If your trip home involves a flight from Eindhoven to London, you may be in for longer travel times. PRO Brabant is calling for all flights to London from Eindhoven airport to be scrapped should they win the upcoming municipal elections.
In fact, it goes beyond that. The party is calling for all flights of less than 500km to be scrapped, in Eindhoven’s case, this means its London flights.
The reasoning? More people should be taking the train to London.
Not as easy as it sounds
However, anyone who opts to take the train to London knows that it involves a much longer commuting time, especially if you’re travelling from Eindhoven.
On top of this, train ticket prices are often higher than those for flights, meaning it’s not only faster, but also cheaper for people to travel by plane to the UK capital.
Jade van der Linden, lead candidate for PRO Brabant, speaks with AD, saying “Isn’t it ridiculous that you fly distances that are easily manageable by train? You simply shouldn’t do that anymore.”
There are good intentions behind her reasoning, taking the plane leads to far more emissions than taking the train, but for many, the less-polluting alternative is a cost they simply can’t afford to take on.
More people needed to bring the prices down
However, the only way to bring train ticket prices down is, unfortunately, to push more people onto them.
Van der Linden explains to AD that if Eindhoven scraps more of its short-haul flights to London, more people will have no choice but to take the train — and this in turn will make prices cheaper.
But will this actually happen?
PRO Brabant has a good shot at winning the upcoming municipal elections, but, should they win, Van der Linden’s proposal will still have to be negotiated.
And those negotiations will probably bring up the fact that no less than 300,000 people are pulled to Eindhoven Airport annually for its London destinations.
An Eindhoven Airport spokesperson describes the London flights as important “also for a growing share of travellers from the United Kingdom who specifically have Eindhoven and the surrounding area as their destination.”
So, whether PRO Brabant’s proposal will ever come to fruition, remains to be seen.
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