A ban on short-haul flights has formally commenced in France in an attempt to curb airline emissions.
The ruling bans any flights that trains could cover in less than 2.5 hours and mostly impacts trips between Paris and regional hubs like Lyon, Bordeaux, and Nantes.
Rail journeys between France’s two largest cities, Paris and Marseille take around three hours, so flights between those two hubs will continue.
The new law however does come with some conditions, with a requirement that train schedules on respective air routes be frequent and have similar connections for travellers.
Passengers would also need to be able to make return journeys on the same day, with an allowance of eight hours at their destination.
Perhaps most significantly, rail services would need to have the capacity to handle the increase in passenger numbers, which will no doubt be considerable.
There’s also a question mark over how the flight ban will impact train fares, with rail operators set to benefit most from the new ruling.
To this end, French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir called for “safeguards that [French national railway] SNCF will not seize the opportunity to artificially inflate its prices or degrade the quality of rail service”.
According to Agence France-Presse, the new measure was included in a 2021 climate law, but some airlines had questioned its legality through the European Commission.
Laurent Donceel, interim head of aviation lobby group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told AFP governments should get behind “real and significant solutions” to combat airline emissions and not “symbolic bans”.
He also said the EC had found that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on carbon dioxide levels.
A compromise?
The flight ban could have been worse for airlines.
Created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019, France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate proposed the ban extend to train trips of four hours or less, the BBC reported.
UFC-Que Choisir also backed the four-hour limit.
“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” it said.
But the government scrapped this idea when Air France-KLM and some regional areas objected to the proposal.
Speaking to media in Sydney last month, Rail Europe General Manager Asia and Pacific Richard Leonard said the short-haul flight ban could set a precedent and even benefit the travel trade.
“We know that other countries in Europe will actually follow that [French ruling] pretty quickly. It’s like, let the French do it … and then we’ll follow suit.”
“So that obviously means that train travel and distribution – how you can buy your tickets, how you can get to where you need to go – becomes more and more important.”
