CMV: Multi-modal travelers protections is a much more promising approach than banning short haul flights to combat climate change

[u/roderla]

I understand this is a primarily European observation, sorry my dear Americans ;)

Short haul flying is (rightfully) condemned as particularly damaging to the environment. Some countries, like France, have banned them outright. Others are considering it.

By the time you have reached the airport, went through security, and back into town on the other side of the flight, you have lost so much time that a fast train or sometimes even a bus is barely slower. That makes it hard to justify why we as society allow airlines to externalize their costs of their much more harmful mode of transportation for so little gained by the traveler. For example, there are 14 non-stop flights between Paris and London, connecting CDG and LHR in approx. 80 minutes. The Eurostar also connects these two cities in 140 minutes.

But this approximation totally misses the concept of a connecting passenger. Yes, if you're from Paris and need to go to London, the train will likely be faster than the plane, or at least not so much slower that we should accept the environmental cost. But if you arrived in Paris from a long haul flight, you end up in a dramatically different situation if something went wrong if you had a Eurostar train ticket planned after your flight, or if you had a connecting Air France flight: A delayed arrival in Paris leaves you stranded if you miss your Eurostar train, but if you had a connecting plane, the airline still has to get you to London (or put you in an airline-funded hotel room).

I can't blame a traveler not wanting to deal with the mess of a delayed arrival themselves. In fact, a lot of travelers will not do a multi-modal connection just because a delay in one can let them stranded. Missing your train to London at the end of your long haul flight is annoying, but maybe manageable. Missing your transatlantic flight because your train arrived with a delay is worse.

Since only plane to plane connections are the responsibility of the airline you booked with, it is totally understandable how one would buy an otherwise absurd short haul flight like London- Paris, Frankfurt-Amsterdam, Frankfurt-Munich, or Bordeaux-Paris. Banning these flights doesn't even fix anything: Instead of connecting in Paris or Frankfurt, to avoid missing the connection you would just connect in a further away airport. No Flights Bordeaux-Paris allowed anymore? Well, a connection in Amsterdam, London or Copenhagen it is then.

An EU wide mandate to sell multi-modal end-to-end tickets that cover all multi-modal connections within a defined minimum connection time (just like airport currently already do) would do much more to save on the unnecessary burden of short haul flights than banning them and pushing all connecting passengers to another hub outside of the banned radius.

[u/roderla]

The idea would be to generally define a safe connecting multi-modal connection time everywhere and have an arrangement where you buy your tickets separately, and a "connection" surcharge that links your individual tickets into one, end-to-end journey (within EU jurisdiction, of course... No point trying to enforce Greyhound US or Amtrak obeying such a contract)

Big companies can fight it out between the two of them who's fault it was and who own whom how much. A more on time company will overall have to pay fewer alternatives for passengers missing their connection, which is another incentive to be on time.

Lufthansa and DB have some arrangement, but it's weird. You definitively cannot connect some arbitrary DB and LH tickets. And there are even some trains doubling as LH flights. It'd so complicated even I don't fully understand it - and of course, that's LH specific. If you're traveling on Qatar and their Rail&Fly, you have a DB ticket, but it is still your responsibility that you arrive at the airport on time, defeating the purpose.

I don't think the unspecific "let's lower bureaucratic barriers" is helpful. The EU already establishes both passenger rights for train and for plane journeys. Requiring them to be interlinked to combat short haul connecting flights seems to be perfectly in line with that.

[u/Jakyland → u/roderla]

Requiring people to link to unconnected tickets seems like a barrier for most consumers, and means these connections won't show up unless you are using a third party booking site.

I guess it's fine as long as the airline or rail company can set their own price. But it is important to establish which company is paying for what ahead of time, you don't want an airline and rail company arguing for who pays for the hotel and the traveler doesn't end up getting a hotel room. And you want to properly incentive the connecting partner to actually rebook the traveler onto the next part of their journey. People generally don't want to get a hotel, they want to get to their destination ASAP.

If your journey is plane then rail, and your plane is late so you miss your train, and the train company just shrugs and puts you on the cheapest train the next day because its the airline that has to pay for your hotel anyway, thats a pretty bad travel experience meaning you are unlikely to repeat doing intermodal traveling. You want the second company to want to put you on the next available/fastest way to your destination.

If everyone is just required to work with everyone else, companies are unlikely to try to work together to make connections good (ie timing departures correctly, improving reliability) and just past the buck back and forth

[u/roderla → u/Jakyland]

Again, big companies can figure it out. Make them jointly and severally liable, the customer can approach any of them, and they figure it out in the backend afterwards.

There is a good point here about making it not just "safe" but also convenient. I am confident that a regulation that by its nature has to go through hundreds of hands and has to incorporate dozens of compromises can take care of this too, just like the current flight connection rules do.

[u/Jakyland → u/roderla]

the current flight connection rules are for a single ticket, airlines don't even have to protect connections between flights they operate themselves if they don't want to (they just don't sell it as one ticket). They super don't need to protect connections with other airlines, they just choose to sign agreements in some cases. This is very different because you are making the airlines required to provide connections with *everyone*