The mayor of Nice is moving to ban large cruise ships from docking in its port, aiming to tackle pollution and overtourism. The decision mirrors Venice’s 2021 ban, introduced to protect its fragile environment and infrastructure.
It is indeed nice to ban cruise ships in a fight against over-tourism and pollution
…
I’ll let myself out.
I had to read it a few times to realize it was supposed to read it as Nice but I should have read it as Nice
Noice … but in a French accent
I hate this headline. You can’t correctly pronounce or understand the first word in the sentence without the context that comes later in the sentence.
German be like that with verb kickers.
What am I going to do with the object!? Tellllll me!!
Cruise ships are the absolute worst. The ban could (and should) have been more comprehensive, but this is a step in the right direction.
Fun way to spend some time though
Its actually pronounced Nice.
it’s pronounced “gif”
No, that’s close to Paris
Nice! More cities should do this!
This can start a death spiral - the more cities & ports are banning cruise ships in the Mediterranean, the more traffic the other cities will get. That will increase the problems there, leading to demands to also ban cruise ships there and so on.
I see zero problems with that whatsoever.
It’s only Nice when it comes from the Nice prefecture of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling goodness.
Nice to ban you, to ban you nice.
I’ve taken a couple of cruises when I was younger and loved it, but it’s undeniable that this is a good move and one I wish more places would adopt.
Everything is nicer in Nice
What, they can’t handle a little norovirus spread by tourists? Wimps.
Also against popular tourism.
While I understand the main reason of this ban, like similar ones they tend to stop regular people to visit then everything becomes more exclusive and costly. So less people, richer. I don’t have a solution, but that’s just an obvious outcomenothing stopping people from just flying to Nice if that is where they want to go, there are many other ways to travel to Nice
Problem with cruise ships is that cruise passengers don’t spend much money in the places they go to. I went on a cruise once myself and if I get three all-you-can-eat buffets a day included in the cruise fare, no way am I going to a restaurant on land. So I get why places don’t like this.
as there are lots of ways to reach Venezia, but still… however you make a bold point
I mean in Venice you have to admit that cruise ships offer a very unique view on the city. To my knowledge, they travelled through Canale della Giudecca when they were still allowed there, i.e. cruise ship passengers could view the entire city center including Piazza San Marco from above in a way you can’t anymore nowadays. But of course that also made them a nuisance to everyone else because of waves and also because this just doesn’t look very nice.
Venice is so uniquely beautiful I wouldn’t want to spend just one day there anyway, so abolishing cruises there may be good for the tourists too.
this just doesn’t look very nice.
Of course, that’s because it’s Venice! Uhm.
Sorry. Great comment, carry on.
The Nice region gets completely overrun during tourist season. Normally you can control the level of tourism through the number of hotel rooms in the area, but that doesn’t work when you get multiple floating hotels turning up.
Banning large ships specifically is performative nonsense. Cruise ships are an environmental disaster but large ones are significantly more efficient per passenger — there’s a reason these ships (and cargo ships) have become so immense, and it isn’t because their owners like to spend more money to move a given amount of cargo. If Nice actually cared about the environment they would ban all but the largest ships (of of course ban them all).
Additional reading for anyone interested: https://piernext.portdebarcelona.cat/en/mobility/economies-of-scale-in-the-cruise-industry-bigger-means-better/
Overtourism is an ecology problem in and of itself. They specifically want less people to visit to protect their local environment.
Except that isn’t what they said as quoted in the article; they complain about the environment and that these tourists aren’t spending enough money ashore. It sounds to me like Nice only wants rich tourists. If they were legitimately concerned about the environment they’d start with yachts, which are far more inefficient on a per-passenger basis.
We don’t need to go all in on 1 specific strategy. A diversity of tactics will always be best. From the sounds of it, activists are also trying to ban yachts.
Assuming that their concerns are some mixture of:
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More tourism than residents want.
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Tourists not contributing money (because they’re staying on the ship and eating on the ship, so the cruise line has figured out how to capture providing those services).
I’d think that it’d be far simpler to just charge an entry fee, rather than outright banning classes of ships.
If someone’s going to pay an entry fee, then there’s no question that they’re dropping some money into the city. That’s predictable, and they can adjust pricing to throttle tourist traffic to whatever level of traffic they want.
The only time I’d think it’d make sense to ban a class of ships is if there are some problems tied fundamentally to the ship class. I remember reading that one concern in Venice was that the amount of water pressure created by very large ships was creating some kind of erosion problems – I mean, the city’s ancient.
kagis
Looks like they required large cruise ships to disembark at a different center, rather than sailing straight into the city, though they can still visit.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/venice-divert-large-cruise-ships-city-center-51038139
� – After years of studies, protests and legal debates, the Italian government has announced that large cruise ships and other massive vessels will no longer be able to enter Venice’s large canal, preventing tens of thousands of tourists a day from disembarking in the heart of the famous city on the water.
The vessels will now dock in a new passenger facility that will be built in the nearby industrial port town of Marghera on the Venetian mainland. The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, hailed the plan as a compromise to residents and environmental groups and said the move will not affect the lucrative tourism businesses.
In that situation, sure, then I can see it making sense.
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It’s not only about the pollution: Cruise ships are also bad for cities as cities. A cruise ship will vomit 5000 people into your city center. Most european city centers are quite small, so 2-3 cruise ships will totally overcrowd the city. People might buy some tourist shit, but they will get their breakfast & dinner on the cruise ship. That’s bad for local restaurants. They will not stay overnight, which is bad for local businesses, hotels etc. And they will push out other tourist, because who wants to stay in Dubrovnik when the experience is like this?
It really does make sense for cities to ban cruise ships and advocate other types of tourism, where the tourists are “doing” more for the local economy.
Their problem was never those ships traveling around mate. The environment they talk about is that right there where they are. On a global scale cruise ships are irrelevant.
My city hosts a number of cruise ships, and it was explained to me they can’t be connected to the city grid, so they instead keep their diesel engines running the entire time.
It’s a local air quality issue, and the bigger the ship the more it pollutes locally, even though it might be more efficient on a global level.
Even if efficiency per passenger is better with larger ships, they should definitely still ban the largest ships. The largest ships simply shouldn’t exist.
Banning big ships shouldn’t be the only thing Nice does, but it’s a very good step 1. Step 2 should be limiting the total number of ships and/or passengers that can visit the city.
Only been on one cruise, but I wondered how much gas would those thousands and thousands of people burned driving around for vacation? Even if they flew, still seems far more wasteful.
Take cruises away and lower-middle class families don’t get much of a vacation. How else could you travel to foreign countries, get free food and a room for under $1,000? It would be $400 (plus a bunch of fees I’m sure) per adult for me to get to the Bahamas.
LOL, my gf, her mom and I went in late December 2020. Talk about dodging a bullet! Might never do it again. My Filipino wife would hardly be impressed by the tropics. “Oh boy. It’s like home except I don’t know anyone or the language.” :)
Cruiseships are still much, much more polluting even though they carry thousands of people. Look st some of the graphs here: https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/luxury-cruise-giant-emits-10-times-more-air-pollution-sox-all-europes-cars-study
For example looking at Barcelona, the 105 cruiseships that arrived in a year there polluted 5-6x as much as half a million cars did that year. So by that metric, for 1 cruiseship, you can operate 25000 cars.
One cruise operator alone had a pollution in Europe 10 times that of all cars in Europe. Another cruise operator added another 4 times the European car fleet. So if we were to ban all cars in Europe, that would only compensate 7% of the emissions of two of the cruise ship operators.
