French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights

If your flight within France could be covered by a train in 2.5 hours or less, the French government apparently just banned it (some wanted to ban flights that trains could cover in 4 hours). The purpose of this is to reduce carbon emissions. I suspect  one obvious result of this will be an increase in *private* flights… corporate jets, air taxis, that sort of thing. If this *really* messes with flights, then that will drive up both road traffic (increasing CO2) and increasing demand for trains, perhaps driving up construction of train lines (increasing CO2 as well as messing with public and private property along the routes).

From this news article it’s unclear if that 2.5 hours is what the route *actually* takes, or what the theoretical is. Those could differ wildly. And from the article it’s not clear how precisely the “routes” are defined, since airplanes and trains don’t launch out of the same stations. I could easily see a lot of legal wrangling over the details… City A and City B might both have train stations and airports, but the airlines could argue that “the trains don’t stop at the airport, therefore it’s a different route.”

If the airlines are serious about keeping their shorter routes, there is an obvious solution: screw with the trains. Slow them down, either through mechanical tinkering or software manipulation/hacking. Illegal? Sure.  But so should be Green New Deal-style regulations.