Archive for the ‘livability’ Category:
The Best Worst Decisions for Transportation
Yesterday’s blog post argued that we cannot price any air transportation correctly until we price all air transportation correctly.
This means that if a trip were priced in proportion to it’s distance, then competition between airlines would amount to battles for internal efficiency rather than price wars dependent on short haul passengers subsidizing long haul passengers – plus “gotcha” fees, and unbundled services, increased government regulation, etc.
This would also allow smaller aircraft to be priced correctly in a time/value model…
The long-term view of wrong pricing
Livability is defined in terms of employment, safety, crime education and transportation. City planners, communities, and transportation officials allocate money towards projects, services and amenities that balance these objectives. They also must react to the influence of external forces. The airlines have a disproportionate power to impact an entire economy by manipulating prices and services.
Losing the proximity war
Without proportional pricing, planners do not have a built-in proximity bias that can support multi-mode projects such as rail, bus, and ferry services. If the price is the same to fly 500 miles as 3000 miles, a form of tunnel vision in regional economic development may appear.
Only 6 airports have direct rail service
Negative incentives
The hub and spoke system also introduces negative incentives to regionalization. The time that it takes to travel between non-hub locations 500 miles apart often exceeds the time it takes to fly to a distant hub 3000 miles away.
Yet, families and friends want to disperse in much shorter distances. Small companies want to branch out in smaller segments. A regional tourism industry is easier to support than attracting distant tourists. Innovation clusters need space to diversify. The flawed airline pricing model combined with profit driven hub and spoke economics may actually thwart natural growth in favor of unsustainable growth. It makes little economic sense to disaggregate people from the land that they occupy.
Social Flights is much more than a ride-sharing system for jets. Social Flights is a social organization concept that allows air transportation to serve the needs of communities as people reorganize themselves in the Digital Age. Social Flights allows for rapid and effective air service to be deployed to the natural foundations of economic growth instead of trying to force growth to occur wherever the airlines choose to fly.
Smaller aircraft can fly efficiently between smaller markets as long as the price can be compared to the same time/value criteria as larger jets. People have extraordinary access to information from which to make superior decisions. However, when the wrong pricing model distorts the right decisions, only the best-worst decision is available. This is inefficient – it’s time to take off the blinders.