Originally Posted by
ashill
Yes, it would be absurd. (And the minimum subscription is 6 round trips per year, not 3.) In addition to the 12% statistic from that NY Times article, 53% of Americans never fly; in other words, the average American never flies. The Bay Area isn’t typical, but I see no reason to believe it’s so atypical as to move the average person from never flying to flying multiple times per year. And even if flights are $12 each way, most people don’t even think of flying — I bet (without looking it up) that most of the traffic from the Bay Area to Vegas (and moreso LA to Vegas) goes by car, not plane.
I haven't checked lately, but SFO has been slower recovering passenger traffic than LAX - largely because of the difficulty of flying into most countries in east Asia right now (they split out domestic and international boardings in the stats). Some of the dropoff is domestic connections to flights TPAC flights, but a lot is likely due to local people flying less. The Bay Area has done much better than most of the country on keeping infection rates down, and it's not exactly a terrible place to ride out a pandemic, so I suspect a lot of people haven't seen much need to start frequent travel again.
A quick check of passenger volumes at SFO, OAK, and SJC looks like there are 5.3-ish round trips per Bay Area resident per year. That doesn't take into account that many of the boardings are people changing planes on their way from somewhere else, to somewhere else. Given what we know from that article, as well as some people we know here who do 50+ RTs/year, the travel patterns in the Bay Area probably aren't drastically different from the rest of the country.