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It's official: France bans short haul domestic flights in favour of train travel:
France has been given the green light to ban short haul domestic flights.
The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.
[...] France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.
Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.
[...] The ban on short-haul flights will be valid for three years, after which it must be reassessed by the Commission.
"[This] is a major step forward in the policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," transport minister Beaune said in a press release.
[...] Sarah Fayolle, Greenpeace France transport campaign manager, told Euronews that there were both "negative and positive aspects" to the European Commission's decision given that only three routes are affected.
"It's going in the right direction, but the initial measure is one that's (not very) ambitious. We must go even further," she said.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:29PM (26 children)
No. It's not. It's a non sequitur.
You just said you didn't do that diligence again. The technical cause, "jet fuel fallout" might not be found with a study of the area, but its effects would be. After all, brown spotting on all plants in the area?
Another non sequitur sighted. The tank is full of them today!
It's basic engineering. The less frequent the activity, the larger the negative factors that come from inexperience, lack of testing, and just running the clock. For example, NASA has launched no manned space flights since 2011 more than a decade ago. SpaceX has launched four in the past two years. Unless someone has been working for NASA for more than 11 years, they won't have ever handled a crewed launch directly. And who knows what failure modes have been introduced (or will be introduced over the next few decades) by those processes to the SLS system? You won't find that until you launch a bunch of SLS rockets. And there's huge risks that NASA has dealt with mostly by hoping they don't happen - such as a direct hit on the launch complex by a powerful hurricane, a solid rocket motor going off in the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of their many, critical path contractors failing to deliver, or a presidential administration hostile enough to spaceflight to stop it completely.
Also consider that it'll be at least eight years before the SLS catches up to the present day successful launches of the crewed Dragon capsule. How many manned Falcon 9/Superheavy flights could NASA do in the meantime? Dozens to hundreds and all for the same overall price!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:47PM (25 children)
>You just said you didn't do that diligence again.
And you're denying the central issue for society at large: would an average, reasonable person entering into the transaction be aware of the risks involved?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:51PM (24 children)
Did the average, reasonable person ask homeowners in the area about problems like this? Did the average, reasonable person look at the landscaping?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @07:11PM (6 children)
>Did the average, reasonable person ask homeowners in the area about problems like this?
Having worked real-estate in the area for some time, I can say with authority: no, they did not. The average home buyer in the area barely noticed the deafening noise of the cargo jets overhead until after closing, much less asked about it pro-actively.
>Did the average, reasonable person look at the landscaping?
Look, yes. Notice the brown spots on the leaves? Maybe 1 in 10. Connect the dots with falling droplets of jet fuel? Less than 1 in 1000 even after living there for many years. Suffer the impacts of breathing jet fuel fallout? 100%. What are those impacts? Adequate studies have not yet been funded or pursued, but similar issues have been demonstrated all sorts of ways, just one example: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27102021/diesel-pollution-environmental-justice/ [insideclimatenews.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:01AM (5 children)
Don't need to. Brown spots mean problems.
Well, you do know about airports right?
Has your linked study actually found evidence of a real problem? The article merely noted that there was higher exposure for the usual underprivileged urban, ethnic groups, not that the exposure level was significant or harmful. And called for complete replacement of diesel trucks because of that difference in exposure. Could be a real problem, but it's not a real solution since those diesel trucks are a big factor in improving the lot of the people in those regions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @03:41AM (4 children)
> Brown spots mean problems.
Sure, you and how many expert botanists are homebuyers in Miami? The brown spots also come and go, like the jet noise. Based on prevailing winds you might have a couple of weeks or months without the flyovers, and they can happen morning noon and night for months at a time as well.
>actually found evidence of a real problem?
The linked study was the first Google result on the general topic (you think you are worth more effort than that?) Yes, indeed, diesel emissions have been linked to significant shortening of life expectancy and reduction of quality of life through a whole host of disease mechanisms. Do your own research, cherry pick me some results that say "diesel soot is harmless for humans to breathe" - should make fun reading.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @06:02AM (3 children)
I'm not the only person on the internet.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:50PM (2 children)
Care to wager how many human beings will read this in the next 20 years? ChatGPT and similar will only be infinitesimally influenced by our rambling here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:38PM (1 child)
I'd say around ten. Plus there's a strong chance I'll review this discussion in the next few years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @12:32AM
You are more optimistic than me, I would guess four, counting us, this deep in a thread.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @07:14PM (16 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @10:07PM (15 children)
>Also, did the average, reasonable person hire a professional to check the landscaping?
Oooh you hit a nerve. Your buddies in the bank require a "professional" home inspection before they will issue a mortgage (or, at least they used to, if they dropped that I'd be 110% in agreement). These "professional" home inspectors have, in my experience NEVER found the real hidden problems with the home, many of which I was able to spot from a distance while they were climbing their ladders and crawling around making a list of nits to pick that you're supposed to use to pressure the seller into lowering their price to cover their "professional" fee.
Their lists would include things like:
I lived with that cracked glazing for 12 years until I sold, it never leaked, never caused a bit of trouble, and my buyers replaced all the windows in the house so it didn't make a damn bit of difference to them.
Their lists did not include things like:
Most recent purchase the professional even "tested" the air conditioning (in February) with his "professional" IR thermometer and declared "blows cold, 68F" when the outside temperature was 67F. Standing 20' away from the evaporator / heat exchanger, I can hear a relay clicking in a non-functional cycling pattern, I ask the "professional" inspector about it and he claims ignorance, I should call an AC service company - I allow the seller (a contractor) to call his preferred AC service company and they confirm that the outdoor unit is toast, $1500 to replace.
So, does this have anything at all to do with the cost of regional travel in France? Well, first: you brought it up. Second: it's a clear example of regulation by private (banking) industry gone horribly wrong - government rarely does worse, and the main problem is that there's no evaluation of the inspectors to "close the loop" and sort the corrupt from the incompetent from the clueless from the occasionally helpful.
While I have little love for Greenpeace, particularly when they start going off on nuclear energy, I will applaud their occasional science based presentation which actually contains verifiable data from repeatable studies that reaches actionable conclusions with desirable results. Tangent warning, and I bet you've heard this one before, in the late 1980s the alligators of the Everglades were dying of mercury poisoning and nobody knew why. Greenpeace tracked the source of mercury to waste incinerators in Palm Beach County, got them shut down, and within a couple of years the alligators were no longer dying of mercury toxicity. Score 1 for Greenpeace, I tossed 'em $20 for that back when $20 meant something. Then they wouldn't f-ing stop burying me in anti-nuke garbage and I had to tell them to f-off.
Whether you agree about the concerns of global warming or not, the waste of fossil fuels - which commercial aircraft burn in massive quantities - is something to be avoided when possible anyway. Transfer of air traffic to surface rail transit in France will significantly reduce the burning of jet fuel, and France's trains are powered by 90% nuclear sourced electricity, something the festering codpieces seem to be willing to overlook in this case.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:11AM (14 children)
It started with your comparison of your mild problems with nearby airports to Bhopal. And because you kept making poor excuses for why you chose at the time to live close to a busy airport, ending with the "I didn't know about it" excuse. Now you're telling stories about the poor quality of the professional inspectors you employed. Well, you have my take on that already.
Unless, of course, it doesn't reduce air traffic. This wouldn't be the first time such a scheme had unintended consequences.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @04:11AM (13 children)
>you kept making poor excuses for why you chose at the time to live close to a busy airport
As for "close by," first, my home was not straight off the end of the runway, it was (and still is) 2 to 3 miles east, and 4 to 5 miles north of the runways, and that's the route the cargo jets fly, air traffic instruction is: "Proceed due east to Biscayne Bay and turn left."
The passenger jets all take a nice gentle turn and climb out over the water of Biscayne Bay, but the cargo shithead pilots pull hard then track along 100 to 200 yards inland from the Biscayne Bay shoreline in full-throttle climbout with their engines pointed straight at the homes between 55th street and 85th street North. I was in the area of 75th street and my windows would rattle for 2+ minutes from the jet thrust pointed directly at them, the people around 65th street had it even worse, they would have to pause telephone conversations inside with the windows shut for up to a minute while the cargo jets would fly over, and FedEx had a habit of sending out 2 sometime 3 at 5 minute intervals.
The airport PR flak is along the lines of "well, the traffic goes over different parts of the city depending on wind patterns, kind of spreads it around so nobody gets too much." and of course that's what the real estate agents parrot as well. Homes in the 65th street area can only be sold during those quiet weeks to months when the northbound traffic is leaving over the swamps instead of their homes. MIA air traffic control is one of those things that a bit more regulation would go a long way toward significantly improving the quality of life of thousands of people.
As for "choice," my choices were rental, or basically this home in this neighborhood that I found at the time for $80K, or something in an ethnically different neighborhood where I didn't fit in and would likely have been targeted for vandalism, theft and other harassment, or something over 5x the commute time to work, sucking significantly more car exhaust on a daily basis not to mention wasting 500 additional hours per year sitting in traffic, or keep looking for another job for months, likely only finding one out of state. The NRC was hiring inspectors.... Or, I could just ignore the 6.5 years I spent acquiring 2 technical degrees and go back to stocking shelves in a grocery store for $6 per hour and living with my Grandmother, having my parents pay my insurance. Homes in other neighborhoods were $120K and up, basically unattainable on a $37K/yr salary with some student loan debt and little in the way of down payment. So, yeah, plus the cargo noise wasn't nearly as bad when I bought in 1992 as it was when we finally left town in 2003 - something about Amazon.com and similar starting to deliver everything via FedEx and UPS air-freight.
>the poor quality of the professional inspectors you employed
IDK about your corner of reality, around here I hired some of the best of the best available professional home inspectors. IOW, they all suck.
>Unless, of course, it doesn't reduce air traffic. This wouldn't be the first time such a scheme had unintended consequences.
I have no doubt, with the right people, the BEST people, crafting the details of the regulation, implementation schedules, enforcement policies, etc. it could indeed be made to backfire. On the face of it: traffic wanting to go short hop flights in and out of France has no flights available, so instead they choose to book two flights that are above the regulated minimum distance, taking significantly more time and costing significantly more money than the readily available rail transport options? Yeah, there absolutely will be people who do that, but I believe that on the whole air traffic will decrease, particularly if the trains are run with excess capacity. The trains (in France) already have more schedule choices than existing flights.
You can choose to believe the opposite, you can state flatly or argue eloquently how you believe this will happen. I'll bet you a drink in the bar of your choice that if the regulation is passed, as described, net total air travel in the regulated area will decrease - perhaps not as much as projected, but significantly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @07:05AM (12 children)
So it really was close by.
So you do acknowledge you had choices.
So they really were poor quality as advertised.
Indeed. It happened to be that way for the covid efforts as you noticed. It's SOP not a rare thing.
Or I can use JoeMerchant's own words [soylentnews.org]:
This was more important than anything discussed here. Covid killed over a million US inhabitants after all (like a hundred Bhopals). And yet, it devolved into a "bribe for the corrupt". It's not hard to see that you're whistling past a large graveyard here. I find it silly how you can propose regulations like this with a straight face while simultaneously complaining about the real world results of such gratuitous and uncritical regulation creation.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @04:34PM (11 children)
>So it really was close by.
If that's your definition of "close by" then pretty much the entire city of Miami is "close by" the airport, and when you start getting a little north of that "close by" zone, you start getting into the "close by" zone of Fort Lauderdale airport.
>So you do acknowledge you had choices.
You have a choice right now to jump in a truck, drive to the Fountain Paint Pots boardwalk, take a short hike, then leave the trail, stick your hand in a mud pot and then go rinse it off in a geyser. We all have choices.
>So they really were poor quality as advertised.
They barely advertise at all, they make their living as a required part of the homebuying process for anyone taking a mortgage with a bank. It's not government regulation, it's regulation from the banks and inertia in the industry. And 2008 showed just how well banks and other financial institutions regulated themselves in that industry.
>It happened to be that way for the covid efforts as you noticed.
US COVID relief seemed to go over and above in its efforts to disproportionately line the pockets of people who didn't need it. Beyond SOP to a new level (for the United States at least, of course we're a relatively young country), much like the post election results contest in 2020-2021.
>It's not hard to see that you're whistling past a large graveyard here.
The distinction is: death and disease have historically happened without being built and operated by people (debates about COVID being engineered in a lab to one side for a moment, please) the imperfect efforts to reduce the effects of COVID represent significant forward progress as compared with 1917/18 or previous out of control plagues. The main thing I saw as a "triumph" in the COVID situation was avoiding the scenario where we had patients who needed hospitalization for a (reasonable) chance of survival being turned away because the hospital resources were completely consumed - and the knock-on effects of other things requiring hospital treatment also being neglected and leading to bad outcomes due to the overtaxing of resources by COVID cases.
Now, my contention at the time, which I still stand by, is that there were a number of "potential pandemic outbreaks" prior to COVID where we appear to have kept the genie more or less in the bottle - most specifically a number of bird flu outbreaks that were contained mostly in Asia over the past 30 years, but also less closely related things like Ebola which certainly could be handled worse than they have been. The conclusion of that contention is: the COVID genie was released from the bottle due to neglect and dismantling of the (imperfect, as all such things are) systems that were built up progressively since 1918 through until inauguration day in 2017.
And, you see, rail travel is not as conducive to the transmission of disease as air travel. The rich can have entirely private cars, the well to do and even middle class can afford private compartments, there is much more access to fresh air and less rebreathing of the exhalations of hundreds of other people. If Italy had no short range flights to and from its airports and instead filled those needs with rail transit (exceptions made for Rome-Athens and similar trips which are significantly shorter by air, much as the proposed regulation is written already), then the spread of COVID in Italy at the start of the pandemic would have been slower, more easily identified, addressed, and controlled.
Matter of fact, in 2021 we took the kids on a (rare) lockdown outing for a rail tour in a nearby town, wherein we did rent our own private compartment and enjoyed the trip with minimal exposure to others.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:48PM (10 children)
Which it is BTW. The horizontal distance here is roughly six miles. And they're probably under 2000 feet when they pass overhead. No wonder you were getting diesel fuel spotting.
In other words, you're more informed now.
A big part of that success was that those potential pandemics were much less infectious than covid. And how again did the US manage to dismantle in three short years the entire medical infrastructure of the world outside of the US? Maybe if we pull your other finger, we'll get a better story?
You can't ride rail from New York City to Brussels. And it's slower.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @12:43AM (9 children)
>dismantle in three short years the entire medical infrastructure of the world
Not the medical (treatment) infrastructure, but the detection intelligence network, CDC and friends, took significant funding hits, not to mention installation of anti-science idiots in high level administration.
>You can't ride rail from New York City to Brussels.
And nobody is proposing any regulation on that route, or any other where rail is significantly slower than air.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 21 2022, @03:06AM (8 children)
Any evidence that this impaired anyone's response to the pandemic? Looked to me like we were getting good information all along.
You did. [soylentnews.org] For example, recall my example of a London hub that wants to handle a route from New York City to Brussels. The sensible way would be to fly the passengers to the hub, London, and then on to Brussels. You explicitly proposed banning all air travel between London and Brussels without regard for the economic, environmental, and basic time management of moving people around who start with the prior that they're already flying.
This is bike shed dysfunction. JoeMerchant and these French politicians don't know anything about moving people around, but burning jet fuel is bad, k?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @03:14PM (7 children)
>Any evidence that this impaired anyone's response to the pandemic?
Travel bans enacted after the horse was already out of the barn?
Mask mandates, social distancing, and global shutdown rolled out too little, too late?
The actual spread of the pandemic instead of it being contained near the source?
...Under the "you did" link you should find: London to Brussels which is very different from New York City to Brussels.
If you want to stretch that for NYC to Brussels, let's take a look at how that plays:
First, if I were making the trip, I would opt for one of the 6 currently scheduled daily non-stop options from NYC to Brussels, priced starting at $526 per passenger. Impact of short hop flight regulations: zero - or, maybe they run more of these direct flights to handle demand from the train mandate? Fine with me.
If I felt the need to save $73 on my trip by spending an additional 4+ hours in transit (plus taking double jeopardy of flight delays/cancellations) with a multi-hop flight, that option would then be "gone" but already has an option to hop a Chunnel ride from LHR direct to walking distance to wherever it is that I'm really going (unless I plan to visit someone like this guy [wikipedia.org]) on a train. For sake of argument, train transit time from LHR to one of the three Brussels main train stations, which you probably will end up going through, takes just over 3 hours, and since the trains leave much more frequently than even the short hop flights, you'll spend less time waiting for one, and less time fooling with final leg transit once you reach Brussels. I'll leave it to your free market to work out the pricing for all of this, if there's any sense in the issue it will be lower due to the lower operational costs of the trains vs the short hop planes, but if it isn't then I guess that's more profits to the owners / share holders, and that's a great thing too, isn't it?
The times I have traveled to/from Europe, I actually did make non-stop flights to my destination and get around by 95% train / 5% car from there. I made one (ridiculously expensive) trip MIA-LHR, week in LHR, LHR-AMS by air (no chunnel then) week in AMS, then by rail to Hamburg, week in Hamburg, then HAM-MIA direct. That LHR-AMS flight added a couple hundred dollars to the total transit cost vs taking the ferry, but saved me basically the whole day in travel time. Were the Chunnel not present, that would still be an option under the proposed regulation, and depending on where they draw the line on "same transit time by rail" it may still be. Due to the bullshit fare structures airlines have, I also might have saved $200 by flying HAM-LHR-MIA on the trip home, but it wasn't worth the time and hassle, to me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:10AM (6 children)
I would, of course, not count those as examples. It wasn't funding that caused that but rather failure to act. You could have spent an order of magnitude more money and you would still get the same results.
And follows a lot of feels about why you choose to ignore my obvious point. I'll note the obvious, if the hop flight takes less than three hours, say one or two hours, for example, then you're saving time even if you can magically teleport to the train station as you proposed above.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:58AM (5 children)
>failure to act
Of course, the same administration that failed to act is the one that cut the funding, denigrated the value of the information produced, and I feel: obviously dragged their feet when presented with information from those denigrated organizations which couldn't present their information as quickly or convincingly because of how they were being managed.
Nonetheless, they eventually did act in what is now obviously a too little too late fashion.
>even if you can magically teleport to the train station as you proposed above.
Who said "travel broadens the mind" not so long ago?
All major airports in Europe have good rail connections. 30+ years ago Frankfurt's airport had a major train station directly in the air terminal.
Your language gives away your mindset "say you are an air hub operator in LHR", I am not, I am a passenger and as long as the industry is going to be heavily regulated, as it already is, I want those regulations serving my interests, not the hub operators.
>if the hop flight takes less than three hours, say one or two hours,
Do you even fly, bro? When the flight takes 45 minutes in flight time, there's 15+ minutes on each end of taxi and wait for clearance time, 15+ minutes of boarding and deboarding times, not to mention the time scheduled between flights, plus the uncertainty factor which is just as present in European air travel as the US, while their trains are far more reliable and on-time than air travel, unlike US trains.
Last time I flew, we landed early, then waited 50 minutes on the tarmac for a gate. Then we, as a family of US citizens, cleared customs in 20 minutes, jogged through the air terminal for another 15 minutes to our connecting gate, and barely made boarding time. Our non US counterparts from the first flight took over an hour to clear customs, missed any connecting flights they may have had and got to reschedule for another flight the next day, if available. Their 2 hour "hop flight" turned into an unplanned 12-24 hour layover. That's a common story in air travel, not so much on European trains.
But, I suppose you represent those air travelers who magically teleport from home to the terminal gate, bypassing security, then magically teleport from the runway on arrival to their final destination as easily as telephoning a chauffeur waiting in the cell phone lot?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:30AM (4 children)
Don't forget all the other governments that did that too. It's a cool narrative bro, but you're just not getting it. More money wouldn't have made a difference.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @03:07AM (3 children)
>More money wouldn't have made a difference.
I'm not saying more money, I'm saying the same money and political support they used to get. Other nations also rely on that very same network of monitoring and analysis to make their decisions, and in brighter times they look to the US for leadership.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @04:13AM (2 children)
Except it's pretty well established that those systems were functioning just fine.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @04:18AM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:43PM
>pretty well established that those systems were functioning just fine.
In your head.
🌻🌻 [google.com]