Ecology obliges - and while the Flygskam ("ashamed to steal") from Sweden is gaining ground - the government is now taking all the necessary measures to enter the virtuous circle of an exemplary State in terms of environmental protection. energy transition. Last Wednesday, the Ecological Defence Council a plan including a flagship measure: that ofbanning civil servants from flying to travel from Paris to the rest of France, when the journey in train does not exceed four hours. This is a relatively logical decision, given that the coverage of France by the TGV being the densest in Europe bringing Paris to within three hours' travel time of Bordeaux, Lille, LyonMetz, Mulhouse, NantesRennes or Strasbourg and less than four hours from Brest and Montpellier.
The government's decision, if implemented, should have a relatively limited impact on all domestic air routes. Last year, air traffic on domestic routes reached 26.7 million passengers, according to figures from the DGACof which 16.3 million on radial lines (Paris-regions). The entire domestic traffic France accounted for 14.64% of all French air traffic in 2019, which reached 179.6 million passengers. Radial routes generated 9.1% of these total passengers. Over the last decade, Paris-Province routes have continued to grow, rising from 15.55 million passengers in 2010 to 16.63 million in 2017. 2018 brought a halt, with traffic declining by 1.7% and again by 0.3% in 2019.
Transversal lines spared by the ban
We can therefore expect a more substantial fall in 2020, with the Paris-Marseille, Paris-Bordeaux, Paris-Montpellier and Paris-Brest routes likely to post further declines, probably of between 5% and 10%. This represents a probable drop of half a million passengers compared with the 16.3 million in 2019. Air traffic on these routes will not disappear in its entirety, as there will always be passengers who will choose the air solution, either because their company is close to the airport or outside the city centre, either because they are in correspondence. This can be seen in Paris-Bordeaux and Paris-Lyon. Despite the density of TGV services bringing these cities within two hours of each other, Paris-Bordeaux still welcomed 1.26 million passengers and Paris-Lyon 0.64 million passengers in 2018. Air travel will also remain the fastest means of transport on routes linking Paris to Biarritz, Nice, Pau, Perpignan and Toulon, Toulouse and, of course, the Corsica.
The new rule would indeed cause a slowdown on many Paris-regions lines, but its effect should be limited to the following limited on cross-border lineswhere there is very little competition from the train. Many rail links, such as Bordeaux-Lyon or Nantes-Toulouse, have to be made via a connection, with journey times sometimes exceeding six hours. This delay in infrastructure explains the boom in traffic on cross-border lines. In 2019, this segment exceeded the symbolic ten million passenger mark for the first time, up 6% to 10.4 million. Between 2010 and 2019, passenger traffic on region-to-region routes rose by 68%.
Internationally, the impact should be negligible, as the number of civil servants travelling outside France is more limited, as are international TGV links. Fewer than a dozen air routes are likely to be affected by the new ban, such as Paris-Amsterdam (3h19 better journey time by train), Paris-Düsseldorf (3h45), Paris-Frankfurt (3h38) and Paris-Bale (3h04). Here again, there is an incompressible number of transfer passengers or passengers whose businesses are located outside the urban area. In recent years, however, the TGV has succeeded in eliminating air services from Paris to Berne, BrusselsCologne or Stuttgart, but continues to fly alongside the plane on the Paris-GenevaParis-London or Paris-Luxembourg...
Flygskam in ambush?
However, it remains to be seen what the "Flygskam could cause. The Ministry of Ecological Transition believes that the movement is too recent to be perceived as a real threat. And yet, according to a report recently published by the "Pegasus Chair - dedicated to the economics and management of air transport and aerospace - all the elements are there for a amplification of the Flygskam movement in France. According to this first report entitled The French and the environmental impact of air transport: between myth and reality "According to the chair, which is attached to Montpellier Business School, the impact of the phenomenon is limited for the time being. Out of nearly 48,000 tweets containing the #hashtag "Flygskam" between October 2018 and January 2020, 8,69% were from France. According to Google Trends, the term appears in searches from France mainly from March 2019 onwards, with a peak in October last year...
According to the survey The French overestimate the share of air transport emissions. While aviation accounts for only 2 to 3% of global emissions, more than 50% of respondents believe that it accounts for more than 10%, with 25% even estimating that it accounts for more than 15% of global emissions.
While these CO2 emissions fell by 25% in the world over the last 15 years and that these same emissions per passenger fell in France by 28% between 2000 and 2018 - thanks in particular to new technologies and greener air transport management measures - 90% of those surveyed think that they have been stable or that they have increased. 38% even think that this increase is greater than or equal to 25%. This is fertile ground for the Flygskam movement, against which airlines and airports must respond, or risk seeing their business tainted by this phenomenon, which is probably more devastating than the new government measures.
