⚠ Link #enshitification warning: #euronews has a forced agreement type of popup in some browsers (TB). I suggest either Ungoogled Chromium or lynx. Lynx warns “bad html” but it renders fine.
This is being cross-posted to several places so I won’t bother to list them here… but there are a few discussions on this if you look around.
It seems like the ban is only for train rides under 2.5 hours which is IMO ridiculous. Considering you can take 1 hour commuting to the airport, have to be there 2 hours earlier, the flight is at least 30 minutes, then you take 1 hour reaching your destination, this ban would be reasonable for train rides upto 4 hours.
That is why this ban is wrong. If people are choosing toefly anyway then there is a problem for the trains to fix so they become more attractive. figure out why People didn’t take the train and then you have your list of issues to fix. Soon those short flights won’t exist as everyone is taking the train.
Kerosene is not taxed which makes low cost flights cheaper than train. Strat with taxing kerosene in all EU countries, use the money to improve Euro-wide rail transportation
It’s worth noting that the train problems in Europe are relatively well known (some of them, anyway), e.g.:
- Train fare from country A to country B will differ on each of the 2 official national websites involved for the very same ticket. So you might benefit from buying from the destination country (in which case of course you must do so online which nixes cash).
- Different train scheduling websites show different inventory; you must visit both national ticket sites plus some third party sites to become aware of every possible train.
- (Germany) The train app is closed-source & exclusively available from Google/Apple.
- (Germany) The train site’s “necessary cookies only” option actually includes many shitty 3rd party surveillance advertisers (thus they mean necessary for business, not technologically necessary). They are being sued for this.
- (Germany) Some tickets are only exclusively available through the app. Not all ticket inventory and prices are available at all points of sale. I heard there are some stations where in some situations you’re fucked if you don’t use the app because they are removing kiosks under the nasty assumption that everyone is a happy smartphone-owning patron loyal to Google or Apple.
- (Belgium) The only Tor-reachable train data is the irail.be site, which does not show prices and which is missing more than half the inventory.
- (Belgium) Weird requirements to get low pricing in some cases. E.g. there are cheap “cross-border” tickets but they can only be bought in a bordering station. So if you want to go from Antwerp or Brussels to Lille, to get the low pricing you must buy your ticket to Tournai (a border station) and then at the Tournai ticket window buy the ticket to Lille (hope the window is open when you arrive!). So you can’t even buy the tickets for all segments in advance.
That’s just a sample of problems in this train shit show. The EU Commission actually tried pushing some legislation to fix problem ① (and I think ② as well) years ago but still today there has been no progress.
So if the Commission can’t fix that mess, what’s Spain to do? Spain needs a stick because the carrot is not working.
Soon those short flights won’t exist as everyone is taking the train.
Even if they fix the train ticketing situation people don’t want the risk of making a separate purchase for the ground portion of their trip. If you miss the plane→train connection or vice versa, you’re fucked. I’m not sure if Spain has train codeshares in place to remedy that. (I forgot what those tickets are called… is it airtrain?) And note as well the codeshares still have the problem that an airline will do an exclusive deal with a train operator. E.g. train-plane itineraries involving CDG are only offered by Air France and for Amsterdam it’s KLM, AFAIK. Which is a kind of monopoly.
Spain can fix those proplems for internal trips.
I would love to take the train more, but the train scheduling and ticketing sites are so broken, Tor-hostile, and the infra is somewhat cash-hostile, that I often don’t take the train.
Apart from bad ticketing sites, it’s flying any better in any of those regards?
Flying is a little better in this regard because you have many more competitors in ticket sales. Versus trains in Europe where you have the national rail of each country selling tickets plus just ~2-3 third party sites, and in many situations they are all broken (depending on countries involved).
There are dozens if not hundreds of airfare consolidator sites. Most of them are problematic. I can easily find some that do not block Tor so I can at least see the schedules and pricing. But then when I purchase a ticket, it’s often a shit show: I get a msg saying i have a ticket, then the next day i get a notice that my flight was cancelled for no reason (if i’m lucky; sometimes they don’t even tell me they cancelled the ticket). They never tell me why, but after probing it’s often that they don’t like my use of a disposable email address, or that I used Tor, even though the website rejects neither. So it’s a big effort to find the needle in the haystack that works but at least the possibility is there with air travel.
With train sites, consumers with properly defensive browsers are usually blocked from even seeing the fares on all ~2-3 sites that sell tickets. Then there are other shenanigans like online purchase only promos extra fees for cash acceptance.
But I have to say it’s never a plane vs. train choice for me. If I would normally take a train, then usually the bus is the best option w.r.t digital rights and privacy. If crossing the pond, then the flights Spain is cancelling are likely connecting flights for me. So it means I probably won’t be getting flights that connect in Spain unless Spain brings in train codeshares for airlines.
Last time I looked up how much a train costs across my country, it was just as expensive as a plane and took 10 times longer
10% and 0.06% are ridiculously far apart, and someone is wildly wrong (or disingenuous) if the values are relative to the same metric. Google tells me (via statista) that Spain produced 261x10^6 tons of CO2 in 2022. The article says a potential savings of 300x10^3 tons from 5000 flight, which is 0.12%.
Guaranteed this won’t apply to the rich
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Flights with a rail alternative that takes less than two and a half hours will no longer be allowed, “except in cases of connection with hub airports that link with international routes”.
It comes after the French government officially banned domestic flights for journeys that can be made in less than two and a half hours by train in May 2023.
The text agreed by the two political parties - PSOE and Sumar - also seeks to analyse the potential impact of restricting private jet use and a European Union directive on taxing energy products, including kerosene which is used as an aviation fuel.
The coalition of environmental groups said that 11 air routes could be replaced by train journeys under four hours, slashing Spain’s CO2 emissions by nearly 10 per cent.
PP member Guillermo Mariscal explained that he believes the initiative is “ineffective” because it would only result in a 0.06 per cent reduction in emissions according to data from the College of Aircraft Engineers (COIAE).
Last year COIAE shared a statement expressing its disagreement with a plan to cut flights of under three hours, claiming it would have almost zero impact on carbon emissions.
The original article contains 452 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
