat 2½ hours (the original citizens’ assembly recommendation was 4 hours) by train. There can't be that much area where it's faster to fly over 2½ out and backtrack.
The best example I could find was Paris-Orly to Lyon, at 2½ hours by train (airpor to center of town). It's 3½ by connecting flight, according to Google Flights.
The alternative is to fly to Geneva (1 hour 10 min) then drive (1 hour 50 min), so at least three hours, assuming you could get a taxi right when the plane arrives.
And that's weighted in favor of the flight. If you leave from Paris-Gare de Lyon instead of the airport, it's only 2 hours to Lyon.
> You know some people will do that.
Laws are adjusted and even improved based on experience.
> what happens to medical patients, say after surgery? Travel by train?
I am glad that her recovery went well. I don't know the French exceptions for medical issues, but France has an excellent health care system, so I'm surprised she would be discharged so quickly if doing so would almost certainly endanger her life.
Is this something you are comfortable discussing further? Or, based on your user name, was it in Bulgaria, where the trains and medical system are rather different than France? If so, perhaps your experience isn't so easily transferable?
I've also heard it the other ways around - a diver with decompression sickness who wasn't allowed to fly and had to take the train.
Flying is probably worse since you don't have much space. Also you have to walk a lot more in airports vs train stations, security checks, etc.
Because people really want to place about after a major surgery?
> Also you have to walk a lot more in airports
Have you heard of wheelchairs?
I'm... having difficulty imagining how travel by train could _possibly_ be more strenuous than travel by plane; anyone who's going to be killed by a train will be killed by a plane far quicker. Assuming you're talking about commercial flights; if you're talking medevac, that wouldn't be impacted by these rule changes.
I can't read the original source: can anyone confirm if this bans private flights or only scheduled flights? I mean could Elon Musk still fly between rail-linked cities in France if he wanted to?
But, in this case, that logic doesn't seem to apply. There is nothing "free market" about either air or rail travel. Both exist within and only because of the structure of government, and would not exist without regulation and subsidy.
* the situation they're trying to bring about with this law
or
* the same situation we have now except the gov't is taking more of people's money
In case of taxing, these would continued to have been used, and people and animals not using them would have experienced acute health externalities associated with these substances.
I believe mountains of evidence strongly suggest cigs are worse for us and cause a much worse net negative harm on society via increased long-term strain on our healthcare sector. But, just like planes, people hold onto cigarettes as a right to freedom and attach unwarranted stigma on psychedelics (just like some attach unwarranted stigma on using trains).
Banning cigs in some circumstances where the other is allowed makes sense if we just think about overall human welfare, insofar as that is our goal. Same goes for planes.
France's national conversation seems to be increasingly realising that we're heading towards a difficult future and pre-empting it.
Anglo societies seem to find this much harder to reckon with.
It's because of our astonishingly bad common law system. The worst thing that England gave to the world.
I do like the principle that all things being equal, cases should get decided the same way, and we technically have the option of amending the law for clarity if courts seem to interpret it strangely.
It does seem like it can slow laws down, which seems like a possible advantage in some contexts for the stability and continuity of society, but possibly a major downside if you need to act quickly.
I think our common law system is one of the best things about our country
Take the housing market, for example. The entire thing is nothing but a massive U.S. subsidy towards homeownership. Subsidies by the govt insuring 30 year fixed mortgages, while lots of carve outs in the tax code to promote housing, actual, literal intervention in the market over the past century to bail out homeowners, and companies whose failures would wreck the homeownership market, subsidized funding for infrastructure to keep those homes livable, etc.
France's high speed train network is powered by electricity which is primarily provided by it's nuclear energy power plants.
When viewing it through this lens then it becomes obvious trains have less climate impact.
If that is what you are optimising for then one is better than the other.
You have to choose some metric, this just seems to be the one they have chosen.
> If that is what you are optimising for then one is better than the other.
Yes, if the goal is to minimize climate impact at the expense of everything else, then this is logical, but that's not all that governments are supposed to care about.
If their analysis says something along the lines of "if we don't optimise for climate we all die" then I think it becomes pretty obvious what you optimise for.
However we don't have this information, we can only speculate.
Here are other than climate benefits:
Traffic is reduced in most cases (reducing infrastructure costs) (airports tend to not be in city center like train stations). Road use is decreased. Fuel imports are decreased. Noise and air pollution are decreased. Strike risks are likely decreased. Infrastructure costs at smaller airports is decreased.
Competition and end user costs are things that would be worse. (But France already have government granted monopolies for airports, trains, and airlines)
Not sure if you're trolling but a quick search finds that "rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars."
Imagine if all evidence pointed to train travel between cities being much worse than air travel. Then yes, banning the trains could be the right call.
How about allocating carbon credits to people, annually? No trading. You have to budget. From the poorest hobo to Jeff Besos, everybody gets the same. But even that doesn't work. People will use their carbon! It would be like allocated PTO: none will be left on the table at the end of the year. So by setting a budget you are simultaneously ensuring that it becomes the minimum carbon emissions per person, unless you let people cash in unused carbon credits! The hobo gets a Christmas bonus from the CO² man!
But the whole system would be impossible to track and police.
This thing the French are doing, works.
Its efficient and simple and enforceable.
Carbon taxes on the other hand would be a bureaucratic nightmare as you've pointed out. It would require far more oversight, would be harder to enforce, require so much tax dollars spent to just manage the system taxing short flights etc etc. It reeks of inefficiency and overregulation when I think about it.
This isn't really a great argument. "Good regulation is bad actually, because if the opposite of the good regulation was done, that would be bad" isn't particularly coherent. This isn't a preference thing.