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from the walking-will-be-mandatory-soon dept.
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, @06:35PM (2 children)
It also ignores that we may well see higher levels of flight because air carriers and such have to work around the ban with more flights!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:57PM (1 child)
>air flight just doesn't kill that many people.
No, it doesn't. It does, however, kill more than rail travel - particularly when evaluated per passenger trip instead of per passenger mile as this evaluation should look at.
The bigger issue isn't people dying in transit (and, for that, you might want to throw in deaths in transit to/from the air fields... passenger car travel is horrid as compared to rail or air, and if you're outside a UK pub pedestrians hit by cars are a real problem, but that's another issue entirely.)
>we may well see higher levels of flight because air carriers and such have to work around the ban with more flights!
Sure, if you need to get from London to Brussels and you're stubborn enough to demand that your carcass be hauled through the stratosphere to do it, you can make a connection in Moscow to circumvent the regulation. There's also the (scrubbed from the internet, yet all too true) story of the Saudi prince who arrived in San Francisco but forgot his diary, so he sent a servant in his private 737 back to Saudi Arabia to retrieve it. Searches for the topic will find much more serious crimes against humanity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-concludes-saudi-crown-prince-ordered-jamal-khashoggis-assassination/2018/11/16/98c89fe6-e9b2-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html [washingtonpost.com] but, nonetheless, the hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel burned in pursuit of a forgotten book that the prince wished to have at hand a few days earlier makes for an extreme example of how fossil fuels are wasted for trivial desires, which you will call a non-sequitor, but I call on-point to the argument that these things (short hop travel) can be accomplished far more efficiently if people are appropriately encouraged to do so.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @08:54PM
Which is insignificant, as you noted in the next sentence.
It's poorly thought-out regulation and policy that harms us in these examples.
A typical example is a airline that has a hub operating out of either London or Brussels. It's not stubbornness, but normal airline efficiency. Now, for some reason, you want to break that because planes on short trips are bad somehow. Let's give a working example of how bad this particular case is. Suppose I want to go from New York City to Brussels. The only timely way to do that is by plane. So planes are involved no matter how bad you think they are.
So let's say that we have an airline with a hub in London, but not in Brussels. If flights between London and Brussels are allowed, then the airport can fly people from New York City to London and on to Brussels. But if they can't, then it's probably either a direct flight to Brussels or no flight at all! For airlines organized around hubs (and the advantageous concentration of logistics that provides), it likely would not be economic to have a plane that doesn't go through the hub.
If they don't get enough traffic for a direct flight, then that's that. Regulators infected with stupidity cooties have introduced significant inefficiencies into the air passenger market.
Because that journalist would still be alive, if the crown prince had to travel by train? Oh right, that's another non sequitur.
As to the high drama of a plane flight around the world for a journal - which may be far more important than you think, all you claim is hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel burned. Ho hum. I would indeed call this a non sequitur, due by definition to the lack of relevance to this thread. Most of these short hoppers aren't going to be Saudi Arabian princes chasing down journals. But rather very efficient travel like the hub airline example I mentioned earlier.
As to the final claim, what "far more efficiently"? Have you even considered this problem in the slightest? I was easily able to come up with reasonable use cases where it was more efficient to allow the short hop. Remember fuel is not the only resource on the planet you can "waste". So is human time. And human time routinely is more important than a small amount of fuel or slight increase in noise and pollution.