Because ordinarily when they announce they are doing something nice for us, they are actually doing something really destructive to us.

So, happy holidays! Enjoy!

Currently being tested in Cincinnati.

#2: Wow, they can't explain how it will let them screen passengers faster. They just want us all to decide that this is a normal, and sensible thing to do anyway. Every once in a while, I wonder if there is a power trip happening somewhere. ("If they really want to fly, then they'll bunny hop to the metal detector...")

I'm also figuring Brown has some connection to the truth because his hard numbers compute (and match what I learned when I was working on an instrument license) -- unlike his political claim about Cheney moving to Wyoming for Constitutional purposes.

Exactly. This is exactly what is going on.

("If they really want to fly, then they'll bunny hop to the metal detector...")

And maybe the hokey-pokey through the metal detectors, since that is what it is all about, after all.

The problem is not number of runways, it's number of planes.

The problem is not airspace restrictions, it's number of planes.

Why is the number of planes a problem? Because airlines have been increasing the number of flights. How do they do this without flying half empty planes? By flying smaller planes.

Thus, the *real* problem with airspace. Regional jets. The most delayed airports, this year, in order. ORD, JFK, ATL, LGA, EWR. In all five, the percent of RJ traffic is 40% or higher -- this is stunning when you consider that the number three and number one *international* airports in the US are 1 & 2, and you don't fly RJs across the oceans.

In O'Hare's case, 53% of the traffic in the last quarter was RJs. Those planes carried 12% of the passengers that passed through ORD.

Back when they used turboprops, this wasn't a problem. Turboprops need much less runway -- ORD would stick them off in a corner. They flight at different altitudes that jets. You could easily add 10-20 turboprop arrivals to almost any airport.

But now, we have RJs. They fly just like bigger jets, they need long runways, they're too fast to fly at the turboprop levels. So, they have to be treated as just another narrowbody -- doesn't matter that they're carrying 45 pax, not 145, they'll need the exact same spacing that the MD-80 or 737 did.

The fix is *simple.* Penalize airlines for flying three 40 seat RJs when they could fly one 140 seat narrowbody.

The airlines tell us that we want frequency. More flights is nice -- but they need to be more flights *on time.* Packing 11 ORD-STL flight into 14 hours isn't useful when 7 of them are late. Forcing people into three hour layovers to make sure that they'll catch that 777 to London isn't useful.

Drop JFK to 40, and ORD to 80, arrivals per hour, and they'll be on time 90% of the time and close the rest. Right now, we expect 55 arrivals per hour into JFK, and 100 into ORD, and unless the weather is perfect, they can't handle the load without delays.

Now, more runways can help -- esp. at ORD, which deals with everyone runway but one crossing another runway (and that one might as well cross another.) But just building more runways won't help if the airlines then pull 15 narrow body flights and replace them with 45 RJs.

Of course, this will all be moot in five years, given Jet-A fuel costs.

Paris-London is a couple of hours by rail, with much less time needed to travel from St Pancras than from Heathrow.

What is the reason that there don't seem to be any commercial propeller planes flying in the US anymore?

Remember, the background agenda of the "air-travel security push" is to discourage long-distance travel -- especially in or out of the Homeland, but also within it. After all, it's much harder to control people if they can go somewhere else....

Except of course, if it's really Security Theatre that you've been practicing during the last 6 or so years and now you can make a show of relaxing some of the restrictions that were bogus anyway....

It wouldn't work for the US coast-to-coast routes, but given the current 2-hour checkin/security clearance lead time and the hour it takes to get your bags and get into town at the other end, modern high speed rail should be competitive with jet airliners for any distance up to about a thousand miles.

(I went on a Shinkansen Nozomi 500 last summer, in Japan. It's the latest generation of bullet train, with enough acceleration to push you back into your seat as it leaves the platform. Cruise speed is comparable to a slow turboprop, except we bought our tickets fifteen minutes before it left, and if we'd known our way around the station we could have cut it finer: and it took us right into the centre of our destination. As it is, it worked out about two hours faster than taking a 737 over the same 380 mile distance. This stuff isn't rocket science; it's just the incremental development of a technology the USA gave up on about 60 years ago. Mutter, grumble, why don't we have trains like that here in the UK?)

#19: Is that to go with the newly raised 20-gram chocolate ration?

... Sorry, brain fart: it's the last generation. The new Nozomi 700 is supposed to be faster, point to point.

For real railroad porn, here's what a performance-tuned TGV can do.

There were 57 billion passenger movements by rail in the UK last year, and the figure's rising, with significant annual growth (petrol is at US $9 for a US gallon). They want to search passengers at 250 stations? There are 128 stations with names beginning with 'A' alone, and that's without adding in the London Underground and other light rail systems. Also, the stations were mostly built between 1830 and 1900. The SRA is having horrible trouble just retrofitting them all with ticket barriers, never mind trying to segregate travellers from the non-travelling public.

Upshot: all they can do is the usual security theatre song-and-dance routine, and maybe pin down the end-points of the major inter-city routes when they've got a call out for suspects on the run.

First off, Amtrak is a dinosaur; it is slow, doesn't go where people want to go, delays are constant, and it's not that flexible. The lines it runs on can't exceed 60mph in most locations, and upgrading them for higher speeds means new alignments. Building a brand new, high speed network of rail lines would cost BILLIONS and there's no guarantee it would be used any better than Amtrak currently is.

With the delays in plane queues and security inspections, the radius where driving or taking the train over flying is getting larger, but it's not more than a couple of hundred miles. Figure two hours in the airport and even a one hour flight time (distance from Raleigh to Atlanta, for example), and you STILL beat driving or taking a train that same distance. Even three hours in the airport isn't faster than driving or taking the train; this country is just too big for anything but regional HSR lines, mostly commuter rail stuff that doesn't have to be high speed.

For some reason, Amtrak isn't supposed to be subsidized by government, although highways and air travel is. This is part of the reason why Amtrak doesn't serve much of the country any more. I doubt that rail would otherwise be more expensive than those multi-billion-dollar air travel system and the multi-billion-dollar interstate highway system.

I wish it were all over the country.

I hate flying and I driving too.

Love, C.

My personal record for air travel is 36 hours, but that included a ten-hour layover in Taipei, which ranks as the most boring airport I've ever been in.

You have it exactly right. An airport can have only so many operations (takeoffs & landings) in an hour. But Delta and Continental and United all think that you can cram more into that time period somehow.

If I lived in the Northeast, I would drive everywhere I could, take the train, or fly out of airports outside of the chokepoints.

Oh, and that Fox News clip? That can't have been real. That had to have been made for The Daily Show.

...

That was real?

I feel kinda sorry for them. Kinda.

The problem is US Airspace is transactions. An independent runway can land about 45 planes an hour. If you replace half your 737s with RJs, you can still land about 45 planes an hour -- but you've cut your passenger capacity by a third. Replace all of them, and it's two thirds.

If you fly a schedule that demands that ORD land 120 aircraft an hour, twenty of them will be delayed, because ORD in perfect weather can only land 100 of them in that hour. If the runways get wet? The max drops to 80. If they're slick, or the winds are strong, 68 or less.

The problem with the NY Metro airports? The exact same thing. You cannot land 70 aircraft at JFK in one hour except under perfect weather. You *cannot* land 50 aircraft at LaGuardia in one hour, period -- but the airlines keep trying to.

That's the problem. We don't need 747s or A380s to fix this. We need 737s, MD-80s, A320s. Replace two 40-50 seat RJs with one 737, and the problem stops.

That may be the original intent, but Amtrak has been subsidized by the government for as long as I can remember. It routinely loses money, and while it is nice to ride a train instead of having to drive the same distance, it only takes one set of delays, or a derailment, to sour many people into not trying it again.

The airlines immediately responded by scheduling 20% (or some such) more flights through Atlanta, with the result that the delays were back where they were.

Despite all the finger-pointing at regional jets and the like, I suspect this is fundamentally not a problem that has a technological solution.

(Want to solve it? Find a way to make the airlines actually care if their flights are late. Right now, where's the incentive?)

More like they don't have any (good) interest in your heart.

Oh god... what it would do for Disneyland is outrageous. (But then again, maybe DLand makes all of its money on outrageous parking prices and would block the construction?)

LAX to San Diego Convention-center, without trying to park in downtown SD during ComicCon weekend? THANKS MOM!

Would these benefits actually make it popular? I have no clue! But then again, the Bay Area can't run light rail on time, it's not like building high-speed trains will magically turn the rail companies into the Japan-Rail group...

The California High-Speed Rail project is a proposed high-speed rail system in the state of California. The system is being planned by the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which will design, build, and operate the system.

It is currently in the Environment Impact Report (EIR) and route selection stages, with the second of two Draft Environmental Statements released to the public on July 20, 2007. An implementation plan approved in August 2005 estimated that it would take 8 to 11 years to "develop and begin operation of an initial segment of the California high-speed train."[2]

If built, high-speed trains will be able to travel across California at speeds of up to 220 mph (354.1 km/h), potentially linking San Francisco to Los Angeles in under two and a half hours.

The initial premise of Amtrak was that it would "pay for itself", however. I would also point out that the interstate system most definitely HAS paid for itself, through more efficient movement of both goods and people all over this nation. There's a very good reason why businesses set up and relocate to areas served by interstates; it makes good economic sense.

The problem with the interstate system is that no one ever thought ahead to what happens after it was finished; the funding was set up to build it, but maintenance was left up to the states. Everyone just thought it would remain 'as is' without further need for upgrades or repairs. Now, more than 50 years after it was begun, the need for those upgrades and repairs are staggering, and the states can't afford the costs by themselves.

You say that the interstates have paid for themselves through the additional economic growth they creates, however rail does exactly the same thing.

If you subtracted the secondary economic benefits of rail from the direct governmental costs, it could very well be paying for itself.

I went to a marketing-fest for 3D modelling and animation software last week, and the first presenter was a local architectural visualization firm that showed footage of the CA High Speed Rail project that they'd done. Apparently all the route plans include upgrading the road crossings between SD and SF with either tunnels, open below-grade underpasses, or overpasses. That's going to cost a middle-aged fortune.

I lived in Tokyo for nearly a year, and I've had two pan-Japan exploration trips. Using a combination of rail, bus, and occasionally bike there is nowhere you can't get in Japan.

Just a few notes: without the eminently affordable, foreigner-only Japan Rail Pass, the shinkansen can be quite expensive... Tokyo to Sendai or Osaka can run up to $300 - one way. That's a little more than I'm used to paying for roundtrip airfare from D.C. to either Florida or New York ($140 - 270 round trip). However, the JR DOES, currently, 'pay for itself' I believe.

The other problem is that, once you GET where you're going, you need to get that last 20-30-80 miles to your final destination by some other means.

Japan has an excellent local rail system, and quite good (if slightly confusing) small-town buses. The problem with American rail travel is not just that it's insufficient... it's that it's insufficiently interconnected, and insufficiently supported by local lines.

This isn't true in all of the US, but the performance is spotty in the areas where I've traveled extensively by rail and bus. NYC and D.C. are huge commuter towns, so the buses and subway and rail are all nicely interconnected (though I still believe NYC subways are designed to trick non-locals). However Philly is not a rail commuter town... it's much more driveable than either NYC or D.C., but the public transportation tends to be dirty, creepy, and confusing when compared to D.C. or NYC. (D.C.'s metro website is really... a technological marvel. You can select any bus stop or train station in its network and get a route - with travel times and arrival/departure times, to any other train station or bus stop).

The other side of the Japanese Rail system coin is that highways in Japan ARE heavily tolled and taxed, especially for long distance use of freeways. It makes me wonder if well-used, state of the art high speed trains and free-use highways are an either/or proposition.

This is all rather disconnected. I guess I'm saying that there is a rail experience in the US, at least in the northeast. It's pretty good in a lot of places because it has to be, but in places where it doesn't have to be it's shameful compared to anywhere in Japan. I'd put in some tax bucks to make it better, and to encourage co-ordination... is there some REASON that there's no way for me to get from the greyhound bus terminal to the local rail station without taking a taxi 30 miles? Is there a way to make the signage in the NYC subway as transparent as the signage in the Tokyo subway? Would the U.S. be able to make the system efficient enough that round trip tickets from NYC to DC aren't $600?

When I was growing up in Philly in the 1950s it had a decent, though not really great, public transit system, and had reasonable ridership on the suburban-to-city rail systems. The economic crash in the 70's, which was the result of white flight from the city, ended that. Up until that time the city had failed in building the high-speed roads to meet the demand; they simply couldn't keep up. I haven't been back there since 1970, so I don't have direct knowledge of the situation since, but I've been told that a good part of the city is still underpopulated, so the transportation is largely aimed at moving people between downtown and the 2nd ring suburbs.

That said, I am stuck having to travel through all 5 of the most-delayed airports in the US several times each year. It's all well and good to say that reducing flights and rearranging capacity on planes will help the delays, but the truth is that the airlines are constantly going to be figuring out how to open up more seats to fill. One advantage of a steady stream of smaller flights is (theoretically, at least) a steadier stream of people moving through this week's version of TSA Security Theater. Bunching up the same number of passengers that would be traveling on, say 12 flights over the course of 12 hours onto, say, six flights over the course of 12 hours will just lead to unbelievable queues at checkin and security in bunches. Wouldn't be long before people would find themselves showing up at the airport 5 hours early just to make sure they had enough time to get to their gate, so where's the benefit from a time-saving standpoint?

And speaking of TSA Security Theater, WTF is *this* about?!?

Ack! I didn't think of that. But it gives me a new name for him: Il Doofus.

Meredith at 56, those Clear guys have been around for at least a year, maybe more.

I think I shall write some letters to my state rep and the Governor.

Amtrak suffers from the Gov't not owning the rails on which it runs. I like Amtrak. I use it whenever it's feasible. Took it to Seattle; cost less and was far more pleasant a trip (going first class) than it would have cost to travel coach by air; for two people).

But the rules are such that it's late; always. Why? Because the railroads (who own the rights of way) make it late. Amtrak is last in priority. The railroads get to add cars (we had a six hour delay at Jack London because UP wanted to add a coach for two of it's employees).

The NE Corridor (and the Surfliner, from SD to Paso Robles) make money. Extend the same level of certainty to SD to SF (or all the way to Seattle) and there would be at least break even (and there is no reason Amtrak has to make money. Break even is better than I demand). I'll add two-days to my trip (and it's less than that with the extra time I have to budget to clear the security theater at the airport these days. I was flying to Scotland and I almost missed my 1100 flight, arriving at the airport at 0530) for travel in comfort.

The benefits you ascribe to the highway system, apply to rail. Hell, if we didn't pay tens of millions to the rail companies to get access to the rails, there'd be a lot less red-ink on Amtrak. And the savings in petroleum aren't counted in the ledger either. The goods and the like you are crediting to the roads don't mean much to the federal budget (yes you can credit taxes, but everything which moves goods/people generates taxes).

Rail is better, cheaper and more pleasant than air travel.

That's worth a lot.

ethan, I'm sorry. I rather like you, and wouldn't want to cause you any grief, considering what you've already had to deal with this year. How about you sit down, have a nice cup of tea laced with brandy, and remember we're getting closer to the end of Il Doofus' regime.
::grins cheekily, pats ethan on the the hand::

@Greg #46 & Leah #52 combined-
Last-mile connection is very important, and is part of why I brought up places like Disneyland, Las Vegas and Tijuana. They are already the last-mile, assuming the Vegas train station is in walking distance of The Strip. (Disneyland has a history of hauling it's visitors to the park (the Disneyland Hotel monorail, etc), I'm sure they'd be happy if people were dumped out of the train station in Downtown-Disney, and then had to walk up to the theme-park...) San Francisco by street-car, BART, and Bus already gets a variety of carless tourists where they're going, so I imagine they'd be fine.

The problem would be people who live elsewhere but want to visit LA, or are visiting the Southern-Cali homestead. On the other hand, if there were tons of carless people getting dumped off at Los Angeles Union Station, there would be a real reason to make bus & subway lines that go where people want to. (The subway already goes from Union to Hollywood, and Universal Studios)

@Leah #52
The fun thing about the high-priced toll-roads in Japan is that you really can get where you're going rather quickly (by Japanese car standards). High Tolls convince a lot of people that they'd rather slog through the slow and narrow highway routes, so the toll-ways aren't overused. I wonder if the long stretches between metro-areas pay for themselves, or if money from heavily traveled suburb->city-center stretches flows out to them (I certainly don't know).

The GREAT thing about the toll roads for a solo-traveler, is you can take a bus on them for about the same price as the toll. The prices are fairly reasonable, once you're adjusted to paying too much for everything *eyeroll*

At least I have a nice view from the aerie, here at home.

Doh! You are, of course, completely correct. One way tickets from Tokyo to Osaka seem to average between $120ish and $140ish.

I think I may have misremembered a time when I was buying tickets for two... bad brain, bad!

...hey, what's in this? I'm feeling woozy...

I suspect Disney has a shuttle running from the Anaheim train station (which is at Angels Stadium).

The tea was a nice herbal mix my grandma gave me, involving the lovely plant known as belladonna. She swears it's the best and helps her deal with her troubles. I was only trying to help!

That's OK. I do know that with great power comes great responsibility. Bawhahahah!!!

-----
* Your surname isn't Brewster, is it? Mortimer's daughter?

I'd love to ride rail like that in CA.

My comfort level for choosing to drive rather than fly has gotten to be about 13-15 hours from the Bay Area; That's Tucson southward or Portland northward from here, generally in a day-and-a-half rather than the one long day push.

--Ru,
--not abi, Xopher, Tania, nor Fromme the land of Squeak.

meredith@56: I do not think your description of bunching caused by fewer larger planes computes. With centralized security, having to pass (e.g.) 8050 people in some hours and 7950 in others would not make a big difference; plus, current airlines (unlike the late Ansett & TAA) can ]counterprogram[ to fit into each others' void spaces, leveling the load.

You mean that Xopher is Jamaican?

Well, I have to admit, the mail doesn't always stop when it goes by my box. (Especially the one at work!)

Are you sure you're not Teresa?

P.J. Evans #91: That would also be telling.