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Is this the end of cheap Europe flights? France proposes EU-wide minimum price (www.forbes.com.au)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/europe@feddit.de
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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

(...) flying is very obviously a big-city thing. Inhabitants of big cities fly much more because (...)" etc..

... assuming there is an alternative. If there is no viable alternative infrastructure other than the airport, you get a flight.

In general poor people fly very little, which is also the case in Germany (...)

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?

Portugal is itself mostly responsible for its transportation network and (...)

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.

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.

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.

I just can’t imagine it being cheaper to fly outside of portugal for vacations based on those prices.

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Continuing...

    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 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.

    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 (...)

    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.

    Flying is one of the few climate related things where the only foreseeable “solution” is a reduction.

    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.

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