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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the cause of your specific situation. But with respect to 5400 cancelled flights, I'd be surprised to hear that there's a transportation system (public + private combined) that can handle a sudden and unexpected influx at a time where things are already at peak-capacity (holidays)

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The holidays are usually a quiet time for public transport systems - the lack of commuters more than counteracts the increase in tourist-like trips.

No, but in my particular situation (which predates the Southwest issue), had I been in Japan, Korea, a decent European, etc I could have managed to get a train ride from a city the size of Charlotte to a city the size of my hometown.

Me thinks you are quite right: back of the napkin math indicates the average flight carries 64.44 passengers. So just the Southwest flight cancellations stranded 347,976 passengers. That’s a lot of people to re-route.

Southwest boards three groups of up to 60 passengers each. Every Southwest flight I have taken post-pandemic has been full. I’d bump that average up to the 120-180 range for Southwest flights this time of year.

Yeah, but they're not all in one place. If the US had a genuinely functional public transport system, I doubt there would be much problem finding seats for all or the vast majority of the stranded people on trains going to or near their destinations.

There's 2 types of public transport: intra-city and inter-city. Intra-city doesn't serve the same use case as flying, and can't generally be repurposed to inter-city transport, so it should be discounted. If the US had inter-city rail that people actually used, then it would almost certainly be near capacity in a normal holiday season. Unless you assume there are a lot of extra train cars that aren't normally being used but could be taken out of storage, there's no way that it could absorb such a large influx of stranded passengers on short notice. Inter-city rail generally operates like airplanes in that only one ticket can be sold for each seat - there's no standing room on a multi-hour train ride.

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