The French government plans to artificially increase the cost of airline tickets with the help of higher taxes. The additional state revenues are to be invested in the expansion of the railway infrastructure. Transport Minister Clément Beaune is currently assuming that the project can be implemented as early as the beginning of 2024.

Some governments, including those of Austria and Germany, have increased ticket taxes, sometimes exorbitantly, in recent years. This happens under the cloak of climate protection and primarily affects traffic within Europe, because the taxes levied on long-haul flights are comparatively cheap.

In France, they want to use the additional income from increased taxes to be levied on airline tickets to cross-subsidize the railways. The latter mode of transport is propagated, among other things, by self-proclaimed climate protectors as being particularly environmentally friendly. However, it is not taken into account that in Germany, for example, the vast majority of traction current comes from lignite power and in many countries a significant proportion of trains are diesel-powered.

By artificially increasing the price of plane tickets, the French government also wants to react to the fact that airlines are often cheaper than comparable train tickets. But the plans go much further, because Beaune also wants to push through an EU-wide tax on kerosene. This is one of the demands of the Greens. However, he also emphasized that this must be decided unanimously by all EU countries. Only international flights within the European Union would then be affected, because a kerosene tax is already levied on domestic flights, and outside the community of states, taxation would only be possible to a limited extent or not at all due to international agreements.

In France, they want to ban flight connections for which a train journey with a travel time of no more than 2,5 hours is available. The ban has already been decided, but there are so many exceptions that only three routes actually had to be abandoned.