Is this secretly taxing the poorest again, while the richest feel no change?
So you want to price more people out of living good lives and being able to travel? What percentage of people do you want to be too poor to have a holiday?
Sounds good! Now just make sure to include a clause that planes below a certain (carbon emission) threshold are excluded, so it actually promotes innovation and change, and doesn’t just make it more expensive.
You mean like planes that have no wings and fly roughly 0mm above metal rails on the ground?
I really can’t wait for the internet to learn the reality of trains and get over this obsession, the steel required for tracks is a huge issue before we even get to the logistics and wasted energy involved in running them - a carbon neutral fuel source would make plains considerably better from an ecological perspective then trains for long and medium length journeys - we’re already in the process of taking solutions to market and the chemistry isn’t especially difficult so it’s something that’s absolutely going to happen.
I love trains but they’re not an ecological panacea.
I really can’t wait for this trend of “There is this technology just around the corner that will allow us to not change anything major about the status quo” predictions to die. We are very late to this attempt to prevent climate change from fucking us over completely. We need technologies that are mature and on the market now with some infrastructure already built, nothing that is still in pre-production stages will be the dominant form of travel/energy production or anything else in our society that requires major infrastructure within the 10-15 years we have to change our society for the better.
While a pan Atlantic railroad would be interesting, I think it would run into unique problems better solved with other technologies.
No, I meant planes or other flying vehicles that do not use fuel which is refined from oil.
I know technically there are a few little islands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that you could count as European but I am assuming the main focus of European flights would be flights within Europe.
Oh nice
Instead of trying to lower prices for alternatives (e.g. trains), they just try to jack up prices for existing forms of transport, so that the other transports now seem cheaper. How about taxing the shit out of airlines and using that to get trains down to the price of what airlines charge now?
This is just again getting the mid- and low-income layers to pay for shit.
“I openly call for taxing polluting activities to invest in the ecological transition,” said Beaune, adding that the government plans to increase the tax on flights departing France to fund rail investments.
I don’t think it’s entirely clear what he wants the EU to do, but it really seems like making other forms of transport cheaper is part the goal here.
Hence I think it’s likely going to be a reasonable proposal. Making flights more expensive to pay for cheaper trains is a good way to go about it. The money for the trains to come from somewhere and flights are something people can live without.
Yes, if it is done in the right order. Make trains cheaper first, then add to the cost of airlines. Knowing politics it will be “We will now tax flights with an additonal X% and use that for alternative travels”. Then, 10 years later, the “alternative travels” will be the same price but flying will be more expensive. I just do not trust politics anymore at all if they do not put the “lowering costs” part first.
Make trains cheaper first, then add to the cost of airlines.
Then you have a gap regarding financing. I.e. also a problem. Hence I really don’t care about the order here. Both trains becoming cheaper and plains becoming more expensive are things that need to happen asap. I would prefer both to happen tomorrow, but if one happens later or not all all that’s still better than nothing happening.
Who do you think they will pass on those costs? Basically all Airlines make their money on normal tickets and not on the class 1 tickets. What you really want are instead of 0% tax on Airplaine fuel, ridiculous taxes. That actually increases the COSTS of airlines and those do get passed on more to the rich as they travel a lot more inefficiently. They also can’t evade costs, but they can taxes.
You might be misunderstanding my comment: They can increase costs if they want, but they should take the costs away elsewhere. I have no problem with a train ticket being 10€ and a plane ticket being 120€ instead of the other way around.
But this will lead to a plane ticket being (as an example) 80€ and the train ticket continuing to be 120€. While they do make more money off of 1st class and stuff, they still need to make a chunk of the cost off of 2nd class. Especially on more local (e.g. inside the country or just one over), where there often is just one class in the plane (And maybe there is business).
No, just massive tax privat jets fuel.
I regularly hear people say stuff like “I would like to take the train, but the flight was cheapest”. “You know, i’d take the train, but with switching twice and 8 hours… and the flight was only a bit more expensive”
There is still a lot of convenience over actual need.
What are they doing for the train interconnections and low price all over the union ? Nothing.
