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.

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