COMMENTARY: We Need a More Sophisticated Discussion on the Rail versus Domestic Flights Climate Issue

by Andy Smith (GreenAir Online) In April this year, as part of climate measures to reduce carbon emissions, French MPs voted to ban flights on domestic routes that can be travelled by direct train in less than two-and-a-half hours. This had been reduced from a previous recommendation that proposed the limit at four hours, following a French government bailout to Covid-hit Air France. In the UK, and picked up by the national press, environmental pressure group Campaign for Better Transport (CfBT) is now calling on the government to ban domestic flights where the equivalent train journey is under five hours. Calls for bans of domestic flying have become frequent and the general public perception, driven by the constant criticism of environmental NGOs, is that domestic flying is amongst the most climate destructive activities we humans can make. But how bad is it really and when and where do the alternatives come into play, questions Andy Smith, Head of Sustainability Strategy at Scottish regional airline Loganair.

The objective here is not to argue for one mode versus the other, but to understand the true carbon and financial trades of the travel choices consumers and planners face, rather than relying on the very crude national averages used to make sweeping generalisations.

Firstly, what is the scale of the problem being described: the amount of emissions from UK domestic air travel where there is a five-hour equivalent rail journey?

Using OAG data, I found 127 unique UK domestic city pairs currently served by air. Of these only 46 pairs (36%) had a viable rail route given that the majority of UK domestic air services cross water. Of these 46, only 16 routes (13% of the total) met CfBT’s requirement of five hours by rail and some of these only just on occasional services.

Given how widely domestic air travel is condemned, most people are surprised to learn that emissions from the rail network are almost double that of all UK domestic air services (3.0 MtCO2e for rail and 1.6 MtCO2e for domestic air) and both of these are dwarfed by the equivalent emissions of road vehicles at 122.6 million tonnes of CO2e per annum.

To reiterate, there are undoubtedly carbon savings from electrified rail versus flying specifically. But they may not be the cheapest, quickest or most practical way of decarbonising our national transport system. Even if the rail capacity existed to replace the air services, as CfBT demands, the capital cost of £350 million at a 10% return is generating carbon savings at around £350 per tonne of CO2e. A better discussion would be about how we could improve on this figure.

If we are to make genuine progress in reducing the carbon intensity of our transport network we need less stunts, less deriding the green credentials of competing modes of travel and serious, practical discussions about where and how we can cut emissions from the UK’s public transport network the hardest and the quickest. READ MORE