That airport train station is set up to transport the passengers from the airport to the city center, not inter-city travel.

Air France is right to complaint - banning all those short flights just shifts the juiciest international city pairs to a nearby hub, and what used to be NYC-CDG-BOD will become NYC-LHR-BOD or NYC-MAD-BOD, served by a different airline.

Most importantly, however, the law being discussed doesn't ban connecting flights. So a NYC -> Le Mans (say) would be allowed to fly through CDG, even though Le Mans is at around one hour by high-speed rail.

However, as there would be less traffic on these routes, I do expect some of them to be more expensive or even dropped altogether.

There's also a provision for "zero carbon" flights which would be allowed to operate on short distances.

The actual law (in French): https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b3875_pr...

Uh ? Since when and where ?

Which is why in France and other countries, train stations at airports have high speed rail service to other cities. It's the case at CDG( Paris), Lyon St Exupéry, Amsterdam Schiphol. That way you get there via plane, switch to high-speed rail, and get to your final destination.

Maybe one day NYC-YUL-BOD will be a valid option to shave off a few hundred miles in the air, but that is another border.

But it ground my gears that KLM was still bussing from the gate to some aircraft to keep up their drive-through ops efficiency.

You have no idea how hard basic things can be until you're incapable of doing them on your own.

Even though I was already aware of just how difficult it would be to get around, living through it gave a shocking amount of perspective.

Some of the disability accommodations (disability parking) were pure bullshit. Elevators and ramps were godsends.

A large, standing shower without steps and room for a stool were musts.

A taste of what’s to come, when I get older. I don’t really see any real solution either, other than prepping.

Meanwhile, I technically didn’t qualify for disability so I still had to move through the hard way once I was able to drive again.

It’s somehow an abused system.

[0] Note that switching modes always costs time, sometimes significant amounts of time. In some cases it's time you may not have or may not be able to easily find.

When I land at SFO from an international flight, I’m on BART way before anyone could board a second flight after clearing customs.

Switching modes doesn’t have to cost any more time than switching vehicles within the same mode. You just have to design the systems to do it well. Train to bus isn’t magically less efficient than bus to bus. Neither is Airbus to train.

Switching to and from cars is pretty bad and usually inefficient though, that I think we can all agree on.

train journies are also far more practical if you have a toddler or small children considering trains are a very relaxed atmosphere.

Europe has absolutely enormous levels of flying. The amount of city pairs in Europe which are a 1-2hr flight and more than 4 hours on trains are very high. Outside of maybe some routes in UK/France/Netherlands/Belgium/(western) Germany basically flying will always be vastly, vastly quicker going between different European countries.

It was often plan kinda last minute.

I’m French and was living in Paris at the time.

Of course, for all abroad stuff beside london ( Eurostar ), the plane was preferred.

But for national travel, only one city was too far to reach with a early morning train ride. All other major cities are reachable by a 2 to 4h train ride ( city center to city center )

The city is question is Toulouse. It’s just take too long from Paris. I Had to fly for this one.

Marseille,Lyon,Lille; Strasbourg, Metz, Bordeaux,Nantes, Montpellier, Rennes.

All those cities, I was able to take the first train in the morning. Do the fucking thing. Have dinner there on the client. And fall asleep in the last train. Waking up a midnight or so in Paris.

I had the choice to take a plane. But for the route in question in the article, it was consistently suboptimal.

I should look this up for details, but I seem to remember that there's a train route running parallel to the southern border that was abandoned for lack of demand. And there are some major cities there (Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse) which aren't all that far apart.

Why do you think I was living there? Why is 1/5 and more of our population living there ?

It’s the economical center of the country. And it’s been design intentionally this way dating back to before the revolution.

It’s infuriating in many aspect. But it’s not relevant to the conversation of fly travel for distance under 3h in train. ( you can do Paris-Marseille in exactly 3h with fast train. It’s 80% of the nord-sud distance of the country. And it take 6h by car )

Since last year ( or the year before that) via the LGV to Bordeaux, Toulouse is at 4h and ~10minutes from Paris.

In France some high speed trains go now directly to airports (CDG,LYO). So it is becoming possible to chain a plane and a train in a few scenarios.

For freight[1]. Putative high speed rail might go to the same places but generally can't share the same tracks with 30mph long haul trains. And the big gap is the plumbing of rail and transit into the urban cores, which in most US cities is highly decayed and in many of the newer metropolises was never built at all.

[1] Which is unsurprising, because we have the biggest per-capita need for transcontinental land freight transport in the world. The US has been perfectly fine at building out infrastructure it thinks it needs, it's just been making poor choices about what it "needs".

The evisceration of the passenger rail market was in large part caused by intentional urban planning. White flight moved a lot of people from city centers to suburbans where nary a black person could be found, and urban planners in turn abetted the process by building freeways straight through urban cores and turning every other city block into a parking lot in all but the very largest cities (well, except for LA). Uncoincidentally, the cities that didn't get turned into massive parking lots retained much more functional commuter rail systems than those cities that did.

E.g. Utah has a population density of 14km^2, similar to Norway. But like Norway, Utah has most of its population in a small portion of the area - the Salt Lake City–Provo–Orem Combined Statistical Area makes up 82% of the population.

Nebraska has a density of 9.63km^2, but Omaha-Council Bluffs + Lincoln makes up more than half the population (and that's ignoring the Iowa side of Omaha-Council Bluffs)

There are plenty of metropolitan areas like this in the US that may not have the density to justify much of an expansion to rail between them, but that are dense enough that a more rail oriented infrastructure within them would be possible.

And as you point out, this is with current US urban planning. If an expansion of rail is combined with adjustments to urban planning to encourage construction aligned with expanding transport systems, it'd become even more viable (e.g. near automatic planning permission for higher density near stations would probably in itself do a lot)

That play a role in usability. It’s a good environment to work, for instance.

... The trains departing from there are mostly low-cost trains rather than trains meant to be connecting with flights, and people taking them have to move to CDG instead of a better location.

It seems to be a service aimed at salvaging the infrastructure rather than an actual useful service.

And if you buy a ticket in advance, you are basically making a risky bet on whether or not you will have to change your plans because of a strike.

That's an infrastructure feature. Trains are designed to serve city centers, and they do it well. Moving high speed train infrastructure to airports just for the sake of fliers would kill train experience for everyone else. Moving airports to city center is an obvious no-go. Duplicating train infrastructure for the few connecting trips is probably economically unviable.

Would it?

If you ever visit Netherlands, take a note on how well Schiphol airport is integrated to the rail network. Its underground railway station, Luchthaven Schiphol, is just yet another station on the Rotterdam - Den Haag - Amsterdam main line, so for many trains (including the high-speed Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam line) the airport is just yet another stop on their route.

It is the best of both worlds.

also, the line is sort of infamous for constant delays on the schiphol part of the track.

The U.S. has the world's best designed and maintained rail infrastructure. It's simply that, unlike every other country with a national rail network, America's rail system is designed for freight traffic, because now and historically passenger traffic in America has always been such a small portion of trips that it has never been worth the investment to prioritize people over goods. If transporting people had ever been more profitable than transporting cargo, America would have more rail lines dedicated to transporting people.

100mph is not a "high-speed" train. It's just a train. Freight engines are capable of going up to 80pm with cars, and over 100mph without (but don't for safety and operational reasons). Freight lines are designed for cost efficiency, not speeds, but generally unless your 100mph train is using specialized wheels, it will run just fine on a freight line, though it will need to slow down for turns due to the shortened turn radius on most freight lines.

I don’t think you can really compare the infrastructure freight trains use with high speed rail. Designing and maintaining a rail network where trains go at up to 350kph is a much tougher job.

So, I’d argue the US rail infrastructure isn’t even close to being one of the best.

But in a nutshell: (a) the US rail system is cheaper. The entire freight rail system costs less than what France pays for its significantly smaller system each year, (b) more throughput. Millions of tons of goods travel by rail every day. It's cheaper, faster, and more ecologically friendly to ship by rail than by air, water, or truck, (c) America's rail system is designed to withstand weather features that would obliterate most of Europe's rail lines, like tornadoes and hurricanes.