SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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]