This is a good time for the EU to get its shit together on their train networks. Make one central portal for booking trains Europe wide, remove the no fuel tax subsidies and no VAT for airlines and apply them for trains instead, and invest in a network of night trains.
The European Rail Passengers Union recently started and is looking to advocate for solutions to some of these issues.
This is great! I signed up to try to help. Thanks for sharing!
Good. Excellent 👌
Why?
Less pollution. Maybe people will finally learn to use trains again.
I'd love to use trains, but they're so much slower and way more expensive. A return journey cuts into some very precious, limited time off.
I'm going to Berlin soon and I checked out the rail option first, it it's just unfeasible.
This 100% is the problem with bad policy.
Maybe it will get at least bit more possible after the new railway EU legislation passes this year but I am not that hopeful because they are just bunch of idiots flying business jets and don't understand the problems there.
Tbh it is big lobby by national railway companies like SNCF that slow the prgress way down, they should really pull out their heads from their asses and recognise that cross European travel isn't that much competition.
Berlin?! What sort of a awful place you live that you want to go to Berlin? Its just gray and concrete, horrible place.
Visited recently and I loved it! Met so many nice people and visited so many interesting things. And I come from a very pretty city. ;)
I must have upset some Berliners with my silly joke :D Funny how I got upvotes when making the same joke about France :--D
Anyway, I'm glad you liked it. But in these trying times, I'd suggest people to travel more locally. But as a misanthrope, the faster we burn ourselves off the planet, the better it is for the fishes and whatnot =D
My friend lives in the Netherlands, and we don't see each other very often. It's for a big birthday celebration for myself so it's a bit of a one off trip, I've always wanted to go to Berlin. I think my last trip away was possibly 10 years ago!
I agree, local travel is the way. I went there by train, so I guess that still counts. :D But I would wish train travel would be more affordable and EASY. So complicated to book trains which go borders. You really have to know all the tricks to get a good price. But I will train interrail that summer I think, let's see how that goes.
Yeah I really wished there was some EU wide train system thing that would make things faster and less complicated. In fact, I'm baffled how that wasn't done decades ago. One of the best ways to deal with climate change and bringing down emissions would be to subsidize, simplify and make things easier with rail travel. But we are lead by donkeys, so whatddyagonnado you know
The Epstein distraction war will have to stop.
So do people not understand that this is game over? We are in a zombie economy, it may still be walking but in reality it's dead.
Even if the straits open tomorrow, planting season is ending with out the needed fertilizer. Smelters and pot lines for aluminum, iron and glass are going cold. They can't just be restarted, cold idle make them giant bricks and damages them. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is shutting down, and also can't just be restarted. Clean rooms must be re-certified before restart. Similar problems for micro chips production that uses helium from the gulf.
The global economy is having its Wiley E. Coyote moment. The floor is gone, but gravity isn't doing its thing yet.
Can we get this map (Paris before and after cycling was pushed) but for the entire atmosphere once the jet fuel runs out?
After much thought and googling, really that's before and after dieselgate.
NO2 is a notorious byproduct of diesel engines at 10x the rate of gasoline cars. Dieselgate cars emitted 40x the legal amount. You can't quite do this, but roughly that means a dieselgate vehicle emitted 400x the NO2 of a gasoline car. Aka a single dieselgate vehicle was equivalent of 400 gasoline cars.
Now let's get the absolute number of cars. France had 984,064 dieselgate affected vehicles. Paris has about 19% of France's population. Assuming equal ownership that's 186,972 dieselgate affected cars in paris. At 400x the emissions of gasoline cars that's the equivalent of a whopping 74,788,800 gasoline cars.
So replacing the dieselgate affected cars with gasoline cars (apparently the popularity of diesel peaked around then and has been declining since) is the equivalent of removing 74,788,800 - 186,972 = 74,601,828 vehicles off the road in paris alone.
Dieselgate was 2015 so the change between 2020 and 2024 definitely was bikes, seen by how the main car roads are still horrible and emission standards havent been tightened enough to create such a big change. It really is just less cars driven and less space where cars are allowed.
I think your math is confusing people here:
"Dieselgate cars emitted 40x the legal amount."
40x the legal amount FOR DIESEL.
"roughly that means a dieselgate vehicle emitted 400x the NO2 of a gasoline car."
You're arguing that the legal amount for diesel is 10x that of a gasoline car, and by exceeding that 40x, they are more or less 400x a single gasoline car.
Now I don't know if any of that is actually TRUE or not, I'm seeing a lot of the weaselly "up to 40x", not that it was ACTUALLY 40X. It might have been 25x on average, we don't really know. Still awful.
But the piece you're missing is that dieselgate didn't impact ALL diesel vehicles, it was specific to Volkswagen group. So only VW and Audi, and even then, only the TDI models.
Well, first off, VW also includes SEAT, Škoda and Porsche that also use their diesel engines (Porsche no longer does after Dieselgate)
Secondly, VAG was the first to get caught, but many manufacturers were cheating. Including Renault and Citroën, which I imagine might be moderately common in France.
Paris has to remove the low emission zone so old polluting cars are back in the city. Parliament just approved that.
can we stop calling it iran war and start calling it usa and israels expansionist war?
To be fair, we usually also call it Ukraine war instead of Russo-Ukranian war or just Russian invasion or Russia Expansionist war. Makes it not less wrong, but you need to admit Iran war is a little shorter than your suggestion.
Vietnam War
Iraq War
Ukraine War
Iran War
It's just a continuation of the tradition of naming wars where a single country gets invaded by another after that country.
It's almost like we name the war after the location where the fighting takes place.
Brothers in Arms will have to go Down to the Waterline with their Six Blade Knife to save us from Industrial Disease.
It's not easy when the whole world runs on Heavy Fuel.
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles They can always fly away from this rain and this cold You can hear them singing out their telegraph code All the way down the telegraph road
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