If Airlines Operated Passenger Trains Too, Transportation Options For Shorter Trips Would Increase.
This article is a guest post written by a friend of mine, Matthew Wages Johnson. I hope you enjoy it.
On I-75 North, there is a billboard that advertises air service from Atlanta to Chattanooga, cities that are only 120 miles apart. For lovers of transportation policy, especially when they are trapped in interstate traffic, that billboard is unintentionally thought-provoking.
A search on Delta’s website for tickets for that Atlanta-to-Chattanooga route yielded seven flights on one day, and the cheapest ticket on each flight was $289.00. Taking that flight would entail arriving at Atlanta’s Hartsfield- Jackson International Airport well before departure time, going through security, waiting to board, boarding, and then flying on a 50 minute flight to Chattanooga. The only other alternative for getting to Chattanooga is taking an unpredictable, unpleasant trip up I-75.
There is a tremendous gap in transportation for trips that are too short and too expensive to be made by plane but too long and too boring to be made by car. Filling this gap would allow Atlanta to connect with Georgia’s other cities and cities all around the Southeast. Passenger rail can fill that gap, and airlines should be not just allowed but encouraged to operate passenger rail.
Government, which has the power of eminent domain, creates transportation infrastructure and then allows private parties to use that infrastructure. Government constructs ports for ships, roads for cars, lanes for bikes, sidewalks for pedestrians, airports for airplanes, and railroads for trains. When infrastructure space is limited, space allocation can be a challenge, and at busy public airports, private airline companies purchase slots that allow their planes to land and take off at designated times. Passenger rail should function in the same manner, and competing private companies, including airlines, should be able to purchase slots for their trains on public railways.
Airlines are the undisputed masters of scheduling, ticketing, logistics, and transporting people and things. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 2,900,000 passengers fly in and out of American airports every day, and airlines carry those people and their luggage in metal tubes that travel 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet in the sky. When compared to operating commercial aviation, operating passenger rail would be a breeze.
Airplanes themselves are extraordinarily expensive—the list price for a new Boeing 737 MAX 7 is about $100 million—and a flight requires jet fuel, rigorous maintenance, highly trained pilots and flight attendants, baggage handling, check-in staff, air traffic control, and all the other parts of the vast complexity that makes air travel possible. An airplane has a fixed amount of space, so a flight that has just one passenger costs essentially the same to operate as a full flight does, but a train can have cars added or removed as needed. A hijacked airplane becomes a precision-guided missile in the air, but a hijacked train can move only forwards or backwards on the ground, so trains have no need for the extensive, intrusive security that air travel requires.
Train passengers are self-directed. They show up at train stations with tickets in hand (or on phone), carry their own bags, board by themselves, and exit at their stops. In fact, the easiest, least-supervised part of traveling through Atlanta’s airport is taking the underground train system, which handles more than 200,000 passengers per day, to and from departure gates. Air travel is one of the few areas of life in which adults are treated like children. “Take your shoes off, and put them in the bin,” “You need to fasten your seatbelt,” and “You are now allowed to use the lavatory” are familiar to anyone who flies.
Different train cars could have different levels of service. Business leaders could rent private cabins and be productive and even have meetings as they travel from city center to city center, versus using their valuable time for traveling to and from airports or paying for expensive private air travel. An airline passenger might expect a drink, a snack, and perhaps a meal, but a train passenger does not, so trains could sell food and drinks. Chefs could convert entire cars into pop up restaurants for high-paying passengers between major markets. People who are skeptical of variations in pricing and levels of service should realize that as with airfares, the train fares of first-class passengers would subsidize the fares of other passengers.
Allowing airline companies to operate passenger rail would neutralize two of the biggest obstacles to passenger rail itself. First, airlines would view trains as functional and financial complements, not competition, to their planes, and they would welcome passenger rail. Southwest Airlines was one of the most effective opponents of high-speed rail in Texas in the early 1990s, but trains and planes should work together. Airlines could become comprehensive travel companies, and trains would make their planes more accessible. Someone could take a Delta train from Birmingham, Alabama, connect at the Atlanta airport, and then take a Delta plane to Birmingham, England, all without setting foot in an automobile.
Second, if airlines have a stake in passenger rail, then a newly powerful train lobby would provide a counterbalance to the airline lobby and automobile lobby, and more government resources would be devoted to trains. Tracks would improve in quality and quantity, old train stations would be revitalized, and new train stations would be built all over the country. Amtrak is a federally chartered corporation that has the federal government as its controlling shareholder, but Delta is a private corporation that must answer to its shareholders. Allowing private benefit in passenger rail could lead to explosive public benefit for all Americans, even if they never own a share of an airline.
Train technology would improve over the coming decades, and rail travel would become cheaper, quicker, and more efficient. During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States treated train travel like it treated soccer, which was to ignore it while the world kept moving along with it. It dismantled what today should be the greatest rail system on the planet, even as it was using its unparalleled financial, industrial, and intellectual capital to put men on the moon. Had American industry focused on developing train technology, then the resulting advances would have spread throughout the world. It is not too late for the United States to concentrate some of its tremendous creative capacity on improving trains, particularly if influential companies can profit from passenger rail.
Trains have minimal environmental impact, and they are flexible, safe, and efficient. Trains need thin strips of land with parallel steel tracks, train stations, and not much else. Atlanta’s airport is about 4,700 acres in size, but a train station is much smaller, and having many of them spread out over train routes means that passengers enter and exit at stops that are much closer to their starting points and final destinations. Shifting travelers to trains, which are far safer than automobiles, would mean fewer cars on the road and fewer deaths and injuries. Advertising for cars often shows them traveling alone on highways or conquering mountains, but the reality of automobiles in daily life is boredom, traffic, danger, frustration, and expensive maintenance.
Trains have no need for deceptive advertising in order to convince people how cool that passenger rail is. Hollywood often does the job, as it did in a scene in the 2006 James Bond movie Casino Royale, a scene that would have been impossible in the ugliness and stress of car traffic or in the loudness and turbulence of air travel.
Vesper Lynd’s sudden approach to James Bond, the framing of the night outside in the large window, the spaciousness of the table, the uninterrupted smoothness of the ride, and the quiet interior, which contrasts with the tension between them, are possible only through train travel. And, as anyone who has seen the rest of the movie knows, Bond later is seriously injured in a high-speed car crash.
Though gliding through northwest Georgia on a business trip might not be as exciting as gliding through Montenegro on a mission to defeat a financier of terrorism in a poker game, the comfort, ease of travel, and ability to be productive are the same. Passengers get on at Point A, and they can get work done, relax, have dinner, consume alcohol, and then get off at Point B. All that policymakers need to do is to set the conditions for private companies like airlines to operate on America’s rails.
Passengers who do fly into the world’s busiest airport land less than eight miles from the former location of a village called Terminus, which was so named because of its site at the end of the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Its name was changed to Marthasville in 1842, and five years later, 124 years before the birth of Amtrak, it was incorporated as Atlanta. Atlanta and America were built on trains that were operated by private companies, and there would be nothing more American than allowing companies to compete for consumers in passenger rail, lowering costs and raising quality of service, just as airlines do.
