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, @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.