Parliamentarians voted late on Saturday to suspend some domestic airlines’ flights that could be made by train in less than two and a half hours as part of a wider climate bill.
If the bill goes through the upper house of France, the Senate, France will join a number of European countries that want to move away from short flights.
But some have criticized President Emmanuel Macron for rejecting proposals from his own environmental panel, which had recommended a ban. flights in which a train journey would take less than four hours.
Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari said the government’s proposal was “reasonable”. He told lawmakers during the debate that a four-hour threshold “would have really affected territories in need of flights”.
“When there is a solid alternative, customers usually switch to trains,” he said, citing routes from Strasbourg and Bordeaux to Paris. “Every time the high-speed lines competed with the flights, I noticed that the trains were largely emptied (the passengers of the airlines).”
Djebbari also said that the bill will mean the end of flights from Orly Airport in Paris to Nantes and Lyon.
But the measures do not apply to routes that are usually part of an international connecting flight; which means that the capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport is largely exempt from movement, as it is France’s main international transport hub.
Left-wing MP Danièle Obono said the government’s plan to move away from a four-hour limit would “save the three routes that emit the most greenhouse gases: Paris-Nice, Paris-Toulouse, (and) Paris- Marseille ”.
The four-hour proposal came from the citizens’ panel of the Climate Convention, which was set up by Macron to take the country’s temperature into measures to reduce emissions.
A number of European countries have tried to promote train travel as an alternative to domestic flights, even though the Covid-19 pandemic has put the airline industry under pressure.
The € 600 million ($ 714 million) government aid package for Austrian Airlines provided for a 50% reduction in domestic flight emissions by 2050 and an end to flights where a direct train alternative takes “much less than three hours”. .