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Is this the end of cheap Europe flights? France proposes EU-wide minimum price
(www.forbes.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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The poorest are already not travelling, sure, but making travelling even more expensive is going to stop a whole lot more people from doing it.
And it's not that flying prices "can't be touched", it's that touching them should come along with creating alternatives, but that mostly doesn't happen in my experience. In Portugal, gas taxes have increased over the years and a carbon tax has been added on top of the already existing ones to incentivize other means of transportation. The promise, years ago, was that this would also help the state fund public transport. That mostly hasn't happened. New transport infrastructure is mostly only built around the couple of cities where transports were already fairly good and the rest of the country just gets continually shafted. Just last week some study popped up on the news that there's more people in Portugal simply not going anywhere on their vacation.
With the rise of accommodation costs in Portugal, driven by everyone from richer countries in Europe seeing us as their big beach, and with how expensive transports are, it's often cheaper to fly to other European cities and then use their transport infrastructure than picking a local destination. When I want to travel, I book in advance, take the cheapest flight and backpack only so I don't pay any added taxes. I do it out of season and to places where accommodation is cheap. This is very common for people my age, at least in my social group. If flight prices in Europe get much more expensive, I'm sure it won't affect many but the absolute poorest in France or Germany, where the minimum salary is what a top 15% earner in Portugal makes, but a lot of portuguese people will certainly travel much less.
Again, though I understand the emergency of fighting the climate crisis, a bunch of climate measures coming out of Europe often feel like the rich countries shafting us - and shafting the poorer overall - without coming up with any alternative. It feels like European legislators - and even europeans in general - think that the whole of Europe is France or the Netherlands or other countries where if you ban flights entirely or come up with yet another mandatory tax that make gas absurdly expensive people can just get on one of the cheap trains going by every 10 minutes - but that's not a fair representation of all - or even most - of Europe.
I can't judge the state of Portugese public transport (apart from the fact that the lissabon-madrid rail link is a tragedy, mostly thanks to portugal), but flying is very obviously a big-city thing. Inhabitants of big cities fly much more because the airport with frequent and direct flights is right around the corner as opposed to rural places where the nearest airport is quite some distance away and serves few destinations.
In general poor people fly very little, which is also the case in Germany, so I can't imagine it making much of a dent around there for the poorest. Portugal is itself mostly responsible for its transportation network and, if I'm understanding https://www.railjournal.com/in_depth/road-out-rail-in-under-new-portugese-plan/ correctly, the portugese government has chosen to invest in its road network over rail in the recent past. While just looking at the cp website it seems that prices are pretty low compared to germany or france. Similarly for hostels it seems porto and lissabon are cheaper than many less touristy cites like lyon, toulouse, cologne, genoa, ... right now. I just can't imagine it being cheaper to fly outside of portugal for vacations based on those prices. And at least for gas taxes there certainly is an alternative without large changes that is especially viable for non city-dwellers: electric cars. While still too expensive, they are much cheaper than even 5 years ago.
The last point is entirely ridiculous: The Netherlands certainly isn't known for cheap trains and france is the opposite of a train every 10 minutes (especially outside paris), with often large multi-hour gaps between TGV connections from many cities. Most people in other european countries fly much less than people in Portugal or Spain: Portugal and Spain have one of the highest per-capita flight rates in europe (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/air-trips-per-capita), more than double germany or france, even though spain has one of the largest HSR networks (in total and per-capita) in europe.
Flying is one of the few climate related things where the only foreseeable "solution" is a reduction. For heating, electricity, driving, steel, ... there are technological solutions in the works and often already deployed that should solve the problem in the next 20-30 years. For flying there is little in the works. The aviation industry talks about SAF while missing targets for implementing them or even thoughts on how to deploy them on a large scale, while mostly ignoring the various non-CO2 related effects flying has on the climate. Flying related emissions mostly increase year-over-year (due to increasing demand) without indications of reduced emissions in the near future. And with flying mostly being for leisure, it is doesn't need to be directly replaced.
And just to repeat myself: Flying just mostly isn't a thing poor people do.
... assuming there is an alternative. If there is no viable alternative infrastructure other than the airport, you get a flight.
I already addressed this. Quote: "The poorest are already not travelling, sure, but making travelling even more expensive is going to stop a whole lot more people from doing it."
Making prices higher naturally incentivizes other transports, when those exist. If flight prices increase by much I'll just... mostly stop going anywhere honestly. Ironically, I'm not "poor" by portuguese standards. I just earn around the average portuguese salary - which is below minimum wage in all neighboring countries. Do only the poorest of the poorest count?
It is, in part, if we ignore European obligations often forcing our hand. It should still not be France mandating minimum prices across all of Europe, which is what the article we're all talking about mentions.
Trains (and transport infrastructure in general) are actually one of those cases where smaller countries get shafted - not on purpose, but by the sheer size of the country and their economy - mostly because of having less budget to work with. We're often paying outside companies to build our train infrastructure and the trains themselves, paying their prices adjusted for their salaries and costs - which ends up ridiculous for us. That doesn't happen with roads, which was why roads were often the focus of large infrastructure spending in Portugal - we could do it with national companies paying national (very low) salaries - so costs were fairly low in comparison to train infrastructure. And those investments mostly happened 20/30 years ago, when trains weren't really all that popular. Since then we've mostly made on investments on anything really.
A great example is the - supposedly - soon to be portuguese TGV. The government has already basically admitted that the construction costs for the whole thing will be large enough that it'll be impossible for the state to cover it, so it'll mostly end up being done with public - private partnerships. The arrangement will likely involve private companies assisting the state in paying for the whole thing, in exchange of the state having to pay a fee for around 50 years for every train that crosses certain parts of the line. The state will then pass on that cost to train operators - TL:DR, tickets will probably be very expensive for the first 50 or so years to account for that.
Prices for trains are only "cheap" if you look exclusively to suburban trains which only cover territory around Porto and Lisbon. Look at intercity or regional trains and the prices suddenly get much higher. And that's without adjusting for salaries. Only 15% of portuguese make the equivalent of the French minimum wage (post-EDIT - actually even less, I didn't know the minimum wage in France had increased). If you look at stats for young people alone, only 3% make over that (https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/fact-check/apenas-3-dos-jovens-em-portugal-ganham-mais-de-1600-euros-por-mes). Account for the salary difference (even without counting taxes) and portuguese transport prices become much less friendly.
It is. I'm not going the extra length to prove it to you considering I've spent my life min maxing for prices every vacation I took, but if you want compare going from Porto to Lisbon, staying in Lisbon and returning for a weekend in october, for example, versus Madrid, for example. You can do the same for a lot of smaller european cities. It's ironic in a way, but I hardly know Lisbon.
Continuing...
The cheapest electric car I know of in Portugal is the Dacia Spring for around 20000€ - 20X the average portuguese salary. A used Zoe goes for around 12000€. As comparison, the Dacia Spring costs 15800€ in France, only 9X the current minimum wage. Electric cars are talked about in Portugal as cars for the rich - though a lot of the "rich" upper crust of portuguese earners (the low top 15%) is only middle or low-middle class by the standards of neighboring countries (an interesting piece by a portuguese economist on that - https://www.publico.pt/2023/08/18/opiniao/opiniao/classe-media-politico-quiser-2060528).
The price of electric cars has ironically been increasing fast in Portugal. I remember the Spring was around 16000€ at launch.
I mean... yes? That's my whole point. As an anecdote, students in Portugal going on an interrail are usually told to fly to somewhere in the center of Europe and start it there, so they can do it cheaper and better, and then fly back. It's natural that with better rail infrastructure, people don't use flights as much. I wouldn't get in a plane or car if I had the option. I didn't take a drivers' license while I lived in Porto. When I was forced to move out tough, I got one. Outside of that and Lisbon, it's car trips mostly as it's often the only option. I didn't even know what a TGV was until I rode one in Italy. Check the timetables for an intercity train in Portugal - it manages to be simultaneously slow, with large time gaps and expensive prices when adjusted for salaries.
I very much agree. We should work to stop most - if not almost all - flights inside Europe, or at least when the destinations are internal or between neighboring countries. But I also think we should remember that countries in the EU are at incredibly different stages in terms of economy and buying power.
The EU's major plan for combined train infrastructure has been halted by France for around 10 years, because they desperately wanted to prevent english from being chosen as the main language for train conductors - though I've just checked and that decision has finally been approved in may, apparently (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12109253/Train-drivers-EU-countries-speak-English-new-rules-Brussels.html).
I applaud France's new found enthusiasm for saving the planet, I wish they hadn't spent the last few years boycotting EU decisions to prop up its train infrastructure.
People in poorer countries get to have "leisure" as well. These types of blanket decisions only seem to further the already existing and increasing anti EU sentiment in countries like mine and periphery countries in general.
On another note, I was checking out some of your sources so I could learn further and I noticed the source for flights per capita (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/air-trips-per-capita) isn't actually measuring flights per national individual, only flights inside a country, without accounting for who's flying in them.
The figure was odd to me as I was wondering how portuguese people could be flying this much - you'd think we're all making top dollar here haha.
It's only natural that countries that mostly rely on tourism (such as Portugal where tourism is king over every other sector of the economy) have a big number of flights. Switzerland is a great example as well - it also has a high number of flights despite having a knowingly very good transport system. I'd hazard it's mostly not the swiss contributing to that stat.