All national routes that can be traveled by train in less than 2.5 hours are suspended.
France has banned short domestic flights that can be replaced by an existing train journey. The initiative is an attempt to reduce carbon emissions.
The law took effect two years after lawmakers voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two and a half hours.
The ban virtually ends air travel between Paris and cities like Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, but connecting flights are unaffected.
Critics have described the measures as “token bans”.
Laurent Donceel, interim head of airlines association Airlines for Europe (A4E), told AFP news agency that “the ban on these flights will have only minimal effects” on CO2 emissions. He added that governments should support “real and meaningful solutions” to the problem.
Airlines around the world have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Flightradar24 website, which monitors flight data around the world, the number of flights last year decreased by almost 42% compared to 2019.
The French government had come under pressure to introduce even stricter rules.
France’s so-called Citizens’ Climate Convention, created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and comprising 150 members of society, had proposed a ban on flights with journeys that could be made in less than four hours by train.
But the duration was reduced to two and a half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.
French consumer rights group UFC-Que Choisir has also asked lawmakers to keep the four-hour limit.
“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” he said.
He also called for “safeguards so that the [ferrovia nacional francesa] SNCF does not take the opportunity to artificially inflate prices or degrade the quality of the train service.”
Source: Terra
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