France bans air travel that could be done by train in under 2.5 hours | Hacker News Reader

France bans air travel that could be done by train in under 2.5 hours

arstechnica.com

65 pointsnixass37 comments

Previously:

France to ban some domestic flights where train available due to climate measure (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/12/france-ban-...)

43 points | giuliomagnifico | 11 hours ago | 27 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777551

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26770929 (currently 244 points, 347 comments)

It was originally supposed to be domestic flights under 4 hours which would be a much bigger area. This feels a bit like a token victory.

Consider for a moment, the chances you’d fly if a train trip was less than an hour are pretty near zero. Even at 90 minutes, it’s pretty unlikely you’d fly. Every mile less than exactly 2.5 hours makes it less likely you’d fly regardless. So it’s essentially banning a small number of flights which might take 1.5-2.5 hours by train. How many airports are situated that distance apart? Is there a lot of domestic traffic between La Mans and Paris? I’m not familiar with France, but it really feels like this won’t affect a whole lot.

It may be more about establishing this kind of regulation as the norm so it can be strengthened later. That way changes are merely incremental and to an existing system. It may be more politically viable to go that route and tie each increase to some concrete climate goal.

> the chances you’d fly if a train trip was less than an hour are pretty near zero

Why is this?

I'm genuinely curious. I've never been on (or even seen!) a train, nor have I ever flown.

Airports are rarely next to your starting or ending locations, so flying usually requires extra ground transport on either end. This transportation, and the transfer time easily add an hour. Train stations are often close to the city centre, and better integrated into the local transportation networks.

In the airport, there is processing time before boarding - check-in, security, gate check, etc. This time adds another 45 minute buffer before departure. Boarding a train can be as simple as arriving at the terminal and walking onto the train.

All of this.

To be honest, I think my estimate may have been generous, I just don’t know France.

In the US, I wouldn’t even consider flying unless it was closer to 5 hours. Anything shorter than that I’d just drive. But not knowing France at all, I was being I think generous.

> However, there will probably be less impact than you might first expect. For one thing, connecting flights won't be affected, so international travelers won't have to worry about having to navigate the train system from Charles De Gaulle International airport.

> In fact, French lawmakers are only proposing to cancel five routes in total. Yes, just five: Paris Orly to Bordeaux, Paris Orly to Lyon, Paris Orly to Nantes, Paris Orly to Rennes, and Lyon to Marseille.

We have high speed train. Paris to Bordeaux (~500 km flying distance) is 2H train, 1H flight.

Why not just price carbon?

And just let the market decide? Crazy!

Why deal with changing the inputs if we already know what we want the output to be?

Because you can’t know all inputs and outputs across all of industry. You can play whack a mole on a per-industry basis and incentivize all sorts of wankery to evade regulations, or you can just price carbon and fix _all_ industries at once.

Surprisingly, this makes a lot of sense. It will help protecting the environment tremendously.

Impact of this particular ban is very limited. Connecting flights are not affected, neither are some important routes (Paris-Marseille) where the TGV takes too long to travel.

Agreed, the knee-jerk reaction to "France regulates [something unexpected]" is usually that it's lunatic bureaucrats gone wild (in the way that "America deregulates [something unexpected]" often is the converse).

Ideally, the regulation wouldn't be so centralized and discontinuous: flights that replace 3-hr train trips are still harmful to the environment and still have nonzero fungibility with train trips, and this legislation doesn't address them at all. Relatedly, there could be reasons someone may want to take a short-hop flight that provide more utility than a flight over the allowable threshold would for someone else, and reflecting externalities in the price signal neatly allows this decentralized decision-making system to kick into gear.

But the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good, and this is likely a much easier-to-pass alternative to, eg, thorough carbon pricing of transportation options. Even though its area of effect is small, status quo bias is one of the most powerful forces in democratic politics, and it'll probably open the door to smarter and more expansive regulation in the future.

I would be not surprised if they will rise the train ticket price on those routes.

In Austria Vienna-Salzburg leaves at the airport and even has code sharing like a normal flight. The train takes 2:49. It was a condition of receiving the pandemic bailout money. I did the journey once and most definitely not want to fly instead. These trains serve many more people than just Salzburg though and I wonder if it is not a massive advantage for the airport in the long run. Airports have serious negative externalities and I think the public should set sensible rules here. Just because it is profitable doesn’t mean it has to be allowed.

It sounds also like a win for the French train company “SNCF”.

Agreed! Given the number of SNCF strikes the past few years, I wouldn't be surprised if this is really a victory for the SNCF unions over their Air France counterparts rather than a pro-environmental move (which is an off-shoot of the decision).

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26770929

And then there isna train strike, followed by a monster traffic jam, and then Greta Thunberg getting her "How dare you?" on.

i wonder whether it practically kills short haul electric flights in France? I mean that new generation of transportation is going to be mostly autonomous with heavy reliance on ground based infrastructure, and banning it would put the country well behind in such tech and infrastructure development.

How can you kill something that does not, never did, and never will exist?

the same way like the Wrights' patent practically killed aircraft development in US for almost two decades.

That the American aviation business was somehow set back by the Wright Brothers is, I guess, a take.

>a take.

only in the same way like the evolution is "just a theory".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

"The patent war stalled development of the U.S. aviation industry.[7][10][11][8][12] However, this claim has been disputed in research.[13] Perhaps as a consequence, airplane development in the United States fell so far behind Europe[7] that in World War I American pilots were forced to fly European combat aircraft, instead.[14][15][16][17] After the war began, the U.S. Government pressured the aviation industry to form an organization to share patents.[7][18]"

Probably adds another hour travel time to anyone flying to Paris just to connect to an international flight.

Connecting flights won't be affected

If so, doesn't that somewhat defeat the point? A plane normally has connecting passengers and direct together. Now are they just going to fly the route half empty?

> Now are they just going to fly the route half empty?

Flying full but with half the frequency achieves the same result.

Still adds an hour.

It doesn't really because connecting flights are only useful if the times match up.

So what might end up happening is people avoid connecting flights through Paris and instead take a longer route which ends up being faster and cheaper (trains are expensive).

This will make those flight emptier, thus more expensive. It was one of the point from "The shift project".

The main international airport is keeping the intra-France flights. It's the other, regional, airport that's not.

(Although the regional airport may serve the entire EU. It does not serve the major international destinations in the US or Asia however.)

corner cases:

- people that live very close to an airport but far (+1hrs) from a train station?

- Train stations that don't have a place to park your car

Do all airports have connections to these rail?

Makes a lot of sense to me. E.g. in India, travelling by air between two major cities that is less than 300Kms apart takes roughly 4 to 5 hours - 1 hour to travel to the airport (if you are lucky) that is often on the outskirts of the city, 1 hour for security frisk, check-in and boarding the flight, half an hour to 45 minutes of actual flying, half an hour to get out of the airport, and another hour (or two) travelling back into the city. A train journey between the same cities may take 5-7 hours (or 7-9 hours at night) but is often more comfortable, relaxing and cheaper because the railway stations are inside the cities and getting in and out of the railway stations and trains are much, much faster and less stressful.

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