Make trains cheaper goddammit
I also read an opinion piece that there should be a way to apply for additional state-paid holiday-days if you spend more than X hours on a train while going on holiday which I think would also be a nice incentive use trains as long travel-time is a big problem as well
going Berlin to Paris on a plane is not necessary much faster than going by train because of the time you spend in the airports so for those distances just regulating the price as a first option is good
for longer distances it would also be good if people would start using trains eventually (we seriously need far more night-trains)
Oh! I really like this idea. If I got just a half day extra per stretch, that would make taking the train much more enjoyable. Especially since I could take a train for less money outside of peak hours, and not deal with packed commuter lines.
A major motivation for flying is it’s faster and that will still be the case, so they’ll still have plenty of customers, right? So if an airline can fly a route for 20 euros but the minimum price is, say 50 euros, won’t the airline just pocket an extra 30 euros?
Why are flights cheaper that trains, anyway? According to the article and the linked Greenpeace research, trains are 2-10 more expensive (and take longer) because of extra taxes that the airlines don’t pay. So, instead of a minimum price, how about we address the root of the problem and either tax the airlines more or tax the trains less?
Maybe in addition to removing some exemptions, we add a pollution tax too (or maybe just raise the fuel tax)? Taxes have been used to motivate the market for a long time, so if we make it expensive enough to pollute, then it will motivate r&d to develop less polluting aircraft. In fact, hydrogen fueled aircraft are already being pursued: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hydrogen-aircraft-developers-are-long-haul-2023-02-09/
In my opinion, France’s proposal is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail.
Let’s just introduce a Shinkansen style bullet train network.
Can’t travel much faster on land without killing anyone.just
With the best of intentions.
Obviously introducing a whole new railroad network is a whole task in of itself (see Stuttgart21).
Now make it accommodate a bullet train is even another issue.Fun fact:Stuttgart21 will service less trains than before https://wikireal.info/wiki/Stuttgart_21/Leistung#Fehler_in_den_bisherigen_Gutachten_.E2.80.93_was_bleibt.2C_sind_32_Z.C3.BCge
It is basically just a big real estate project as it frees up expensive space in the city centre.
Eliminate cheap flights: great! But then we need affordable HSR pronto!
affordable HSR would eliminate short distance flights on its own
We should just stop exempting airlines from taxes. There’s no reason why kerosene should not be taxed.
Exactly!
This has good intentions but all this will do is make it so low income people can’t travel, and not really affect the rich who are mostly the problem here.
This is such a vague and unspecific statement that it can’t be wrong. It also agitates.
This assumes that flights are the option of choice for low income people to travel, but in fact low income people rarely fly with over 50% never flying and 31% flying less than once a year as opposed to high income households where only 50% never fly or fly less than once a year (https://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/archive/pdf/MiD2017_Tabellenband_Deutschland.pdf, p. 74, I’ve seen similar things for other countries, will probably be much less for the top 1%). Poor people are more likely to choose closer destinations and choosing their own car, long-distance busses (common in eastern europe) and travel less in general, not only due to the time cost and cost of transport, but also the high cost of accommodations.
Flying is one of the few areas where the distribution of flights taken is so strongly slanted by income that even a flat per flight tax would cost (by income) the 50% income percentile roughly as much as the top percentile worldwide (https://theicct.org/aviation-fft-global-feb23/ fig. 1).
If even the cost of flying can’t be touched because of concerns about disadvantaging poor people, nothing can, because flying is truly one of the things the things that is most strongly tied to income (of relevant emissions ,https://www.carbonbrief.org/richest-people-in-uk-use-more-energy-flying-than-poorest-do-overall/).
