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Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

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Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#71

Post by AshamedCaptain »

rbehrends wrote: post #62

The actual waste here is that while the European Parliament normally meets in Brussels, it is still bound by a 1992 decision to have a monthly session in Strasbourg [1]. This creates a huge and unnecessary overhead (shuttling 705 MEPs back and forth, maintaining separate offices in Strasbourg and other unnecessary duplication of efforts), of which this additional flight is just a small part. This could be fixed by de…

Or just keep adding more capitals into the rotation, until the overhead of any capital is negligible. I'm actually rather happy to have a moving capital / parliament seat. Would probably do with the fancy buildings and architecture, though.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#72

Post by raverbashing »

gunnarmorling wrote: post #68
SirHound wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes?

Members of the parliament (legislative power) are not the government, which is the European Commission in this case (executive power).

And by a comment on the page, the flight also takes not only MEPs but members of the EC as well

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #71
rbehrends wrote: post #62

The actual waste here is that while the European Parliament normally meets in Brussels, it is still bound by a 1992 decision to have a monthly session in Strasbourg [1]. This creates a huge and unnecessary overhead (shuttling 705 MEPs back and forth, maintaining separate offices in Strasbourg and other unnecessary duplication of efforts), of which this additional flight is just a small part. This could be fixed by de…

Or just keep adding more capitals into the rotation, until the overhead of any capital is negligible. I'm actually rather happy to have a moving capital / parliament seat. Would probably do with the fancy buildings and architecture, though.

> keep adding more capitals into the rotation, until the overhead of any capital is negligible

In what world is maintaining multiple headquarters cheaper than one?

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#74

Post by bobthepanda »

mike_hock wrote: post #59
bobthepanda wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankfurt is a major Lufthansa hub. There is a train station at Frankfurt Airport, but a plane connection would be airside, and for connections having to travel to city center possibly with bags is a minus. These days there is onboard wifi on most planes.

What about the 10x worse carbon footprint per passenger mile? At 2 flights per month it's a drop in the bucket so who cares. But replacing the trains with flights would be extremely wasteful.

Ultimately, it seems like the price of carbon is not high enough to offset an entire cabin of business class seats of €1K+ each.

If you want the behavior to stop, increase the price of carbon. It’s all about the money in the end.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#75

Post by bobthepanda »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #45
melenaboija wrote: post #17

It seems EU politicians believe in climate change, until they have to catch a bus for a couple of hours… BTW, I am a EU citizen worried about climate change and tired of recycling at home to sometimes see this kind of hypocrisy of some politicians.

It's not even a couple of hours, that's the best part. There are direct trains (ICE/TGV) that take around two hours, some even a bit less. The flight can't possibly be faster if you factor in getting to the airport and going through the security theater. Which, if we want to talk about beliefs is another ridiculous policy that hasn't demonstrably saved any lives. Instead now people simply get shot up in theaters and…

I would imagine this is a connection flight, in which case the passenger is already airside and doesn’t need to go through security or to travel to the airport.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#76

Post by Proven »

rbehrends wrote: post #62

The actual waste here is that while the European Parliament normally meets in Brussels, it is still bound by a 1992 decision to have a monthly session in Strasbourg [1]. This creates a huge and unnecessary overhead (shuttling 705 MEPs back and forth, maintaining separate offices in Strasbourg and other unnecessary duplication of efforts), of which this additional flight is just a small part. This could be fixed by de…

No post body was provided.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#77

Post by [deleted] »

unmole wrote: post #55

> In many cases these are high ranking government officials, and presumably if this flight didn’t exist, they might travel on private jets, which would be even worse; in order words, these people probably wouldn’t otherwise take a bus Do MEPs really qualify as high ranking government officials ?

[deleted]

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#78

Post by lostlogin »

netsharc wrote: post #23
lostlogin wrote: post #16

This flight seems very slow. I’ve just compared it to some short haul flights locally - 1hr 10 mins gets me 650km. The flight in the article takes 55 minutes to go 178km. Short flights will have proportionally more time taxing etc, but this alone wouldn’t appear to explain it.

Did you compare to a local flight within the EU? Rules about on-timed-ness and passenger compensation for delays mean that airlines now add buffers to their flight times, so most of the times it's "Wahey, we're early!", when they do experience delays they end up landing at the advertised landing time, saving them from those compensation payments.

> Did you compare to a local flight within the EU?

No. Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#79

Post by kzrdude »

bobthepanda wrote: post #54
sofixa wrote: post #50

I don't get the point of this flight. A train between the two will be around two hours, so an hour slower than the plane, but when you add travel to airports, it's probably faster, and the trains are more comfortable (and you can work from them).

Frankfurt is a major Lufthansa hub. There is a train station at Frankfurt Airport, but a plane connection would be airside, and for connections having to travel to city center possibly with bags is a minus. These days there is onboard wifi on most planes.

The ICE train going south towards Basel stops at the Frankfurt airport. The minus is that there is probably no train connecting directly to Strasbourg, but it's also not far away - take the stop at Offenburg and a train or shuttle bus to Strasbourg would do it.

Re: Lufthansa’s European Union Strasbourg “shuttle”

#80

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

So while this flight sounds a bit ridiculous it's not really. It takes of in Frankfurt and which is a big hub. You can buy a ticket VIE->FRA->SXB for 1000 EUR in Business class. It takes you three hours to get there. The cheapest ticket not involving a train in business class is 850 EUR so barely cheaper and takes 5.5 hours.

As to why the plane does not take passengers on the return flight: it's a 30 minute flight and it's probably more efficient for the airline to send the plane in that configuration back to Frankfurt as there is no demand for a business class only flight on that day out of Strasbourg. A plane that does not fly is losing money.

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