Short haul air travel is declining

The LA Times reports that short-haul air travel is declining substantially:

In fact, the number of travelers on many short-haul routes has dropped significantly in the past two decades. Passengers have been chased away by a combination of factors — higher fares, more airport hassles, repeated recessions, new technology for video meetings — even as the number of travelers boarding U.S. airlines has climbed.

According to U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, it's a phenomenon that has hit many routes and most airlines. Consider these numbers:

• In 1990, people flying on short-haul routes, 400 miles or less, made up nearly 34% of domestic passengers on U.S. airlines. In 2009, the last year for which full numbers are available, the percentage had dropped to 26.6%.

Southwest saw the share of its annual passenger load who take short-haul flights decline from nearly 59% in 1990 to just under 35% by 2009.

The average Southwest passenger in 1990 traveled 502 miles each way. In 2009, that average trip lengthened to 863 miles, a 72% increase.

Aviation consultant Michael Boyd, who advises airports on how to attract new service, said the trend was a national one.

"Air transportation does not work for many short-haul markets as well as it did for 20 or 30 years, for a couple of reasons," Boyd said.

What happened to these trips? Are they being forgone, or substituted with teleconferencing, rail or driving? These are stark numbers:

But Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly said it was much more than that, as Southwest is just one player in a national story. And the national story is that many short-haul routes are handling fewer passengers today than 10 or 20 years ago.

For example, 2.2 million passengers flew between Phoenix and Los Angeles in 1990, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data. By 2009, that had dropped to just under 1.3 million, a 41% drop.

On the 185-mile route between Boston Logan and LaGuardia, the passenger totals dropped from 1.8 million in 1990 to 1 million in 2009, down 45%.

The 237-mile route between St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo., has seen a 48% decline in passengers, from 430,600 in 1990 to 223,835 in 2009.

"One has to speculate about the causes, but what we do know historically about short-haul travel is that it tends to be dominated by business travelers," Kelly said. "Because of that it is very sensitive to the economic cycle. In recessions we have always experienced a drop in business travel."

So the recession may have eliminated some trips. This decline in short haul air travel needs more study. If we are going to build many new high speed rail lines to serve the short haul market, we better figure out what is happening to those travelers. Here is something we know and should keep in mind:

"We know a couple of things: We know that short-haul traffic is more elastic and price-sensitive than long-haul traffic," Kelly said.

Life sentence for avoiding tolls

The NY Times reports a Chinese driver was sentenced to life in prison for evading tolls:

BEIJING — Like most drivers around the world, Shi Jianfeng did not like to roll down his window at toll booths. In fact, Mr. Shi, a farmer from Henan Province in central China, was so averse to toll collectors, he evaded more than $550,000 in road fees during eight months of highway driving, according to the provincial court that convicted him.

Life in prison seems a bit extreme. But so is $550,000 in tolls for eight months! That's a lot of cash. Shi did have three vehicles and was hauling sand which made the tolls worse because the tolls are sometimes levied by weight, and apparently there is now an uproar over the tolls. The rest of the story has some interesting details about road tolling in China.

China may be building HSR faster than adequate materials can be supplied

Damien Ma at the Atlantic highlights a few research papers that suggest China may be building high speed rail lines faster than necessary high-quality building materials can be produced.
From his story:

Yet there are legitimate critiques of whether the HSR system makes sound economic sense and whether the Chinese government can afford such a massive construction project. The pace of expanding the system -- the Beijing-Shanghai line, completed after a mere 2.5 years, is expected to commence operations this summer -- has led to questions over the quality and safety of what's being built. In particular, a little-known technical issue of the material used for the track foundations, apparently something called "fly ash." Here's what the South China Morning Post had to say:

"The problem lies in the use of high-quality fly ash, a fine powder chemically identical to volcanic ash, collected from the chimneys of coal-fired power plants. When mixed with cement and gravel, it can give the tracks' concrete base a lifespan of 100 years.


According to a study by the First Survey and Design Institute of China Railways in 2008, coal-fired power plants on the mainland could produce enough high-quality fly ash for the construction of 100 kilometres of high-speed railway tracks a year.

But more than 1,500 kilometres of track have been laid annually for the past five years. This year 4,500 kilometres of track will be laid with the completion of the world's longest high-speed railway line, between Beijing and Shanghai. Fly ash required for that 1,318-kilometre line would be more than that produced by all the coal-fired power plants in the world...

...Professor Wang Lan , lead scientist at the Cement and New Building Materials Research Institute under the China Building Materials Academy, said that given poor quality control on the mainland, the use of low-quality fly ash, and other low-grade construction materials, was "almost inevitable" in high-speed railway construction."

Let's eliminate left turns

Researchers at NC State have evaluated "super streets." Here is a story about their work. These streets eliminate left turns from local streets and result in much faster and safer auto traffic.

The researchers are not exploring pedestrian and cycling safety effects, but eliminating left turns in some urban intersections may be worth exploring, especially in cities with weak crosswalk protection laws. (Though for cycling safety we should eliminate right turns as the most common driver-cyclist crash is where the driver turns right in front of a cyclist.) Many roads already have limited left turns or time-restricted turning for traffic flow reasons.

David Levinson on gas taxes as user fees

David Levinson has a nice post about the new US PIRG study that claims "roads don't pay for themselves." Here he explains why gas taxes are user fees, which deflates the core argument of the study:

The authors have an interesting take on the term 'user fee', suggesting that gas taxes aren't really user fees because (a) they were sometimes used for deficit reduction, (b) they are shared with other surface transportation (transit), and (c) they don't correspond with use. While I don't like either diversion, that doesn't mean that gas taxes aren't user fees, just that Congress can't avoid meddling. Just because gas taxes imperfectly measure use (i.e. it is proportionate to gasoline consumption instead of miles, it is assessed on travel on all facilities, not just highways), doesn't mean it is not highly correlated. It is a surrogate, as are most fees. They are charged only to users of motor vehicles (admittedly only those users who use fuel, but that is approximately all users at this stage of technology). It would be better if user fees (preferably tolls if transactions costs could be reduced, but gas taxes in the interim) covered all costs of operating and maintaining existing streets, roads and highways, so we could depoliticize the issue, and treat it like the public utility it is. It would be better if the charge could vary by location and time of day, it will eventually do so.

It is worth reading his whole post. I will add that "do roads pay for themselves" is the wrong question to ask. Roads are not some cheap date who sticks you with the tab at the end of the night. Everybody gets some value from roads regardless of if they drive. A better question is "do road users pay their way?" Mark Delucchi looked at that question a couple of years ago (David Levinson has done a lot of work on the full cost of transportation modes as well) and Delucchi argues that the per mile cost of driving is about $.20-$.70 per gallon of motor fuel below the full cost, but most of that subsidy is parking, not highways.

Google Transit will minimize time spent waiting

Google added new features to their transit maps that can help reduce the time spent waiting and number of transfers:

Google Maps has added a new feature: search transit directions by types of transit and time spent outside. Want to take the light rail and not the bus? Willing to take a longer route if it means fewer transfers and time spent outside in the cold? Google will now oblige.

More data equals more choices and for Google to have taken the time to index all the more types of public transit is a real service to transit riders...The new feature is live now.

Dollar Van Demos is awesome, and dollar vans are important

Dollar Van Demos is:

From the Borough of Brooklyn comes Dollar Van Demos: a showcase of talented musicians, rappers and comedians performing inside a dollar van with real passengers.

Dollar vans provide a much-needed transportation for neighborhoods under-served by mass transit. Typically operated by West Indian drivers, the ride is cheap, adventurous and now immensely entertaining with the addition of performers singing their hearts out.

Here is their business model:

GET IN THE VAN.
DO YOUR THING.
GET OUT OF THE VAN.

The dollar vans, also known as commuter vans or group ride vehicles, really are a critical transit system for many areas of New York City. There are about 300 licensed vans (licenses are issued buy the Taxi and Limousine Commission) and 500 or more unlicensed vans. I've been doing some research on these vans and the ridership is shockingly large. I estimate that the commuter vans in New York City constitute the 20th largest transit system in the country measured by daily ridership. And some of those lucky riders get free entertainment from some of Brooklyn's rising stars!