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French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

reuters.com

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Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#241

Post by prostoalex »

ajross wrote: post #42
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #4

There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center. However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears and those 1.5 hours start making a difference. I think forcing companies to advertise more honest flight durations and prices could make a huge difference. If the airline tells you that…

> There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center. In France. In nations like the US (outside the DC-to-Boston corridor anyway) without a well-designed and -maintained rail infastructure, 1-2 hour flights are routine and not really replaceable with other options. Infrastructure investment pays off for decades and decades, and Europe has done really well here. > However, if y…

The problem is hub-and-spoke approach of many national carriers (Air France included). Covid travel restrictions aside, one can buy an air itinerary that gets them from NYC to Bordeaux (or Nice, or Nantes, or Toulouse, or Marseille, or Lyon, or Strasbourg) all via CDG.

That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.

Air France is right to complaint - banning all those short flights just shifts the juiciest international city pairs to a nearby hub, and what used to be NYC-CDG-BOD will become NYC-LHR-BOD or NYC-MAD-BOD, served by a different airline.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#242

Post by xyzzyz »

fredophile wrote: post #219
closeparen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amtrak generally averages about half that, so it seems pretty good.

The Edmonton to Calgary route is straight, flat, and has a mostly sparsely populated path. I'd hope that high speed rail under those conditions could do significantly better. I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater.

> I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater.

This sentence can be interpreted in multiple ways. Maybe they mean that half of their trains could theoretically ride at 160 kph, but that doesn’t mean that they ever actually reach such speeds on their routes. Or, maybe, that half of their trains reach 160 kph on some fraction of their route, maybe very small one.

What I would be more interested in is their average speed according to schedule, weighted by the frequency of trains on a given segment, and same average but for actual ride times, including delays etc.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#244

Post by jcranmer »

fredophile wrote: post #219
closeparen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amtrak generally averages about half that, so it seems pretty good.

The Edmonton to Calgary route is straight, flat, and has a mostly sparsely populated path. I'd hope that high speed rail under those conditions could do significantly better. I also looked up Amtrak's speeds and found a report from 2016 saying that over half of their trains had a top speed of 160 km/h or greater.

Most of Amtrak's routes are likely to be on the NEC, where the top speed is I believe 140 mph (~200 km/h). Outside the NEC, the newest of the diesel fleet can probably reach 100mph (or 160 km/h), but the actual routes are unlikely to support that kind of speed with any amount of routine. Instead, the effective speed limit (again outside NEC) is going to be closer to ~60-70mph.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#245

Post by crazygringo »

chrisseaton wrote: post #223
crazygringo wrote: post #145

EDIT: Thanks to commenters below, looks like my concerns aren't valid after all -- CDG has a train station and airlines there sell air tickets with a train connection. I didn't know about either of those -- seems like France has this figured out in a way other places haven't. (original comment below) --- I can appreciate the logic behind a ban on this for single-hop trips . But if you're flying into a hub and want to…

> I'll have to fly into Paris and add 3 hours to my already-long trip and make a totally separate train booking, and worry about if lose the train ticket if the flight is delayed? I don't know if you're American, but I think you've just got funny ideas about how trains work. You don't really need an advance booking - you just turn up, buy a ticket, and take the train. It's not a big deal - they go every hour or so be…

I am American, but having traveled around Europe and Japan, I can say with confidence that if you're traveling between cities you very often need to buy your ticket in advance and it's valid only for that departure. Your seat is reserved because the train can sell out, and they do. Plus, fares often go up significantly the closer the train is to being sold out (so days/weeks early can be a good idea). It's no "funny idea" of mine, and it's certainly not just Amtrak.

Of course it really depends on the individual train line and time of day and direction and if it's a holiday etc. If you have enough local experience to know for sure it won't be sold out in advance, then that's great for you, but if you're traveling somewhere new you won't know that.

I'm not talking about commuter rail, which is like what you're describing.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#246

Post by belorn »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #4

There is no reason to fly short distance if you want to go from city center to city center. However, if you're already arriving or leaving on a long distance flight, the whole overhead of getting to/from/through the airport disappears and those 1.5 hours start making a difference. I think forcing companies to advertise more honest flight durations and prices could make a huge difference. If the airline tells you that…

When we compare train and air travel here in Sweden, the issues are far away from being about time, UX or advertisements.

The rail system has been stagnated in the last 40-50 years and maintenance neglected. The rail is not straight and gives a lot of lateral movement, vibration and noise. The train departments are not sound isolated or have air condition. The speed limit (as a result of the neglect) makes the trip slower than on the highway, with around 30m in favor of the car on a 3hr trip. Motion sickness is an obvious problem. Because of the lack of maintenance, there is almost never alternative rail tracks which mean that when they do maintenance they have to shutdown the whole track and switch to bus, often doubling or tripling the total traveling time. Train tickets is also about 100-200% the cost for distances above 3hrs.

I don't know if the French rail is better, through I do know the German one is. Getting into a train department with sound isolation, air condition, plenty of space and almost zero lateral movement was amazing (sample size of one trip I made between two large city centers), and if that was the option I would pick that ever time even if the train was slower or costed more. It is the 50 years old black tin can of motion sickness that makes me pick a plane over a train.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#247

Post by jcranmer »

pochamago wrote: post #107
xalava wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is pretty exceptional in its lack of rails. There is also a Seattle-San Diego. Enjoyable as a tourist, but probably not suited for business purposes except in the last portions. In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO). So it is becoming possible to chain a plane and a train in a few scenarios.

It's not really that the US lacks rails, we have the largest rail network in the world. The problem for passenger rail here is population density. France is three and a half times denser, and Japan is nearly 10x. I think they would also struggle a bit more to justify rail costs if they were as spread out as the US.

Looking at gross population density misses the mark completely. The US has a large land area where approximately no one lives: most of Alaska, the Great Basin region, even the High Plains are thoroughly devoid of population yet take up millions of acres of land. Cut out that area and focus on places where people live, and the density is now much more comparable. The Midwest is about the same density as France.

The evisceration of the passenger rail market was in large part caused by intentional urban planning. White flight moved a lot of people from city centers to suburbans where nary a black person could be found, and urban planners in turn abetted the process by building freeways straight through urban cores and turning every other city block into a parking lot in all but the very largest cities (well, except for LA). Uncoincidentally, the cities that didn't get turned into massive parking lots retained much more functional commuter rail systems than those cities that did.

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#248

Post by _Microft »

thiht wrote: post #101
dopidopHN wrote: post #96

To be noted : we have a extensive fast train system. As a user, I prefer to take the train. It’s faster, more confortable and overall less hassle. ( you get from city center to city center, no security check; you can move around, use your mobile hotspot or the train wifi ) The one use case is going from Paris to Toulouse for instance. It’s take a day of train. But even Paris-Marseille is less than 3h at this point. P…

Rennes-Toulouse is 10 hours by train, because it transits through Paris. It's 2 hours by plane. If you're in Paris, you can go anywhere easily. If you're not in Paris, some cities are hard to reach by train.

The SNCF metric has got their name for a reason...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_space#SNCF

Re: French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

#249

Post by slowmotiony »

chrisseaton wrote: post #223
crazygringo wrote: post #145

EDIT: Thanks to commenters below, looks like my concerns aren't valid after all -- CDG has a train station and airlines there sell air tickets with a train connection. I didn't know about either of those -- seems like France has this figured out in a way other places haven't. (original comment below) --- I can appreciate the logic behind a ban on this for single-hop trips . But if you're flying into a hub and want to…

> I'll have to fly into Paris and add 3 hours to my already-long trip and make a totally separate train booking, and worry about if lose the train ticket if the flight is delayed? I don't know if you're American, but I think you've just got funny ideas about how trains work. You don't really need an advance booking - you just turn up, buy a ticket, and take the train. It's not a big deal - they go every hour or so be…

Oh, you arrived without a ticket? Sorry, covid restrictions, only one person per wagon and the tickets have been sold out a few days ago. Enjoy your indefinite waiting for a free spot. I feel like you might not have taken the train anywhere within the last year or two.
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