Hacker News Reader

Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

And you still regulate it, just differently.

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.

View on HN

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance).

I wish the US could figure that out.

RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester.

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.

A pilot friend who flew for ryanair showed me around control tower of Frankfurt Hahn (hint: nowhere near the real frankfurt) some ten years ago. We were shooting the shit with the controllers as a private jet plane came in on the radio, asking permission to land. After some back and forth they discovered this was the fake frankfurt, and eventually didn't come in for landing. That got a good chuckle from everyone...

Ryanair flies to Berlin. Even before the new airport, they were flying to Schoenefeld which was just outside the city limits. In fact, the old airport was just across the runaways of the new one and you can still reach the old terminal building with the commuter train. Schoenefeld was the old East Berlin airport, which was indeed suboptimal for the load of travellers it got over time.

The are going to renovate Schönefeld and make it a private airport for German politicians. I guess the project will be ready in 20-30 years...

In general, European air travel is often pretty cheap relative to trains. Varies enormously though.

Houston <-> Austin is a business flyer route. That's why it's so expensive and you can get a flight every ~30mins or so throughout the day.

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

Austin, isn't representative of anything except a confluence of factors combined with stupidity.

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 only takes a couple of hours to drive. Flying would be slower, more hassle, way more polluting and more cramped.

Heh, reminds me of the saying: An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

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.)

Just remember to leave early enough to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your scheduled departure time ;)

And don't forget to factor in that IAH is a 20 mile drive from downtown Houston, and AUS is another 10 miles to downtown Austin! (Combined, that's about 1/5 of the driving distance between the two cities.)

I wish this wasn't the case. Lack of tax on jet fuel and massive taxpayer funded subsidies for airlines is why a flight is £20 and rail is like £100. It's just ridiculous. But people like their cheap flights so they won't vote to not destroy the planet.

> having tickets be free - the main source of income for the airlines was in duty-free on either end of the journey anyway

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.

Maybe the answer is for the US government to not regulate these things, but instead somehow allow the EU to regulate them on US soil. (No, I have no idea how that would work legally.)

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).

And of course it's circular:

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).

> 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.

I think they just want to bring back smoking on planes

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped?

Geniuinely curious.

Everything about regulating Big Telecom. They didn’t want to run lines to people, drop long distance, increase broadband speed, etc. Each time, the behavior was countered by regulation or the threat of it.

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.

What are you talking about - that is deregulation. This was a government granted monopoly - you don't get more regulated than that.

They broke a private company into many competing companies. Then, at various times, they forced the companies to serve customers in ways they were simply unwilling to. They’d tell lies why it couldn’t be done. After regulation or threat of it, they rapidly accomplished what they previously couldn’t.

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.

When California re-regulated the wholesale energy markets after the Enron debacle.

Source: https://www.apep.uci.edu/PDF_Research_Summaries/Impact_Of_El...

And now CA has gone full circle with how PG&E rules the roost over here. Outside of a few places, it’s very much a monopoly.

Telephone roaming charges in the EU.

Card payments are regulated in the EU, and prices are much cheaper. Contrast that with New Zealand where there is often a 2.5% surcharge on credit card and contactless payments.

Internet access after the telcos were forced to share their last mile fibre?

Phone roaming in EU. You pay your normal home fares now for voice/data instead of the former massive roaming surcharges.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com