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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: 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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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]