Deputies voted late Saturday to suspend some domestic airline flights that can be done by train in less than two and a half hours, as part of a broader climate bill.
If the bill goes through France’s upper house, the Senate, France will join several European countries that want to get away from short flights.
But some have criticized President Emmanuel Macron for wearing down the proposals of his own environmental panel, which had recommended the 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’s a solid alternative, customers usually switch to trains,” he said, citing routes from Strasbourg and Bordeaux to Paris. “Every time high-speed lines have competed with flights, we’ve noticed that trains have drained heavily (airline passengers).”
Djebbari also said the bill would mean the end of flights from Paris Orly Airport to Nantes and Lyon.
But the measures do not apply to routes that are normally part of an international connecting flight; which means that the capital’s Charles de Gaulle Airport is largely spared by 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 “will save the three routes that emit the most greenhouse gases: Paris-Nice, Paris-Toulouse and ( i) Paris-Marseille “.
The four-hour proposal emerged from the citizens ’panel of the Climate Convention, which was created by Macron to take the country’s temperature on emission reduction measures.
Several European countries have tried to promote train travel as an alternative to domestic flights, although the Covid-19 pandemic has put the airline industry under pressure.
The € 600 million ($ 714 million) government aid package for Austrian Airlines stipulated that it would reduce domestic flight emissions by 50% by 2050 and end flights where a direct train alternative takes “considerably less than three hours “.