We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then.
The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense.
EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel reached a point some years before covid where some providers played with the thought of having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway, so more travelers meant more revenue even if their tickets were zero.
Disallowing discriminatory and unfair business practices is not the same as having the government set travel prices.
I wish the US could figure that out.
Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.
You can also fly Austin<>LA/Denver for 1/3-1/2 the cost Houston<>Austin. I've flown to Canada (from Tx) for less than a Houston/Austin (or Austin/Houston<>Dallas) flight.
These routes are where high-speed trains would excel...if one could get past the airline lobby
First, its a ~30 min flight to Houston, and a ~40 min flight to Dallas, two of the largest and busiest hub airports in the USA. So, a massive amount of american/united Austin traffic is Austin->IAH/DFW->destination if your not flying southwest with a direct route. Yes, there are a number of direct routes to other places, particularly large hubs (DEN/ATL/JFK/etc) but its like once a day or every other day for non hub airports.
But that pattern is doubly reinforced through local decisions which have resulted in ABIA being the number #1 airport in the USA for flights per gate.
AKA, by gate count it has the highest utilization of any airport in the USA, and this is the result of the anti-growth politics for the past 40+ years, that did things like move the airport from Mueller, to ABIA while initially planning on having the same number of gates as Mueller, and only relenting and adding 4 (IIRC) more. And keep in mind that Mueller was frequently like going to a crowded standing room only bar. And not only was ABIA undersized but it wasn't designed for serious expansion. And really, there wasn't any excuse when one looks at any airport designed in the past half century its obvious where the terminal expansion is planned (ex:DFW) with the better designed airports like TPA/MCO using a hub and spoke model. Instead what Austin is going to get is an ad-hoc expansions which will result in Heathrow levels of suck (and its already that way for the south terminal, where one has to leave the airport, drive for 10 mins and then re-enter).
Houston to Austin seems to take 50 minutes by flight vs. 2 hours and 30 minutes by car. That's not the best convenience ratio for a domestic flight (going between the two largest cities in Denmark is 40 minutes by air vs. over 3 hours by car), and it's certainly more expensive...
However, whether it's more polluting actually depends on a lot of things. Comparing a fully booked, modern commercial passenger plane vs. a car carrying a single person usually has the airplane coming out on top (heh). A modern car with all seats occupied beats the airplane though.
(A naturally aspirated V8 without direct fuel injection leads to a divide by zero in any efficiency calculations.)
I'm sure that was pretty far-fetched and not something actually viable. Considering duty-free isn't even a thing for most Ryanair/other cheap airline flights because they are inside the EU.
Because when the EU regulates things like this, the result is usually pretty good. But when the US regulates things, it turns into regulatory capture and only helps the big corporations at the expense of everyone else.
It's a bit like unions: Americans complain about how bad labor unions are, because in the US they didn't work out very well at all. But Europeans like unions, because over there they seem to work pretty well. So obviously, the US just can't do unions properly, just like they can't do a lot of regulation properly (see: FAA/Boeing).
The US doesn't do things like well because Americans don't trust their institutions and think governments are inherently corrupt and ineffective, so they think might as well join in (and then perpetuate that corruption/ineffectiveness).
Sounds like the way countries typically considered "corrupt" probably work. But for some reason, Americans don't like to think of their country as being as corrupt as someplace like [random central American country], despite evidence to the contrary.
Geniuinely curious.
Splitting MA Bell into the Baby Bells also helped for a while. Then, they started merging back together. Then, the oligopolies made service worse again.
If left on their own, they collude to do a minimum form of competition while cooperating on profitable ways to cheat customers. That’s called cartels. It’s as big a threat to the free market as governments.
A recent example that isn’t regulation so much as revealing was Google Fiber vs established telecoms. The established companies had low speeds on purpose in many areas. They couldn’t do better. After Google Fiber hit, we’d sometimes see a comparable offering show up in just that area very quickly. As in, they could’ve done it the whole time but refused to soak up more profit.
That’s the kind of abuse that regulation is supposed to deal with. Whereas, the breakup was using regulation to force the companies to operate like a free market. That’s often necessary because the companies will make more profit if they collude to cheat customers. Or workers as we saw in the wage scheme in Silicon Valley.
Source: https://www.apep.uci.edu/PDF_Research_Summaries/Impact_Of_El...
That freight also helps explain why nearly empty flights can make sense economically.
I'm not sure this is the gotcha you think it is. Air travel, even in coach, was downright luxury compared to where it is today, and I'm not even talking about in the distant past, I'm talking about 25 or so years ago. Seats are narrower, legroom is practically nonexistent, and the seats only recline like two inches these days. Also almost everything is a la carte.
You can't really though - e.g. 25 years ago you could fly economy from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia for $2600. (Inflation adjusted.) You can now do that flight for $1400. Pretty good, but the kicker is that flying business class is now $5300. Even premium economy is $4400. (Prices are all the cheapest I see on Google Flights over the rest of 2024, so some of them are limited to very specific dates.)
Probably the most equivalent price to 25 years ago is basic economy plus paying for a meal, snack, checked bag and selection of an exit row seat, but today's premium economy is probably the most equivalent service level to yesterday's basic economy.
From what I can find e.g. SF to Sydney was $2300 US in 1986 (over $6000 now).
London - Sydney. Allegedly might have been as low $600 (~$2200) both ways in 1980 (though I don't think economy back then was even remotely close to modern business class...)
Apparently this part of the biz is taking a bit of a nosedive, and he expects airline prices to skyrocket to compensate for the loss in revenue.