Air travel nowadays is all about the delay. From two conversations yesterday, tales of miserable delay. A family visiting a friend stretched a two-hour flight into twelve, getting home at 2 a.m. And then from a road warrior, the observation that her delays just continue to get worse as the months drag on. While maintenance delays were often resolved in the old days by pushing a fresh plane into place, she now routinely sits until her original ride is fixed. The skinnied-down price structure of the modern day air fare somehow ain't accounting for the value of a passenger's time (for my road warrior friend, maybe a couple hundred dollars an hour, grossed up) or the cascading misery caused by wrecked plans. How can this unconscionable waste be justified by cheaper fares? Hell of a way to run a railroad. Air travel, it seems, is broken.
Not sure what the answer is, but maybe the airline industry needs to have a good old fashioned nervous breakdown, like the Big Three did, so they can bottom out,come to their senses, and put a more sensible structure in place.Meanwhile, high speed rail offers a sensible alternative for the short hop. Take Dallas to Houston. Many now sit on the drive-fly bubble. Yes, it's only a one hour flight, and yes, it takes four hours to drive, but four is less than one in this strange calculus. When you tack on travel to the airport, finding parking, walking to the terminal, check in, security lines, procuring ground transportation and...the big, fat probability of suffering a delay, driving is the comfortable, dependable, quicker choice.
So, high speed rail might split the difference, getting you there in half the time it takes to drive, without having to endure flying: the security line beating and festering delay anxiety, topped off by some horrific delay that made mild even the wildest of the anxious fears you'd harbored. High speed rail makes sense where major population centers are 200 to 600 miles apart, gets the job done at 150 to 200 miles per hour, is not weather dependent like flying, and presumably would run like, well, like a well-run railroad.
Fix the airlines and bring on the high speed rail.
Photo: Mike Chen on flickr
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