France managed to make a huge splash by\u00a0banning some short haul flights earlier this year<\/a>. It managed to gain the country\u2019s government massive positive publicity. Now in the talks to form a new coalition in Spain, a\u00a0similar ban there might be possible too<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But when you look into the details of the French ban, the impact is minimal. Only these three route were banned: Paris Orly-Nantes, Paris Orly-Lyon and Paris Orly-Bordeaux.<\/p>\n

There are two elements to why the ban is so limited. First, it applies only if a train trip is 2 hours 30 minutes or less (green groups had pushed to set this limit at 4 hours instead). Second, there is a cunning carve out in the law (original text of the law here<\/a>) \u2013 translated into English:<\/p>\n

The journey must be between stations serving the same cities as the airports concerned. However, where the larger of these two airports, in terms of average traffic recorded over the last seven years, is directly served by a high-speed rail service, the station taken into account for the application of the provisions of this paragraph is the one serving this airport<\/em><\/p>\n

So that means that the TGV station at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport is the point of reference there, not stations\u00a0in<\/em>\u00a0Paris<\/strong>. And CDG-Nantes and CDG-Bordeaux are longer than 2 hours 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

A further carve out \u2013 that train service has to be all day long \u2013 applies to Paris Charles de Gaulle to Lyon Saint Exup\u00e9ry services. The train service is fast enough (around 2 hours), but not\u00a0regular<\/em>\u00a0enough for the flight ban to apply (so SNCF, why not put that right? But anyway I digress).<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s then apply this to Spain.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0draft coalition deal between PSOE and Sumar is here<\/a>, and the relevant paragraph is on page 32 (thanks Moof on Mastodon<\/a>) \u2013 my translation:<\/p>\n

As other neighbouring countries have done, we will promote the reduction of domestic flights on those routes where there is a rail alternative with a duration of\u00a0less than<\/strong>\u00a0[my emphasis] 2.5 hours, except in cases of connection with hub airports linking with international routes.<\/em><\/p>\n

How the latter part would work is unknown \u2013 it would seem to allow a flight Barcelona-Madrid to then connect to, say, a flight to Buenos Aires. But would you need a\u00a0ticket<\/em>\u00a0for the onward flight? Or just the theoretical possibility? The devil is going to be in the detail there.<\/p>\n

And then to the train times.<\/p>\n

Best train times on Spanish routes are:
Madrid-Valencia \u2013 1 hour 49 minutes
Madrid-Alicante \u2013 2 hours 20 minutes
Madrid-Barcelona (the big one!) \u2013 2 hours 30 minutes
Madrid-Sevilla \u2013 2 hours 33 minutes
Madrid-M\u00e1laga \u2013 2 hours 36 minutes<\/p>\n

So two significant routes fail by a matter of minutes.<\/p>\n

Also if you read the wording carefully, the agreement says\u00a0less than 2.5 hours<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0so meaning 2 hours 29 minutes, and \u2013 at present \u2013 the ban would then not even apply to Madrid \u2013 Barcelona. If the agreement said\u00a02.5 hours or less<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0then it would apply.<\/p>\n

Dare we hope Renfe could shave 1 minute off Madrid-Barcelona, 4 minutes off Madrid-Sevilla and 7 minutes off Madrid-Malaga?<\/p>\n

Read on<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Spain may create a short-haul flight ban: Here\u2019s how to avoid France\u2019s ban\u2019s gaps (JonWorth)<\/a> appeared first on London Reconnections<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

France managed to make a huge splash by\u00a0banning some short haul flights earlier this year. It managed to gain the country\u2019s government massive positive publicity. Now in the talks to form a new coalition in Spain, a\u00a0similar ban there might be possible too. But when you look into the details of the French ban, the impact is minimal. Only these…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camcab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}