High Speed Rail and the Future of Air Travel

I love flying. How could I not? It's in my blood. I have logged a few hours behind the yoke, up in my grandfather's 1949 Beechcraft Bonanza, and spent many more hours as a passenger in that plane watching the land shrink from thousands of feet in the air. Working in the airlines is almost a family tradition - the same grandfather flew 747s for TWA during the height of the Jet Age, several uncles worked in charter service, and a few of my aunts have, at one time or another, worked as flight attendants on the major US carriers.

So it is not with any particular pleasure that I watch the slow collapse of the American airline industry. Soaring fuel prices are squeezing the airlines into crisis - four smaller carriers declared bankruptcy in recent weeks, and the Delta-Northwest merger, brought on by rising fuel costs, may be followed by mergers of the other major carriers such as American, United, Continental, or US Airways. Delta and Northwest's CEOs are calling on all airlines to raise fees by as much as 20%.

The airline industry has been in varying forms of crisis for 30 years now, ever since it was deregulated in 1978. The low point came in 2001 when the US Congress approved a $15 billion bailout of the airlines - funny how the usual suspects never complain about those kinds of "subsidies." While that infusion was expected to help keep the airlines in business for many years to come, the unending increase in fuel costs is going to threaten their survival. Merge or die is not a sign of a healthy industry.

Fuel costs are not going to come down anytime soon - if ever. The current spike may continue or ease, but the underlying factors suggest long-term increases. Global demand is soaring, whereas supply is inelastic and many key oil fields are in decline. These factors alone suggest that the airline industry's troubles are only just beginning. Soaring fuel costs WILL eventually eliminate the cheap fares that so many anti-rail folks use to argue against high speed rail. Those low fares are not tenable in the face of permanently high fuel costs - especially when you also consider that by 2020 there will surely be some form of carbon tax or cap-and-trade induced carbon fees tacked on to those fares.

The high fuel costs cascade throughout the system. Less money is spent on maintenance and training - the recent grounding for inspection of hundreds of American Airlines planes was the result of deferred maintenance and sweetheart deals made between a captive FAA and the stressed carriers in 2003. Some airlines look to technology to save them, but Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, designed to be more fuel efficient, has been facing a steady stream of delays and angry customers.

Even if all these problems get ironed out, even if peak oil turns out to be a myth (it won't, of course), even if the US airlines become models of fiscal health and efficient service, here in California air travel faces other constraints - primarily a lack of space for new service. Few California airports have any room to grow:

SFO: No new runways possible as permits to fill bay will never be approved

OAK: Same problem as SFO - and both face serious threats from global warming and a rising bay

SJC: No room for expansion, with downtown San José on two sides, other development on the third, and US 101 on the fourth

LAX: Also no room for expansion, with powerful NIMBYs on one side, existing development on two others, and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth. LAX expansion plans have come and gone for over 20 years, and LA World Airports is now focusing on outsourcing growth to Palmdale and Ontario - which would be served by, you guessed it, high speed rail.

SNA: Also known as Orange County/John Wayne, this airport is forever limited to 14 gates and one runway, with development on three sides, the 73 freeway and some of California's wealthiest homeowners on the fourth. Plans to build a new, larger airport at the former El Toro MCAS were thoroughly killed in the late 1990s.

SAN: Like the others, San Diego Airport/Lindbergh Field has no room for expansion, with development on three sides and San Diego Bay on the fourth. Like Orange County, plans for a new and much larger facility, at the Miramar MCAS, appear to be dead.

Even if these problems could somehow be overcome, the cost of airport expansion is estimated by the CHSRA to be well over $40 billion - for a transportation system facing a fundamental and ongoing crisis. Spending billions on airport expansion would be like giving millions in subsidies to the horse and buggy industry in the early 20th century.

Air travel isn't going away anytime soon. But neither will it remain the backbone of intrastate travel in California for much longer. It will simply become unaffordable to the passenger, and the airlines will have trouble maintaining operations. Air travel will continue to carry most passengers across the oceans and across the continents (though a significant investment in Amtrak would help make cross-country rail travel a more useful option again), but within California, it is hard to see how air travel is going to be cheaper or more effective than high speed rail between our major cities.

For my grandfather's generation, as young adults in the late 1940s, it made sense to view air travel as the future of American transportation. But for our generation, here in the late 2000s, it seems clear we would be nuts to make the same assumptions. Our future will be a high speed rail future. It's time we got started on building that future.