A depopulated Northern Norway is a serious warning for the whole of Norway. The words belong to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. The fact that people live in the north is no longer just district policy, it has also become security policy. Therefore, free kindergarten and more favorable student loans were the treats from the government to people in the north. Will it lead to more people staying, I asked a councilor from a small municipality on the coast of Finnmark. He answered with a question: Do you know what is the biggest obstacle for people and families who want to live here? Prices to be shocked by I didn’t guess it, but he could tell how much the plane ticket cost for him to participate with other Norwegian municipal directors at the conference in Oslo. The price of a regular flight is like a bad joke. But for people who are totally dependent on the plane, it’s anything but fun. When a family from Gamvik goes on a long-awaited winter holiday, it often costs more to get to Gardermoen than the price of the trip to the south itself. And getting into the car is an option for very few people. Gamvik – Gardermoen is 200 miles, and the fastest route goes through Finland and Sweden. And if you are above average fond of driving, the day-long trip is not cheap anyway with today’s prices for fuel and tolls. Getting to Oslo or even further south is not the main problem anyway. Traveling within the region is both difficult and expensive. It caused a stir when a family from Kjøllefjord had to shell out NOK 50,000 to visit their grandparents in Sandnessjøen. You shouldn’t spend many hours in northern Norway collecting sighs of relief: A business leader from Mo i Rana told how hopeless it was to get home from a conference in Narvik. Had to get up at 04:00 in the morning, and it cost more than heroin, he sighed. (And clarifies that he has no complete control over the price of the latter.) A civil servant bureaucrat from Nordland had calculated how much the trip to Alta would cost. For 50 percent less, he had made it to New York. A politician says that as it is, they must fly via Oslo when traveling between two places in northern Norway. Not only is it faster, it’s also much cheaper. A competence company in Lofoten said that it cost NOK 16,000 to get from the head office in Svolvær to the branch in Båtsfjord. Then she sat in the car instead. The trip took 16 hours. Something to think about while running like a madman to the subway to avoid waiting four minutes for the next one. Plane for bus, plane for train and plane for tram In Northern Norway and parts of Western Norway, the plane is like taking the train to Oslo from Ski, only much more punctual. Still, it is not so easy to gain sympathy. In many people’s ears, airplanes are both a luxury and a climate disaster. We must fly less, it is constantly repeated. Flight shame and rebellion against high flight prices do not quite go together. But flying in northern Norway is quite different from flying to London for a weekend to watch a football match. And the frustration is no less when the southerners can get to London for NOK 699. It is often the only realistic option for getting to work, meetings, hospitals, conferences, funerals, study gatherings and family visits. Nor is there much luxury in clinging on when the plane takes off in stiff gales over the Vestfjorden. The fact that we have a well-developed short-haul network with some subsidized flight routes has its reasons. In contrast to our neighboring countries, which have developed better roads and railways, the small airports are a compensation for the fact that we have not built as much. The planes reserved for “a public nobility” There is also a concern that “conference sickness” will spill over into the use of planes. This means that only those who get their plane ticket (or conference) paid for by the public, whether they are bureaucrats, politicians or patient travel, can afford to travel. The companies report that travel costs are hurting the bottom line and have become a disadvantage for business in the north. Many are reluctant to take part in arenas where it is natural, expected and sensible to take part. There are many reasons why it is perceived as too expensive and poor: In parts of the country, the state has bought transport on air routes that cannot be operated commercially. But it is objected that these FOT routes are underfunded, and have also become minimum routes with the fewest possible departures. The route offer is too poor. There is little coordination of prices between the airlines. You pay both air passenger tax, VAT and a CO2 tax that few other countries have on domestic flights in Norway. There is also no family discount. This particularly affects those places that do not have direct flights to Oslo. It usually starts on Facebook. Many people react. Maiken Garder from Hammerfest recently created the Facebook group “People’s uprising against sky-high flight prices on the short-haul network”. She believes that people in the north are cut off from participating in society. The county council in Troms and Finnmark has demanded both cheaper routes and more departures. They will also remove the airline passenger tax. In the election campaign, SP leader Trygve Slagsvold Vedum promised to halve the prices of air routes in the district. Now, as you know, he is the Minister of Finance. And he probably feels he has a lot to spend money on. In the government’s Hurdal platform, it is written in black and white that the goal is halving prices on the so-called FOT routes. The question is whether this is one of the government’s election promises that is literally out of the blue. Electric airplanes may be the future … sometime in the future It is now being pointed out that electric airplanes can be a kind of salvation for Northern Norway. They are small planes, the journeys are usually short and there are few passengers. They also don’t need such long runways to take off, and you don’t have to transport large quantities of jet fuel to every nook and cranny of the country. But it’s not just range anxiety that needs to be cured before we whiz around in electric planes. The toll riot turned Norwegian politics on its head, and the protests against high ferry prices were heard. The government halved ferry prices and gave island communities free ferries. It too started as a protest group on Facebook. Will anyone listen as much to the nascent airline rebellion?
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People aren’t pissed off. They are FLY pissed off – Statement
