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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, @05:14PM
Case 1: I have a plane in city X and want to fly to distant city Z. However some members of my traveling party are in nearby city Y. In the old scheme, I just make the short hop over to pick them up and then fly to Z. In the new policy, I have to come up with something else since I can't just fly to Y. I could fly out to a fourth airport W that is outside the prohibited area and then fly back in to Y. I could transport the people in Y to X (train or car), then board them at X. I could just transport everyone by time inefficient train and waste a lot of time. There are more such scenarios. But notice the simplest and most efficient can't be done anymore.
Case 2: I'm berthing my plane at city X and want to move it to a new berth at nearby city Y. Now I have to fly to a city outside the prohibited area and then fly it back in.
Case 3: My air passenger business flies out of hub city X. Passengers from foreign country U occasionally want to fly in to city Y which is too near city X. A direct flight to Y just doesn't have the volume to justify the flight. Before, I could transfer them to a small plane hopper and just fly to city Y. Now, either that hopper has to do the above dance to get around the regulation, or I dump them on the train, for which most of them have no experience with all that luggage they brought along (since the luggage can't fly there either). Or I could just stop flying people to Y.
These illustrate the silliness of assuming that short hop flight must somehow be spurious and inefficient. In the first case, that short hop greatly reduces the complexity of transporting a group that comes from different starting airports. In the second, it's just a mundane movement of planes from one airport to another that runs afoul of this policy. In the third, it's a display of complete ignorance of how air passenger travel works combined with a cynical attempt to steal air traffic for the rails.