One responder inquires about the "Le Touquet" destination, which is less than 2.5 hours from Paris. And according to Google, a bunch of goverment officials live there.
But the law only seems to talk about Lyon, Nantes, Bordeaux et Paris-Olry
What's interesting is that trains are government-operated in France but airlines aren't. With this regulation, this effectively removed the only competitors to the state-operated monopoly.
It was always puzzling to me how operating expensive, fuel hungry airplanes could be cheaper and faster for the consumer than fast electric trains. But that's due to the intense competitive landscape in Europe for carriers (where any company from any European country can operate in any other country. Think Singapore Airline operating JFK-LAX). Now the state monopoly effectively regulated away competition.
They don't need to offer a better, faster product. Guaranteed consumers.
> I wonder if the government will follow these rules or it's just for regular people.
The Président de la République is notorious for never taking the train, instead flying on a private wide-body A330. These laws are just for regular people.
Lack of market incentives isn't the only reason SNCF tickets are so expensive. A large part is that airline tickets are cheaper because airlines nickel and dime costumers while underpaying staff (for example, only paying them for time in the air when they spend time working on the ground).
SNCF also technically operates at a loss. Despite posting 2.4B euros of profit in 2022, they only paid for 3B of their 10B investments, the rest paid by the state.
Regardless, this legislation is not about promoting state-backed trains, it is about that air travel is an ecological disaster especially when the train is available. The only gripe i have with it is that some of these trips are currently more expensive via train than via air, which sucks for the consumers. People making these trips by plane often are not consumers though, they are corporations. In france, nobody in the bottom 60% of income would even consider taking the plane for pretty much any of the routes being cancelled. Some routes make sense (for example, Lyon -> Bordeaux still requires going through paris by train) but these are more than 2h30, so will still be operating.
I have heard multiple people claim some airline staff are only paid when flying but do you have a specific airline and role you can point to that this is true for? I asked a couple people I know in the airline industry who said, basically, they get paid extra for flight hours, but still have a salary and benefits like any normal business employee. The myth is people misunderstand "getting paid extra for flying" vs "not being paid at all when not flying." They also have per diems when out of town. This is for major US airlines.
That just says there’s flight pay and base compensation. It’s not much different than any salaried job where you happen to work extra hours some time, which dilutes your effective hourly rate, but it’s just part of the job.
SNCF is not a monopoly any more. European regulations also prevent this(although admittedly the French government delayed implementing them as long as the possibly could).
There is already competition on the Paris - Lyon - Milan route, and more will follow.
> European regulations also prevent this […] There is already competition on the Paris - Lyon - Milan route, and more will follow.
… which is a mixed blessing, because with railways, competition runs into the capacity limitations of the underlying infrastructure much sooner than is the case with planes or buses.
The sad part is that this move is hailed as a major win but really is a drop in the ocean.
I've read somewhere that Germany closing its last nuclear power plant will raise Europe's CO2 emissions by more than all of the country's air travel emissions in a year.
The negative externalities of a plane ticket absolutely do not double the cost of a plane ticket. They are not significant - certainly smaller than the taxes already levied on flights.
What this tells you is that flights, as they exist, are a net positive even including negative carbon externalities. Neither banning these flights nor making them absurdly expensive is a net benefit for society.
When we consider the marginal negative environmental externality compared to rail travel, it is even smaller or perhaps negative.
It's not even close. Each air passenger on a fuel-powered plane generates the equivalent environmental externalities of an entire electric train...or more.
Market pricing is not an indicator of the cost of externalities; it is an indicator of the cost of internalities. They're called "externalities" precisely because they're not represented in the price curve.
The electrical consumption of the train is most likely not its largest externality-source. The largest cost might be wasted human life-hours, which used to be more or less correctly internalized but now (due to these flight bans) is not.
Your second paragraph is already known to me and consistent with my comment - not sure what you're aiming to communicate.
I doubt very much that the marginal external costs of plane travel is lower than train travel! It's possible that the net value is still worth it (depending on how much people value convenience), but objectively the marginal cost of one more person riding a plane is [externality of flight]/[capacity of flight]. One train trip over the same route has 10x the denominator, and considering that the power comes from the grid not much worse of a numerator, if indeed it is not lower. Does a train really consume that much power?
Oops is out of their mind. A train running on 70% nuclear energy from the grid with 90+% efficiency cannot possibly have similar externalities to a plan running on highly transformed fossil fuels. The only way this is even close is if you count the track the train runs on to be dedicated exclusively to that train.
There are negative externalities beyond the cost of electricity. Installing and maintaining rail, land disruption, wasted human life-hours, etc. all impose internalized and externalized costs.
Installing and maintaining rail is already priced in, just like the actual market cost of the fuel is for planes. Once all costs are internalized (including land disruption, though the tracks are less negotiable for freight shipping so passenger trips get a free lunch there) wasted life-hours are presumably how people would make the call. But its pretty clear that the marginal, per-person external cost of flying is higher than the marginal per-person external cost of trains.
I presume there always are people always flying in from overseas into one of the larger airports and catching a connecting flight domestically. It'll become annoying if they suddenly have to grab their bags, go to the train station and catch a connecting train.
Even if there are exceptions, the flights just might become unprofitable and go away.
Most of the major airports in France have train stations built-in. For example, you can fly to Paris airport then take a train directly to Lyon; no need to go into the center of Paris first. It’s really not much different from changing flights.
Paris CDG and Lyon LYS are the only airports in France I can think of with a built-in mainline train station. And the schedules are much less convenient than those in city-centre stations.
But I suppose the majority of overseas travelers coming into France by air with the intention of connecting to a smaller city do so via Paris or Lyon. As European travelers seem to enter by car or go directly to their destination. At least that’s my impression from reading a few articles about tourism in France.
They really should have two exceptions, one for electric airplanes and the other for planes fueled entirely with atmospheric CO2-sourced fuels (CO2 + H2O -> renewable energy -> jet fuel). Neither of those options are all that economically viable just yet, however.
The government shouldn't pick winners in terms of specific technologies. They have a terrible track record for doing that and usually fail to anticipate innovations. Plus we end up with a whole new department of highly paid government bureaucrats writing and enforcing rules without doing anything productive.
If we want lower CO2 emissions then just tax those and let the free market sort out specific solutions.
A ban on coal-fired Stanley Steamers makes a lot of sense, from the perspective that governments should promote transport technologies that reduce smog and other air pollution. Extending this to diesel trucks (affiliated with a lot of childhood asthma) - assuming you have electric trucks available is reasonable.
Except that you need to make it clear that it's actually carbon neutral. There are numerous ways to pretend to be carbon neutral without actually accomplishing anything, like "carbon offsets".
(I don't mean to completely discount the notion of carbon offsets. If you spent money to build solar panels sequestering carbon, then yeah, at least in theory you could genuinely offset your carbon. But right now there are too many dubious ways to count an "offset".)
So yeah, it would be better to give people the single rule and let innovation find ways to use it. But if it's just accounting innovation, and not actual technological innovation, it's worse than just dictating specifics.
So now it's faster to take a longer flight and travel back to your real destination by cab.
Or take two connecting flights passing through a city not connected by train from the two endpoints.
You know some people will do that. Enforcing policies in spirit is not as easy as banning things in letter. That's always the issue.
Also what happens to medical patients, say after surgery? Travel by train? That would've probably killed my grandmother. Only time she travelled by airplane in her life by the way.
Not really. If I want to travel from Paris to Lyon (300mi - like San Jose to Los Angeles) via TGV, it take 2 hours. A flight would take a similar amount of time.
If I want to travel from Paris to Marseille (500mi - like San Jose to San Diego) via TGV, it takes 3.5 hours.
When factoring flight prices and time to commute to the airport, it evens out. The only way you're trying a €40-50 flight ticket from Paris to Marseille is driving an additional 1.5 hours north of Paris to BVA, at which point the entire travel time is the same as TGV, with the added downside of dealing with Ryanair.
France is the perfect size to leverage rail transit nationally.
Edit:
Why the salty downvotes? Transit in France is different from Transit in the US.
The one negative case I see here is it's forcing multi-mode transport for connector flights.
Lyon to Paris, I agree with you that the train trumps the plane. The problem comes from Lyon to New York. Now they have to add a connection in Paris from the train station to the airport as well as have multiple tickets which always risks a misconnection.
It's a non-issue because the new law exempts connecting flights. All these comments about how dumb the regulators are because they overlooked connecting flights are flamboyant displays of ignorance.
Agreed! Also the fact that this regulation is only for rail commutes that can be done within 2.5 hours or less. So I can still fly from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Toulouse.
It is almost certain that shorter air routes were subsidized by government. No way it was economical. I read somewhere that many smaller airlines have gone bust.
Trains can be a lot more comfortable also, like seat space.
Just curious. Is there a TSA (long messy security checks at airports) equivalent for trains in France?
No TSA in france for trains no. You just show up on the platform and board. Recent TGVs have a gate to get on the platform to ensure you have a ticket, but they don't do anything but scan your ticket.
Adding to comfort: trains don't have a maximum bag size nor liquid limits.
The issue is that you are neglecting inter-modal inefficiencies. It's (with rare exception) far more time efficient and less hassle to change planes in than it is to change to a train at a physically distinct location.
Also at a higher level view, the intercity flights presumably existed because some rational actors found them to be the best choice for their situation -- it shouldn't be a surprise that people are pissed off about being regulated into sub-optimality.
Yes. Thinking about what factors make people choose plane over train and address those would have been better. People will freely choose the better option.
I would have preferred to see the shortcomings of train addressed. There has to be some if people prefer flying e.g Make train cheaper, can take long distance train straight from airports, more frequency, can book an itinerary that includes plane and train, airline reward programs apply…
> So now it's faster to take a longer flight and travel back to your real destination by cab.
Unlikely. You've got to beat 2½ hours (the original citizens’ assembly recommendation was 4 hours) by train. There can't be that much area where it's faster to fly over 2½ out and backtrack.
The best example I could find was Paris-Orly to Lyon, at 2½ hours by train (airpor to center of town). It's 3½ by connecting flight, according to Google Flights.
The alternative is to fly to Geneva (1 hour 10 min) then drive (1 hour 50 min), so at least three hours, assuming you could get a taxi right when the plane arrives.
And that's weighted in favor of the flight. If you leave from Paris-Gare de Lyon instead of the airport, it's only 2 hours to Lyon.
> You know some people will do that.
Laws are adjusted and even improved based on experience.
> what happens to medical patients, say after surgery? Travel by train?
I am glad that her recovery went well. I don't know the French exceptions for medical issues, but France has an excellent health care system, so I'm surprised she would be discharged so quickly if doing so would almost certainly endanger her life.
Is this something you are comfortable discussing further? Or, based on your user name, was it in Bulgaria, where the trains and medical system are rather different than France? If so, perhaps your experience isn't so easily transferable?
I've also heard it the other ways around - a diver with decompression sickness who wasn't allowed to fly and had to take the train.
According to the tweet, the ban is only for destinations where the travel time by train is less than 2.5 hours. I doubt flights save more than that with security and time buffers.
> Also what happens to medical patients, say after surgery? Travel by train? That would've probably killed my grandmother. Only time she travelled by airplane in her life by the way.
Indeed, and this rule is so ham-fisted that there basically can't even be exceptions, since there wouldn't be enough of them to make a flight economical to fly.
It's not like travel by car is outlawed. You can't travel by air anywhere unless you happen to live right next to an airport; there is always travel to and from the airport.
If a medical condition mysteriously doesn't allow for train travel, but going by car and plane is fine (odd), than travelling for 400km by car is fine too. Most people live quite a distance from the nearest commercial airport in any case (200km in my case, and that's in the tiny Netherlands).
I'm unsure if there is a more optimal solution. If you make exceptions, people would abuse them. If you made it cost more, people would argue it's only a rule for the poor. There will be edge cases, and they are unfortunate, to be sure.
Could you make train travel more comfortable and convenient for folks with medical circumstances? If so, how? If not, why not?
> Not doing this at all, and letting everyone continue to be allowed to fly regardless of wealth or medical conditions?
If climate change is a collective action problem, this doesn't work. Only changes at scale move the needle. This is a change at scale, although iterating when improvements can be made should be considered (wrt the discussed situation).
This, for sure. I gave up flying 7 years ago, and all that has achieved for climate change is a miniscule reduction of fuel used - perhaps 8 hours per year transporting 100kg (self + luggage). Perhaps the important impact personally is that I won't feel guilty as things get inevitably worse. At a stretch, maybe one or two people I have interacted with realised that they too could cut down or quit flying. But I don't preach, so it only ever comes up when relevant (someone starts a conversation about holidays abroad, or the company wants me to go to some pointless conference). I don't think I could name one person who I've influenced to quit flying.
> Travel by train? That would've probably killed my grandmother.
I'm... having difficulty imagining how travel by train could _possibly_ be more strenuous than travel by plane; anyone who's going to be killed by a train will be killed by a plane far quicker. Assuming you're talking about commercial flights; if you're talking medevac, that wouldn't be impacted by these rule changes.
It's sad when otherwise mostly-free countries do things like this. If you don't understand why this is bad, imagine if the people in charge had the opposite preferences and instead banned going by train between cities linked by commercial flights.
It's not a preference though is it? Isn't this a data and evidence-based decision based on what policy-makers believe is bad for environmental and economical reasons?
Imagine if all evidence pointed to train travel between cities being much worse than air travel. Then yes, banning the trains could be the right call.
Instead of banning things you don't like, pass a carbon tax then to account for externalities. As a bonus, it could be revenue neutral so that your average person actually ends up ahead (while frequent fliers or polluting industries end up paying more).
Externalities never really get covered because there isn't somebody using that money to actually capture that CO² and reverse the damage. It's just a hairshirt that affects the poor most. Rich people still won't care. You could quadruple the price of a flight and affluent people wouldn't notice. Moderately wealthy people would, and they'd bitch about it, but still fly. Actually, if carbon taxes kept poor people off planes, rich folks could network! "Hey, I'm Jonathan. I work for one of the big four."
How about allocating carbon credits to people, annually? No trading. You have to budget. From the poorest hobo to Jeff Besos, everybody gets the same. But even that doesn't work. People will use their carbon! It would be like allocated PTO: none will be left on the table at the end of the year. So by setting a budget you are simultaneously ensuring that it becomes the minimum carbon emissions per person, unless you let people cash in unused carbon credits! The hobo gets a Christmas bonus from the CO² man!
But the whole system would be impossible to track and police.
This just highlights an earlier point I made which is I don't get why people think the flights being banned is "over-regulating"
Its efficient and simple and enforceable.
Carbon taxes on the other hand would be a bureaucratic nightmare as you've pointed out. It would require far more oversight, would be harder to enforce, require so much tax dollars spent to just manage the system taxing short flights etc etc. It reeks of inefficiency and overregulation when I think about it.
Also, the idea that Anglo countries, especially the US, aren’t interventionist is beyond hilarious.
Take the housing market, for example. The entire thing is nothing but a massive U.S. subsidy towards homeownership. Subsidies by the govt insuring 30 year fixed mortgages, while lots of carve outs in the tax code to promote housing, actual, literal intervention in the market over the past century to bail out homeowners, and companies whose failures would wreck the homeownership market, subsidized funding for infrastructure to keep those homes livable, etc.
What problem do you see with the common law system in this context?
I do like the principle that all things being equal, cases should get decided the same way, and we technically have the option of amending the law for clarity if courts seem to interpret it strangely.
It does seem like it can slow laws down, which seems like a possible advantage in some contexts for the stability and continuity of society, but possibly a major downside if you need to act quickly.
To be honest, for the UK at least I've always thought it was because as an English speaking country we have no moat from American media. So we're way more susceptible to the propaganda pumped out by big corporations.
I think our common law system is one of the best things about our country
That didn't make obvious sense to me. It makes as much sense as "It's bad to regulate cigarettes. Imagine what would happen if the government regulated apples."
A better analogy might be cigarettes or psychedelics.
I believe mountains of evidence strongly suggest cigs are worse for us and cause a much worse net negative harm on society via increased long-term strain on our healthcare sector. But, just like planes, people hold onto cigarettes as a right to freedom and attach unwarranted stigma on psychedelics (just like some attach unwarranted stigma on using trains).
Banning cigs in some circumstances where the other is allowed makes sense if we just think about overall human welfare, insofar as that is our goal. Same goes for planes.
It's not like kerosene has been banned completely, though, and the right solution for something that you want people to avoid using but not ban completely is a tax on it, not selectively banning certain uses.
What about DDT or asbestos? Should we have banned them or just put a tax on them?
In case of taxing, these would continued to have been used, and people and animals not using them would have experienced acute health externalities associated with these substances.
What?! DDT was banned because it was killing people. Consider how many people would have died because a corporation would happily sell them poison for profit
It's hard to imagine how that would work. Airline routes are usually based on a use-it-or-lose-it slot. So either the tax will have the desired effect and make the flight uneconomical, in which case it'll be discontinued, or it won't in which case the flight will continue as normal and the government will have an incentive to keep it going, having found some pre-existing use for the extra money that they now can't imagine not having!
I can't read the original source: can anyone confirm if this bans private flights or only scheduled flights? I mean could Elon Musk still fly between rail-linked cities in France if he wanted to?
I generally agree that it is better to tax emissions and let consumers decide where to spend their carbon budgets. For example, I don't support the idea that we should ban beef, because there are people who want to eat a hamburger and never burn motor fuel, and good for them.
But, in this case, that logic doesn't seem to apply. There is nothing "free market" about either air or rail travel. Both exist within and only because of the structure of government, and would not exist without regulation and subsidy.
The government of France owns a third of Air France and 10% of Airbus and half of Aéroports de Paris. I fail to see any rational reason to conclude that domestic air travel within France is "not subsidized at all".
I have no strong opinion either way, but your comment sounds a bit like "imagine they made saving lives illegal instead of murdering people" and then expecting us to agree with you.
My whole point is it's not like that. Saving lives is unambiguously good and murdering people is unambiguously bad. Planes and trains are similar and accomplish the same thing, and neither is inherently good or bad.
> When viewing it through this lens then it becomes obvious trains have less climate impact.
> If that is what you are optimising for then one is better than the other.
Yes, if the goal is to minimize climate impact at the expense of everything else, then this is logical, but that's not all that governments are supposed to care about.
Traffic is reduced in most cases (reducing infrastructure costs) (airports tend to not be in city center like train stations). Road use is decreased. Fuel imports are decreased. Noise and air pollution are decreased. Strike risks are likely decreased. Infrastructure costs at smaller airports is decreased.
Competition and end user costs are things that would be worse. (But France already have government granted monopolies for airports, trains, and airlines)
I guess that really depends on what their analysis was.
If their analysis says something along the lines of "if we don't optimise for climate we all die" then I think it becomes pretty obvious what you optimise for.
However we don't have this information, we can only speculate.
> Planes and trains are similar and accomplish the same thing, and neither is inherently good or bad.
Not sure if you're trolling but a quick search finds that "rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars."
And imagine if people with the opposite preferences, instead of banning smoking in restaurants, made it MANDATORY!
This isn't really a great argument. "Good regulation is bad actually, because if the opposite of the good regulation was done, that would be bad" isn't particularly coherent. This isn't a preference thing.
This is not just a matter of preference though. Nothing to do with freedom either, I know Americans have trouble defining this notion but don’t be ridiculous.
(Maybe it says that in TFA, but unfortunately I can't speak French).