lightsaber wrote:

London to Brussels is advertised at 1 hr, 53 minutes.
https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/train/be ... o-brussels

What is the security requirements? Considering one must get to/from the airport and deal with TSA and wait for checked luggage... This could force enough people to look

Just a minor point though lol. Travelling London to Brussels there would be no TSA involvement

FluidFlow wrote:

To be fair for a 500km Journey you need between 20-40l of fuel or diesel depending on load of the car and model. This is around 30-60€. You pay a lot more CO2 tax (the tax rate on fuel is 47c per liter diesel and 65 cent per liter petrol in Germany, 60 cent on both in Belgium) on the car trip than on the flight. So if you want to avoid the CO2 tax you better pay the 6€ extra for the flight.

But surely that's rather pedantic point, unless one is plucking out figures (irrespective of how correct they may be) to make a really meaningless statistic. When you put petrol or diesel in your car you don't calculate the tax as a component per litre of it - it's included in the price which you have to pay, no matter where you might be driving the vehicle to/from. Perhaps you do, and which is perfectly fine of course, but I've never met a single person who does. However, at that level, if one is concerned about the environment, then an aspect to the argument would be the car is the better option alluding to a car has a hell of a lot less emissions than an aircraft. So thus, does it equate to 'cost' and saving a mere few €, or to being as 'concerned' as the person would make out?

lightsaber wrote:

London to Brussels is advertised at 1 hr, 53 minutes.
https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/train/be ... o-brussels

What is the security requirements? Considering one must get to/from the airport and deal with TSA and wait for checked luggage... This could force enough people to look

I know my employer travel system now has trains and buses in the airfare selection area due to environmental mandates. Now only approved if rental car is available at the destination (otherwise, it won't show up unless you go out of your way).

So this will push travel portals that way. As an aviation fan, I am sad.

missed it, are electric aircraft excluded?

Lightsaber

I did this 3 times back in the day and it was much faster to get into the train than on a plane at LHR.
The more skocking thing for me as an aviation fan is that beast of a train ( Eurostar e320 ) has 902 seats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_374

[quote="DLPMMM"]This tax will do nothing except raise 30M euros for the Belgian government…that is what it was designed to do, and that is what it will do.

The amount of the tax is too small to be a deterrent to force passengers into a different mode of transport.[quote]

But it is not forcing passengers into doing anything, so no need to 'Americanise' it.....they have complete choice.

MartijnNL wrote:

In the grand scheme of things the introduction of this tax is completely pointless.

But, in the grand scheme of things, where do you draw the line on things

Vicenza wrote:

FluidFlow wrote:

To be fair for a 500km Journey you need between 20-40l of fuel or diesel depending on load of the car and model. This is around 30-60€. You pay a lot more CO2 tax (the tax rate on fuel is 47c per liter diesel and 65 cent per liter petrol in Germany, 60 cent on both in Belgium) on the car trip than on the flight. So if you want to avoid the CO2 tax you better pay the 6€ extra for the flight.

But surely that's rather pedantic point, unless one is plucking out figures (irrespective of how correct they may be) to make a really meaningless statistic. When you put petrol or diesel in your car you don't calculate the tax as a component per litre of it - it's included in the price which you have to pay, no matter where you might be driving the vehicle to/from. Perhaps you do, and which is perfectly fine of course, but I've never met a single person who does. However, at that level, if one is concerned about the environment, then an aspect to the argument would be the car is the better option alluding to a car has a hell of a lot less emissions than an aircraft. So thus, does it equate to 'cost' and saving a mere few €, or to being as 'concerned' as the person would make out?

The point is, the mere existence of a CO2 tax on flights is a logical consequence to level the playing field for every form of transportation that directly emits CO2 into the atmosphere. It is time to tax jet fuel equivalent to every other fossil fuel. I actually do not like the way this tax is proposed. Jet fuel should have the same tax rate as diesel or petrol.

In general we also see the tax on flight tickets because airlines can blame the high ticketprice on the government while the slip at the fuel station does not tell you how cheap fuel is and how high the tax actually is. This is purely done to not enfuriate the citicens.

Eurostar has security similiar to an airport, but they are not so fussy about liquids over 100ml

Vicenza wrote:

DLPMMM wrote:

This tax will do nothing except raise 30M euros for the Belgian government…that is what it was designed to do, and that is what it will do.

The amount of the tax is too small to be a deterrent to force passengers into a different mode of transport.

But it is not forcing passengers into doing anything, so no need to 'Americanise' it.....they have complete choice.

I don’t understand what you mean by “Americanise” it.

My point was pure economics. Economics are the same the world over.

There are only 2 reasons to create or change a tax.

One reason is to increase or decrease government revenue.

The second reason is to change the behavior of a populous toward some transaction.

Since a very quick analysis of the market where this tax will be imposed versus the substitute commodities clearly shows that consumer behaviors will not be logically affected, this only leaves the increased revenues to the government as the primary goal.

This conclusion is bolstered by the governments revenue projections that use the past travel patterns directly for their estimates without reducing future passenger numbers to account for the stifling effect that a punitive tax on the flights would have it the tax was indeed meant to deter these passengers.

Granted I’m sure there is also some political capital to be gained by some Belgium Pols…but I really don’t know any of the particular parties or personalities involved in this legislation.

Noshow wrote:

I flew from MUC to BRU the other day. Evening flight after a day of work. No high speed train would have made it in time. Shorter flights are necessary as well. And Brussels needs feeders to feed it's long haul network.

Brussels - Munich is almost twice the distance than Brussels - Frankfurt/London and also lacks HSR on a long stretch of track, so I am not sure why you bring up that example. I don't think that there is a discussion about cutting flights in the 800-1000km distance bracket unless HSR can cover that distance in three hours or so.

Quite honestly, even on a.net where every discussion is heavily biased towards pro aviation arguments (some of them, to put it mildly, quite bizarre), there should be no disagreement that if an air route competes with a HSR link that takes less than two hours (London) or three hours (Frankfurt), there is no point for P2P flights (unless you live right next to the airports or do your business there - but that's such a small number of people that they cannot make such flights viable). It is quite obvious why routes targeting P2P passengers such as BRU-LCY or CGN-CDG disappeared as soon as HSR opened as everybody outside a.net sees no point in going to an airport, queueing again and again, waiting at the gate, getting into a sardine can etc. etc. In such markets, P2P flights only make some sense if at both ends the airports are at small downtown'ish locations that allow for minimum extra time wasted before and after the flight portion of the travel (that's why, for example, ANR-LCY survived much longer than BRU-LCY). The only reason to have flights between BRU and FRA or LHR or CDG is because of hub feed. And in that case not really because otherwise BRU would be cut off from air travel, but in order to be able to compete with hubs located further away that are served by competing carriers. People travelling P2P on such flights will have somewhat exotic reasons to do so - having a meeting at the airport, being an avgeek, collecting frequent traveler miles no matter what, milling the free buffett at the frequent flyer lounge. Most of which is in the eyes of the general public a rather poor excuse for air travel.

lightsaber wrote:

London to Brussels is advertised at 1 hr, 53 minutes.
https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/train/be ... o-brussels

What is the security requirements? Considering one must get to/from the airport and deal with TSA and wait for checked luggage... This could force enough people to look

I know my employer travel system now has trains and buses in the airfare selection area due to environmental mandates. Now only approved if rental car is available at the destination (otherwise, it won't show up unless you go out of your way).

So this will push travel portals that way. As an aviation fan, I am sad.

missed it, are electric aircraft excluded?

Lightsaber

For Paris and Amsterdam (Thalys), you just try to arrive on time to take your train, no specific measures in Brussels or Amsterdam. Only in Paris they have metal detector and luggage scanner, but it's very fast, more like what you have for entering the hall of some airports.

For UK, the Eurostar departs from a dedicated section of the station due to the stricter protocols. It is similar to the ones in airports : baggage scan (liquids are OK though), and IDCard/Passports are verified. But I must say that the time to clear it is quite predictable and was always well below the 30 minutes so far and there is no long walk to a remote terminal or whatsoever. You can arrive just 30 minutes before the departure time of the train and still be fine, something I would never try in airports.
When I need to be in the center of London, I would never consider taking a flight ... but I suspect some colleagues do to collect miles

So when do I finally use the BRU-LHR flights ? ... to connect from BRU with long-haul flights when the Star Alliance" solutions were too expensive or fully booked. For those connection flights, I'm sure the price difference will not convince people to go by train. Changing from the train station to the airport in London is just too much hassle...

...there should be no disagreement that if an air route competes with a HSR link that takes less than two hours (London) or three hours (Frankfurt), there is no point for P2P flights...

I think we need exactly these flights. I am not going to ride three hours on a high speed train in the evening. I travel a lot by rail and use high speed trains almost exclusively. But to arrive late at night only at a some high speed station only needing more time to finally drive home is not for everybody. Brussels-Paris, Hamburg-Berlin oder Frankfurt-Cologne can perfectly be done by rail but there is something like a hard limit. Three hours train ride to me feels like being above it. Many airline passengers connect from other flights and need follow on short haul flights to reach their final destination.

BTW the newest ICE trains in Germany, so called ICE 4, have tighter seating and hardback "chairs" that are way less comfortable to sit in, especially for longer rides. Deutsche Bahn drove me away from some longer trips already. Thalys and TGV feel more comfortable to me.

ScottB wrote:

marcelh wrote:

Since the beginning of 2018, all our customers travel on our ICE, IC and EC trains within germany by 100% renewable power.

Statements like this always feel like a bit of greenwashing; in reality, the electricity they use is basically as renewable as the overall grid in the regions where the electricity is consumed. Or probably more accurately, it is as renewable as the incremental generation required to power the trains vs. what would be generated absent that demand. It's not as if DB or the power generators actually direct electron flows from renewable sources to the trains.

While you do have a point, DB Energie actually have their own grid and their own power plants.

Noshow wrote:

...there should be no disagreement that if an air route competes with a HSR link that takes less than two hours (London) or three hours (Frankfurt), there is no point for P2P flights...

I think we need exactly these flights. I am not going to ride three hours on a high speed train in the evening. I travel a lot by rail and use high speed trains almost exclusively. But to arrive late at night only at a some high speed station only needing more time to finally drive home is not for everybody. Brussels-Paris, Hamburg-Berlin oder Frankfurt-Cologne can perfectly be done by rail but there is something like a hard limit. Three hours train ride to me feels like being above it. Many airline passengers connect from other flights and need follow on short haul flights to reach their final destination.

Are you talking about a connceting flight or about a P2P flight? To me, sitting down in 1st class on a train in the centre of the city after a long day of work, without someone sitting next to me, resting for three hours is much preferable to taking a longish cab or subway ride to the airport, (sometimes) queueing at check-in, queueing at security again, waisting time at the lounge, having a long walk to the gate, waiting at the gate, sometimes waiting in a cold bus and afterwards getting a sightseeing drive around the airport, sitting on the plane for a while before take-off, spending 45 minutes in flight, having another bus ride, walking late at night through a deserted terminal, flagging down a cab and having a longish drive from the airport to the centre. Which all in all easily takes three hours I could just as well sit on the train, sipping a wine and watching Netflix or reading a paper (or working more effectively, if it needs be). But preferences are obviously quite different (I have to admit that I can get from my place to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin by HSR without connecting)

Blerg wrote:

So will the government use this tax income to invest in more ecological research, to promote the introduction of new technologies that reduce pollution ... or will they simply use it to pay their bills?

Could airports such as Lille or Eindhoven eventually profit from this especially if they keep on increasing this tax?

Also, how much is a train ticket from Brussels to Frankfurt?

I just checked for monday 18. October 2021 Frankfurt to Brussels
ICE train return 119 €
LH oneway 116,33 € ( November 3 € less )

seahawk wrote:

Nice, hopefully it will make people fly less.

Better, hopefully it will make people fly BRU-MUC-FRA When will European governments stop this ridiculousness?

InnsbruckFlyer wrote:

seahawk wrote:

Nice, hopefully it will make people fly less.

Better, hopefully it will make people fly BRU-MUC-FRA When will European governments stop this ridiculousness?

BRU-MUC-FRA would bring the train in an even bigger advantage.
Let's wait and see what the next government in Germany in which the Greens will be represented looks like. They have already declared war on such flights

Here's the thing. Human's don't have the power to control the environment. How vain must one be to think we can. So what's this about? Well notice that almost every "solution" involves the government or more government control. And if you pay attention, you'll notice over time it's never enough, it's always a crisis, and we need more of something that didn't work.

Blerg wrote:

oldJoe wrote:

Blerg wrote:

So will the government use this tax income to invest in more ecological research, to promote the introduction of new technologies that reduce pollution ... or will they simply use it to pay their bills?

Could airports such as Lille or Eindhoven eventually profit from this especially if they keep on increasing this tax?

Also, how much is a train ticket from Brussels to Frankfurt?

I just checked for monday 18. October 2021 Frankfurt to Brussels
ICE train return 119 €
LH oneway 116,33 € ( November 3 € less )

Train seems quite pricey actually!

It certainly is if you buy the tickets a few days before departure, but if you are willing to buy a ticket a month in advance you can get an ICE-ticket from Brussels to Frankfurt for less than €20.

And yes, the Belgian goverment seems to be interested in supporting less polluting modes of transport: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1 ... ional-hub/