Blinded by the (length of your) flight
Or, why slow and steady sometimes does win the race
From an article on the financial failure of the Channel Tunnel:
And then there are rivals that barely existed in 1994: budget airlines.
There are 50 daily round-trip flights between London and Paris, most of
them much cheaper than a Eurostar ticket; many travelers think planes are
quicker even though the train is much faster city center to city center.
The rail journey between central London and central Paris is two and a
half hours; while the flight itself is only an hour, once airport travel
is taken into account, the journey is much longer.
I also find this phenomenon true in the U.S. You can take a 3.5 hour train ride from the middle of Boston to the middle of New York City. For more money (depending on special deals, time of booking and time/date etc...), you can take a 45-minute airplane ride from the periphery of Boston to the periphery of New York City. Add to that 30-minute cab rides at both ends and the suggested two-hour advance arrival for domestic flights, you don't really get where you're going any faster. Even if the plane cost as much as the train, the cabs would easily make the journey more expensive.
So why do people take the plane? They like it for the same reason people set off from a green light like it's a drag race even if they can see they will have to stop for a red light and will leave the next intersection at the same time a slower driver will. When it comes to travel, man is not a coldly rational homo economicus - he wants to reach maximum speed instead of minimum time, even if time has value.
Post Author:
rj3 | 05:32 PM |
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The '2 hours before' thing doesn't apply to the Shuttles - for those you only need to be there 30 minutes prior, and as long as you're at the gate 5 minutes before departure, you're golden. Even with that factored in, though, I think the Shuttle and Acela break almost even on Manhattan-Boston trips.
The current recommendation is at least one hour for domestic flights. (On my most recent flight, I arrived about 15 minutes prior to the scheduled departure--I didn't mean to arrive that late though). I have flown, driven, and taken the Acela (all since 9/11) between Washington DC and New York City and flying is clearly the fastest.
DC is different because the airport is so close. If the Delta shuttle left from Dulles, the Acela would clearly be faster.
There is a generation of people growing up in the U.S. right now who have never ridden public transportation outside of a tourist scenario, or not at all. A greater number have probably never taken a train.
As such, skills like reading a timetable and figuring out that you can board along the line are lost. I know people who live in South suburban Boston who would drive to Logan (north) to fly to NYC because they have no idea how to board Amtrak at Route 128, which is much closer to their house and makes the rail trip even shorter.
This is the other advantage of rail (many access points versus very few) that travelers too easily overlook these days.
How long does it take to travel from London to New York on a private jet?
Thank you,
Sandra
