I understand the criticism but to be fair high speed trains are better in many cases:
Paris - Lyon by airplane: 1h15 plus travel to and from airport, plus security, boarding etc
Paris - Lyon by train: 2h30, city center to city center, no security checks. This might actually be faster!
Personally when traveling between London and Paris I choose the high speed train. It's usually more expensive but just the fact it removes traveling to and from airports (especially in London!) adds so much comfort that you realize the extra £50-70 are totally worth it. The overall travel time is also comparable.
That’s correct if everyone traveled from city center to city center, but in my case, the airport is easier to get than the hsr station, has more long time parking options, and sometimes the destination is a layover, so I would have to go from the center of paris to the airport equally. I Would love to travel a lot more by train, or less by plane, but right now and at least in my case, it’s not a very good option.
Laws should not be decided just based on what is good for you in particular, but in considering what is the most efficient in average.
Sure, you may have an easy access to the airport outside the city centre, but people in the city centre, which constitute a bigger number, have a worst access. And people who are not in the city centre but on the other side also have a worst access to the airport than the city centre.
The comment you answer to is still very relevant: it is true that in average using the train is not as disastrous as one could think (so the disadvantages are compensated by the advantage with regard to environment). The fact that it is not advantageous for every one is trivial and not really relevant.
Presumably if trains truly were better, there should be no need for a law. Perhaps they should focus their efforts on making trains an obviously superior service.
What do you mean by "better"? Planes are faster and more convenient, but they are polluting more, which has long term negative impact. If you want to know what is "better", you need to put everything in the balance. And the weight of each thing will also depend on subjective opinion (is it better to see 5 old people die 5 year earlier than otherwise or see 10% less investment from foreign investors?).
Also, this should not be decided by the "market", because the market is crap as evaluating mid- or long-term consequences.
If you don't think "the market" (aka people) should get to decide then you have probably have some authoritarian leanings. My argument is make the train service better so people want to use it instead of forcing them to do so.
Surely you're aware of the market distortions that are a result of negative externalities. Markets aren't perfect and recognizing that governments exist to correct market distortions is hardly authoritarian.
In this case France could alternatively levy a hefty tax so that your air travel costs fully reflect the environmental damage it causes. Would that be your preference?
How do you measure the externalities? In particular, how do you measure the environmental damage of air travel? Note that you must do it, as it is absolutely crucial for your entire argument. Otherwise, it might as well turn out that it is rail travel that’s more environmentally damaging, and we should tax it and promote air travel instead.
My suspicion is that you actually have not given any thought to this, have no idea about the actual cost of the externalities, and you don’t really care about that either. Instead, you just want to push your personal preference for trains over planes, while clothing this as if you were just appealing to objective facts and principles.
If the market decides the planet/climate goes sideways.
'Better' doesn't make people want to use something if they can save money. The main reason airlines like EasyJet and RyanAir thrive is because they're cheaper, not better.
Traveling by train vs. via one of those planes with minimal legroom and non-relciming seats?
Always better for short haul.
But the prices of trains (or rather: the subsidizing of air travel) make this a non option for many people in Europe. It is literally twice as expensive.
For example, Berlin--Munich. This is a one hour flight. Average price when booking in time is less than $90, I'd say.
The solution to climate change is actually attacking the problem head on - not just making everyone poor and forcing them to use crappy government services and ultimately switching to communism.
Right now solving the problem means natural gas, nuclear and carbon capture.
Seriously. I tried to take a train this summer for my European vacation after landing on my direct flight from the US in lieu of a connection. 12 hours and 3 delayed / canceled trains later we were at our hotel which was a mere 189 miles from where we landed and they were both major cities...
If I would have just hung out in the airport for 4 hours and caught the 50 minute connection it would have been a much more pleasant experience.
Unfortunately public transport and esp. railway transport is not a 100% free market, there are a lot of natural monopolies in this space that need to be regulated. For example what stops Eurostar from pricing their tickets by looking at airline ones (it's what they are apparently doing)? Nothing because Eurostar is a monopolist for some important destination pairs like Paris - London.
It costs me around 60€ to go from France to Switzerland by plane. It costs me way more than 60€ to go from France to Switzerland by train. This why people are taking the plane, because it's less expensive that high speed rail, nothing more. Make high speed rail less expensive and people will take the train.
Government induced free market distortion under pretense of ecology concerns is just what it is, bullshit, and a bad French habit.
edit: I know France Switzerland trips aren't affected by these laws, it's just an example.
Just taking a simple example like Lausanne (Switzerland) to Paris (France)¹ shows comparable ticket prices. For an arbitrary date a few months away like April 21st, that gives me a single train ticket for €65 on a direct connection to Gare du Nord, or a train ride to Genève-Aéroport (€8) plus a plane ticket for around €65 to Orly. Cheaper plane tickets exist, but not if you have even a single backpack.
In terms of time, the train is a direct TGV that takes 3¾ hours, while the plane route means taking a train for ¾ hours, waiting at the airport for at least an hour because of security, flying for 1¼ hour, wait for another half hour at least to get out of the airport, and then spend at least half an hour getting to where you actually want to be in Paris. It takes just as long, but probably longer if you want a decent safety margin on the airport.
And that excludes the simple fact that we all have a responsibility in reducing our carbon footprint, and that for most us who have the means to travel taking a route that may be (but isn't in this case) slightly more expensive and take slightly longer is the least we can do if it is the greener alternative by far.
1: Just an example of a journey I took myself, by train.
That's a difficult personal choice to push on people when the super rich are traveling by private jets, fuel for international air travel isn't taxed (because bought in duty free zone technically), etc...
People want legislation for all, not just fake moral that only applies to the middle class and lower. I believe the fact that this law will affect private jet trips is a reflection that politicians are aware of this and starting to feel the pressure.
Perhaps there should be a hefty aviation fuel tax that works inversely: basically, the more you buy at once (per plane), the lower the tax is, by a very large amount.
So, if you're refueling an A380 super-jumbo or a 777, your fuel tax is very low, because those planes need a LOT of fuel. If you're refueling a 737, it'll be significantly higher, to penalize short routes. If you're refueling a small private jet, it'll be huge.
Basically, big jets that carry hundreds of passengers will get the lowest fuel tax this way, and airlines will be forced to prioritize moving people as efficiently as possible.
That's not feasible. You can't cross oceans in any reasonable timeframe without an airplane. Even long land trips don't really make sense by train, over I'm guessing 1000km.
My whole point here was to devise a taxation strategy to discourage passengers and airlines from flying short routes, and leave those to trains instead, reserving airplanes for the much longer routes where they're much less avoidable, and also to encourage more centralization of air travel from large cities and their airports, so that larger numbers of passengers are funneled onto a smaller number of very large jets for those intercontinental trips. Passengers would then just have to take trains to/from the smaller cities. Larger planes are far more efficient in terms of fuel per passenger per mile; much of the fuel burned in a flight is used on take-off and getting to altitude anyway, so maximizing distance and plane size means minimizing fuel per passenger-mile.
Well, then don't cross oceans then. Travel long distances rarely. It's not a human right to get cheaply to the other side of the globe. And with recent breakthroughs in electronic communications, we don't have much need for vast majority of travelling. Close-but-living-far-away relatives dying or getting married happens only so rarely.
If we want to fight pollution big time, ultimately we have to reduce amount of traveling. At least till we get nuclear fission working and batteries with good energy density. Entirely new ways to make trains and planes themselves.
Sure, we'll just all go back to medieval ways of living! That sounds like a great idea! Why travel when you can just stay at home and play video games all day!
Not flying long distance does not mean staying home. Unless you live on a 500m radius island in the middle of an ocean with next land mass thousands of kilometers away.
Air traveling (and traveling in general) is not some sort of human rights where everyone MUST afford to travel. It is a scarce resource, especially with air traveling pollution. And high taxation is a good way allocate a very scarce resource.
Why is train so much more expensive? Surely jets that cost $100s of millions, supported
by massive airports, are more expensive? Seems like the market distortions are subsidies to airlines of some sort.
Rail lines are massively subsidized and the French government is regularly bailing out SNCF (the national rail company). So imho it not clear that the global market distortion is in the favor of plane.
Just like cars are heavily subsidised through motorway building. Every form of transport receives subsidies as a public good, even in countries where transport infrastructure is nominally privatised. This is one area where letting the free market decide invariably ends in disaster.
I suspect in case of the Eurostar high speed train they simply follow the airline ticket pricing for the same destinations and add their "convenience tax" on top of it, usually around £50. Saying this because I've noticed that their prices fluctuate together with airline ones, and they fluctuate wildly.
Yes, despite being state-owned, Eurostar operates like a classic price-maximizing monopoly. Thalys is much cheaper, I wonder what will happen now the two are merging. Hopefully Renfe will launch its competing service soon on the London to Paris route.
Do trains in France use the same sort of demand-driven pricing scheme airlines use? People tend to estimate airline pricing based on the cheapest price they see, which is often a fraction of the cost when demand changes.
Forgive me, but your comment drops below any reasonable threshold of HN guidelines and I am forced to use strong language like “absurd” and “clownish” to describe what you’re asserting …
The overriding market distortion, which trumps every other variable here, is the zero value given to any environmental externalities coming from air travel.
In addition, both CH and FR have massive governmental subsidies for their national carriers and the operation of their airports.
Which is to say:
you’re swimming in free market distortions so deeply you’ll never come up for air … and you’re decrying this one ?
> Yes, the evil government is propping up BIG TRAIN because they hate planes!!!
Dude, instead of mocking me and sounding like an ass, learn your history. 20 years ago in that country, it was impossible to go from Region to region by bus, you had to take the train. You couldn't do Le Mans Paris by bus because bus operators were not allowed to sell inter regional trips. It's the EU that forced France to allow these. You're damn right the french government is once again rigging the game in favor of the SNCF.
You know how these buses are casually named right? Yes, indeed, it's the same Macron as the current one in charge of the government. Not sure where you get your news intake from to believe for a second that the French government is favoring the national railway company over its competitors in any way.
This instance is just a weak law intended for greenwashing purpose, nothing else.
> This why people are taking the plane, because it's less expensive that high speed rail, nothing more.
This is often true. But - not always. Depends on which endpoints. Sometimes it's speed, sometimes convenience, sometime price.
> free market distortion
1. Markets are not free. They are based on violent coercion of private ownership of land, factories, service providing corporations etc.
2. Markets are always "distorted", in the sense that they don't just occur naturally.
3. I can't say for certain whether this specific measure is appropriate or well-intentioned, but - emissions need to be reduced drastically over the next several years; and not just in one sector of the economy. So in _some_ way, people do need to change their habits in favor of using more carbon-frugal modes of travel.
Agree, in France train is usually way more convenient. There are still issues though, for example Rennes-Toulouse is 1h30 by plane, and 7 (!) hours by train. I really hope this gets fixed, until then train is just not an option in this case.
If it’s better to travel by train, then no need to ban short flights, because people wouldn’t use them much. Empirically, since people ARE taking short flights instead of trains, the people who are doing so believe that flights are better for them.
Meanwhile the entire world, France included for Nice-Paris, study flying taxis and "cars"... Oh, but such moves are not made to push some cohort of peoples out of traveling while pushing others to do so...
> Paris - Lyon by airplane: 1h15 plus travel to and from airport, plus security, boarding etc
Reminds of when someone says "this recipe only takes 20 minutes to make!" and they fail to mention you have to spend whole day shopping for ingredients, do some prep the day before and then spend half a day cleaning the kitchen afterwards... oh and then if you actually cook it for 20 minutes, chances are it will be barely safe to eat and would need much longer time.
>Reminds of when someone says "this recipe only takes 20 minutes to make!" and they fail to mention....
Or, keep essential ingredients for good and favorite recipes on hand generally, clean pots and utensils in the middle of cooking (usually very possible during pauses and wait times) and cook properly. Most foods can indeed be cooked perfectly in 20 minutes and with a bit of practice it's easy to create great 20-30 minute meals without any of the hassles you describe,unless you're one of those people who barely bothers to ever cook or keep a thing at home and even scrambled eggs with toast require a trip to the grocery store and bakery first.
Huh? How? Living by the airport (not recommended btw) is a whole huge question of moving house and home to a specific location. Having a few essentials at home and learning a few basics for cooking on the fly and really crafting 20-30 minute recipes requires a pretty minimal investment of time and effort. The two don't compare at all.
Only when you can plan ahead by a few weeks. Typically, flying is still cheaper than the train. Tried to book a trip from London to home for boxing day. Eurostar was double
I have found that flying is often cheaper for many close-ish and middle-ish distances where I want to go. Why is this? These are the cases where I would most like to take the train, and it is hard to justify by ticket price.
Paris - Lyon by airplane: 1h15 plus travel to and from airport, plus security, boarding etc
Paris - Lyon by train: 2h30, city center to city center, no security checks. This might actually be faster!
Personally when traveling between London and Paris I choose the high speed train. It's usually more expensive but just the fact it removes traveling to and from airports (especially in London!) adds so much comfort that you realize the extra £50-70 are totally worth it. The overall travel time is also comparable.