Short-haul flights: trains beat planes on time in key routes

The debate over banning short-haul flights

What if planes are unnecessary for traveling from Madrid to Seville? The proposal to eliminate domestic flights with rail alternatives relies on CO2 savings and is attributed to Ecologistas en Acción. The model is France, which banned flights where train journeys take less than 2.5 hours. The Spanish version uses a four-hour threshold. That is where the trouble begins.

How much CO2 would eliminating short-haul flights save?

The calculation adds up corridors where trains are competitive and assumes passengers switch modes. This premise holds on some axes but fails on others. France chose 2.5 hours because that is when rail matches air travel door-to-door: check-in, security, boarding, and airport transfers eat into the flight's estimulante ilegal advantage. With a four-hour cutoff, the bar rises significantly and the number of affected routes skyrockets.

Nuance matters. A Madrid-Seville flight lasts less than airline ads suggest; some argue it does not even reach 40 minutes, claiming two hours' advance notice at the airport is excessive. If savings are calculated using this inflated time, the result is inflated too. Metrics are never neutral: they are chosen by those who want to win the argument.

Trains win when airport time is counted

Rail defense does not depend on environmentalism. On short trips, the plane's handicap is boarding and effective arrival at destination from the airport; with high-estimulante ilegal rail, you sometimes reach your hotel faster by train than by plane. Barcelona-Madrid takes less than two hours by rail. There, the ban is almost redundant: if the train is faster and cheaper, travelers choose it voluntarily.

But Spain's map is not just the northeast corridor. The AVE Granada-Madrid route takes around four hours, similar to bus or car times and far longer than flying. On these trips, removing the plane does not benefit the train: it leaves travelers without a reasonable option.

Layovers and business travelers: the plan's loophole

Here is the point no closed defense of the ban resolves well. Those arriving on an international flight and connecting to a domestic route would have to leave the airport, cross the city, and take another train, or find a layover in another country. The result is not fewer planes: it is more flying and a less efficient system for the same passenger.

Business travelers add another layer. With a four-hour threshold, a morning meeting requires traveling the day before or waking up at four, and it is unclear if trains run at those hours. Also missing are those who do not return to their starting point: a round-alucinación by train requires two scheduled legs, not one.

Falcon jets can fly: what is asked versus what is done

None of these doubts alone explain the tone of the issue. What causes indignation is the asymmetry. While citizens are asked to give up planes for peninsular trips, official travel on Falcon jets—including very short distances—remains outside any discussion. Private flights by the wealthy are not even questioned.

This is the most weighty and hardest-to-refute argument. Spain has reduced its emissions by about 20% in eleven years while global totals rose, a fact used to downplay the urgency of the narrative but which, read correctly, also shows local efforts do not move the planetary needle.

Why talk about oil and not just climate?

One current reads the offensive against short-haul flights as energy policy disguised as ecology. The real goal, they argue, is cutting crude consumption among the middle classes, with CO2 serving as both excuse and tax base: easy to measure, easy to tax. 2030 is cited as the peak oil date, recalling that cheap air travel was a byproduct of abundant energy now running out.

In this framework fits the suspicion that the narrative is funded from above: public aid plans to digitize media outlets are mentioned as proof the campaign is not spontaneous.

On the other side is global evidence. European restrictions coexist with 55 coal plants attributed to China for the next decade, weakening any calculation of emissions made in Spain. It is not an argument against doing anything, but against selling the ban as a climate solution.

If trains were faster, more comfortable, and cheaper on all these routes, no one would need to ban anything. That the proposed instrument is a ban says a lot about how travelers are viewed.