So you want someone to get off the plane at a major airport, get on a train to go to another train to ride it to a bus so they can get a rental car and then get to their destination? That seems to be the opposite of efficient.
Right now, you have to drive to the airport, park and take a plane. Mass transit isn't going to help everyone directly, but offering a good multi-modal transportation network will not only help some people directly, but free up capacity on the highways for others for whom the mass transit doesn't work.
I don't disagree that other modes of transportation are efficient and useful. Much of the efficiency of the other modes of transport are lost over distance relative to aircraft (ie the western US).
Correct. However, as an example, if the California HSR system is built, it will replace the LAX-SFO route that is currently popular since people don't want to drive quite that far. Right now flying and driving are similar time wise on that route, but HSR will cut the time significantly.
Originally Posted by
FlyDeltaJets87
What's funny is the OP in post 203 says he has and uses an IPhone and a Samsung Galaxy III phone. Two phones. I have an IPhone too and they aren't cheap, never mind having a second phone. Seems like there's a lot of "waste" there as the OP could easily find a cheaper phone (or just one phone). Yet the OP tells us we're wasteful...
I only have one SIM card active, and we have a ton of upgrades available, and I got the SGS III for $50. The iPhone I bought for $400 on contract the day it came out (64GB). I have two phones primarily because my work doesn't allow cameras, so the iPhone has a disabled camera, and I can travel, take pictures, and get LTE on the SGS III.
Originally Posted by
MS02113
Good for them! Who are you to tell them how to spend it?
Who are you to tell me not to judge them for it?
Originally Posted by
MS02113
As a regular passenger on the BOS-LGA Delta Shuttle, operated by Shuttle America and served with a 76-passenger E175 (gasp!), I must be triply dumb.
I really hope you are connecting to something else. If you're not getting a connecting flight, that is a totally idiotic route. It is shorter and MUCH more comfortable to get on Acela or Amtrak Regional. You'll have twice the room, LTE and Wifi the whole way, and a beautiful ride along the CT Shoreline.
Originally Posted by
MS02113
Examples?
Assigned seats, first class, and the resulting lower utilization of their planes because of long turnaround times.
Originally Posted by
tigerstraveler99
If you say people waste money flying anything but Southwest, what hotel do you stay at? Days Inn, Travelodge, EconoLodge, etc or do you go KOA?
Holiday Inn Express or Springhill suites usually. If I'm not staying with family or friends.
Originally Posted by
Calchas
So because there are already small distortions from a perfect market, it is best to abandon the concept altogether?
If you think that a lot of things in this country are actually a totally free market, you are delusional. There are a lot of markets that have heavy incentives, often very perverted ones. If we had better incentives, we'd have similar governmental involvement, but better outcomes.
Originally Posted by
Calchas
It tends to serve a high density market, which large parts of the United States lack. I mean, great, if you want to build such a thing, go for it, I am not a US taxpayer or a US resident so my opinion on US politics is largely void. But it is a political question and I don't see it happening any time soon. In the meantime there is a high demand in these far flung markets for fast public transportation, which some air carrier will always try to serve (unless you just ban them)!
Yes, and it's expensive for the taxpayer in perpetuity. Governments in Europe, Japan and China decided that it is worth abandoning the concept of a free market in rail transportation to provide rail as a cheap public service (well the UK government pretends otherwise but there is no need to debate this detail). As I say that is a choice to make by a government because a market will not push in that direction, but to me it looks like the US is unlikely to go down this route. There isn't even a metro line to IAD for goodness sake.
This is true, but nowhere near as true as you think it is.
Amtrack rail in the US currently requires about 1.6 MJ per passenger km, whereas air requires something like 1.9 MJ per passenger km. Cars require something more like 2.3 MJ / passenger km. (With these new propfans, planes could possibly beat HSR
). [1 MJ (megajoule) is about a third of a kilowatt hour, or roughly the food energy contained in a Snickers bar.]
Your "tiny fraction" is actually about 85%.
Source:
US Department of Energy databook. Wikipedia has a
summary if you do not feel like spending the day buried in Microsoft Excel.
The main problem with planes is not the sheer energy they use: you always need lots of energy to move people long distances, whether you do it fast or slow. Rather the issue is that they dump their pollution in the high atmosphere rather than near the ground. This can seed clouds and might cause other climatic problems. On the other hand, aviation fuel burns a lot cleaner than the coal used to run your electrical train.
Now this is a big can of worms to open in this already expanding thread so I am very sorry everyone! However, I simply cannot let disinformation sit unchallenged.
Flying does not have an ethical property appertaining to it. If you wish to ascribe it one, I wish you had said so earlier rather than trying to persuade us a neutral market would simply eliminate flying on the basis of premises we have shown to be faulty already.
There is an absolutely fantastic, cheap and heavily subsidised high speed rail link between Osaka and Tokyo (the Shinkansen, or bullet train). It takes roughly three hours, if I remember correctly. Yet JL and NH continue to run dozens of 777s between ITM and HND every day, each taking about 60 minutes in the air, at well over twice the price. Similarly BA and AF run many services between LHR and CDG, in competition with the publicly subsidised Eurostar. There are busy domestic air services in the UK, a tiny place with a (reasonable) rail service. Flying isn't going to disappear if the US gets a few railways I'm afraid.
Business class or first class. You decided that they are too expensive. Other people have other priorities.
And trains are not economical without substantial public subsidy.
Most of the books and papers I read are not available on Audible, alas.
A substantial exaggeration. There's no such thing as an automatic take off, for example. Most landings are done by hand. Whenever something goes wrong (it happens more than you might think!) the autopilot is not a good as the real thing. I think we will have driverless cars before pilotless planes.
The cost in rail is the capital outlay. Once you get past that, you can operate at a break even or at a profit. Even Amtrak's NEC, which is an incredibly expensive line to operate due to legacy and location, is profitable when you don't count the CAPEX that was required to make it what it is today.
HSR is critical to the US economy, and the US's ability to function in the future. We are rapidly approaching carmageddon in many of the megaregions. We need better public transit, and good incentives to encourage transit oriented development around the transit stations. If you pull even 15% of car traffic off the roads, it will help immensely. Also, the government pays a LOT for roads, and roads per passenger miles are much more expensive than trains.
Your example in Japan, if US security were applied to it, would make the two methods take the same amount of time. You also have to account for comfort. Would you rather be sardine on a commercial airliner, or travel on a comfortable and fantastic Shinkansen?
That figure for MJ used is based mostly on Amtrak's national network of P42DC's pulling big, heavy trains that are probably half full a lot of the time, and have sleeper cabins and the like. The NEC, with high density electric traction is a lot lower. If the FRA got more realistic with their crash rules, like the rest of the world is, then the energy would go down every farther. The Acela looks like a TGV, but there is almost no mechanical commonality because the TGV wouldn't meet FRA crash standards. The Acela weights far more than a TGV, and the power cars could be stripped down and used as bridge frames they are so strong. Those things absolutely lumber down the tracks, and the energy required to accelerate them to 150mph is enormous, although not as large per passenger mile as a jet aircraft. The Acela is basically like Chris Christie on rails.
Originally Posted by
dilbertsdaddy
Freaking hilarious.
Everyone hates RJ's, airlines know it, and at least DL is taking steps to resolve that. I wish it could happen over night but it can't. The 70/90 seaters are fine.
Seat assignments and first class are archaic? I totally understand - waiting for my flight in the skyclub, knowing where I will be sitting, and having a good seat in first class away from the kettles is so....1950. How dare DL provide a service Southwest won't! The horror!
Thanks for the laugh, and enjoy your flight to South Africa on Southwest....oh wait....!
We'll see how they do. The question then is: how did they let it get this way?
Comparing Southwest to an international airline is pointless, as Southwest isn't an international airline.
Assigned seating is not only a PITA, and annoying, but it adds time to the boarding process, which is annoying, and causes fewer flights per day with the same aircraft, which is waste, and drives costs up. I feel like a broken record, but people just don't seem to get the way the Southwest model works, and why it is superior.
Originally Posted by
FlyDeltaJets87
Driving is "cheaper" only if you count gas as the only cost - a common misconception. For starters, don't forget all the tolls between here and there. Crossing the bridges in NY (if going near NYC), and the turnpikes in PA and OH. The PA turnpike is VERY expensive. The US Government says with factoring in gas, types of maintenance (scheduled and unscheduled) and depreciation and all other factors, automobiles are really $0.565 per mile to operate on average (some more, some less depending on the vehicle type).
It depends on how long you keep the car. You still have some milage-based maintenance, but if you are keeping the car for a long time, you don't really have to count depreciation. If you are only keeping it a few years, then driving gets a lot more expensive on a per-mile basis. I plan on keeping the Civic until it is at least 10 years old, so I don't really care how many miles I put on it.
Originally Posted by
javabytes
If I have a restaurant, is my job to feed the most people at the lowest cost possible? If so, I guess I should be serving only hot dogs?
That analogy makes no sense. A restaurant is not focused on a single objective that is metric-based (like traveling is).
Originally Posted by
aviatorzz
See, what I am curious about is that PVD has three mainlines to ATL a day, and with all this talk about driving multiple hours (thought of that just kills my back!) to find a nasty, old WN plane has me wondering why he just doesn't drive to PVD to pick up a mainline aircraft, if most of his experiences were on DL.
Southwest is not nasty and old, that's for sure. I do fly out of PVD on Southwest now, so I don't know what you're getting at here. It's only an hour from me, we're lucky to have two tier 2 airports immediately near us, BDL and PVD, (although, for example, going to the Traverse City area, the nearest real airport on the other end is GRR, which isn't too bad, but not nearly as close as we have here), and easy access to BOS, JFK, LGA, and EWR (why would anyone want to go there?).
Originally Posted by
aviatorzz
I think there is a reason why WN is the only airline with their business model set up the way they do, mainly because it has been costing them a ton of money. One of the few reasons why they were so successful on the books in the mid to late 2000s is that they took a gamble, hedged their fuel, and came out wildly on top. But since their hedge time has come and gone, they are now hurting for that extra cash flow that dried up.
I can't wait for the day that WN starts charging for bag fees (because that day is coming). I will buy everyone a round.
LOL. Southwest's model is based on eliminating all the waste. When you operate more efficiently, you can offer lower prices, and people will buy tickets on your airline. Now Delta might start to compete more, since Southwest is often the online mainline airline to offer a lot of routes right now at airports like PVD, but Southwest's model will still come out on top. Southwest is a literal textbook model of efficient operations across industries.
Originally Posted by
FlirtatiousFlyer
Scenario #1: I live somewhere that is either NOT near a mainline airport or not on a popular route (say plattsburg ny to washington DC) and must commute daily (or even more generously 4x a week) for work, 520 miles each way daily. This is VERY plausible btw for folks who work for lobbying firms or have to come to DC for political work. Or perhaps I live here in DC and have a beloved parent/relative who is ill up in plattsburg and i must commute to sit with them 3x a week for treatments. Currently, if I'm willing to pay the $$ for it, the market has a solution for me: I can fly. Where there is demand, here comes supply. Your solution would be, in this specific case...?
Scenario #2: I do not live in an area that is close to a mainline airport or i need to go somewhere that is not on a route popular enough to support 737s and i have a disability that prevents me from driving. Your solution would be, in this specific case...?
As an aside I do not understand how you recognize the delays and congestion that come from the current air traffic network but seem to think if we forced most of those regional folks onto trains we could avoid rail congestion and delays? have you ever seen the congestion and delays at union station in DC? granted trains carry more people than the regional jets do but they all have to share the tracks, whereas the sky is a lot bigger.
Your closest airport is Albany. Albany offers mainline flights starting from just [insert Southwest promotion here] to BWI.
The concept of flying there on a near daily basis is physically impossible. You have to get to BWI (1hr 33 mins from Downtown DC), then you have to go through security (2hr), then you have to fly, and even if you were flying direct to the middle of nowhere, that's still not possible to commute multiple times a week.
If you can't drive in America, you're pretty much screwed or limited to major cities with mass transit anyways, which of course have Southwest service and various airport shuttles or whatever.
Trains can carry a far higher density of people. If we invested in HSR what we have invested in planes, runways, airport terminals, and all the infrastructure that is built around them, the capacity would be absolutely massive.
Originally Posted by
FlyDeltaJets87
Such responses demonstrate OP is nothing but a troll and I wish he'd go over to the WN forum and see if the WN crowd over there thinks he makes any sense.
I'm not a troll. I just don't subscribe to coming up with all these nutty hypothetical scenarios of people who can't seem to drive somewhere for a couple of hours. This America. We drive everywhere.
Originally Posted by
BobRoss
I'm not going to argue that SouthWest, JetBlue, and Virgin America provide a better coach experience than the US legacies. In my years (and hundreds) of flights on DL Mainline I can't think of a time in which I've had unacceptable experiences due to the cabin staff. I'd agree, WN/B6/VRD are consistently better, but DL hasn't been bad. Is it as nice? Sometimes. Is that enough to offset all my upgrades? Negative.
That said, I'll agree my biggest gripes and variance in service levels have been on the regional carriers. I've complained to DL many times that the coach experience on the RJs, especially the single-class CR2s (the tiny ones) have ranged from great to unacceptable. That has to be doing damage to DL's brand and, to their credit, they are limiting regional carriers or upgauging to aircraft with F, and the cabin crew apparently get upgraded as well.
Now, to the level that regionals are "less safe" - perhaps at some minute statistical level - yes. But for practical consideration regionals are just as safe as mainline.
Patrick Smith, a Delta 757/767 FO states:
http://www.askthepilot.com/questiona...gional-safety/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/flyingcheap/
Those operations are pretty shady if you ask me.