I swear I’ve seen situations where airlines will actually sell you a cheaper ticket so you can buy your own connecting leg.
I think I’ve seen this with a BER-FRA leg on a BER-SIN route before.
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I used to have to fly from Montreal to Cologne & Bonn once a year, which meant a transfer in Frankfurt and usually a stopover of two hours or so. I was amazed when I figured out how much more efficient it was to just get on DB, which also saved me the taxi ride in from the airport.
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And UK binned miles of railway in the 60’s. Thank you Beeching. So short sighted and utter madness.
Those lines still need looking after by the way and we’ve been paying for them since. They’ve been allowed to deteriorate but the bridges etc. need inspections and so on. Many carry roads over rail.
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The City of Ottawa dismantled a 90km street car system that apparently worked very well up to the shutdown in 1959, and ran at a profit. The property was sold and has now long since been developed.
Over the past decade or so, the City of Ottawa has spent billions on a nightmare project (hopelessly overbudget, behind schedule) to build a 55km system. It basically doesn’t work (once again on an indefinite shutdown), it would not be profitable if it was working. The City has grown enormously, so the 55km has a longer point to point run than the streetcar system ever did, but nowhere near the network coverage. In 1950, a poor downtown resident could take a 30 minute streetcar to reach the beach at Britannia. I have no idea how the 2023 counterpart would even get there.
We have made so many stupid decisions in the name of the automobile.
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And at the behest of those lobbying on behalf of the car and oil industries in general.
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Not having lived through that era, I wonder how much of that was also down to a failure of imagination. Not being able to see anything but individual transport as the future (hence flying car dreams), not being able to see the population explosion, etc.
The logic for that Ottawa shutdown wasn’t absolutely woeful if you understand their assumptions. Post-war, everyone wanted to move to the suburbs that were growing so quickly. The old crowded neighbourhoods with walk-up flats had no place to park the car everyone aspired to own, and in that era could afford fairly readily. For a municipality, extending service was a daunting capital project that would involve an enormous network extension. Maintaining service was going to face declining ridership. The inner city was hollowing out. Of course, shutting down the trams (something similar happened in many North American cities) guaranteed that outcome.
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A friend of mine who now lives in Florida commented that nearby water temperatures of 100 deg F have been observed. He noted that is what he used to use as his hot tub temperature setting
It’s really not a ‘free market’, for one flights are heavily subsidised, for another airlines do not have to pay for the true cost of the service they are running, this is leveraged against the future and the bill will picked up by the tax payer.
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Yup.
Fucking Labour party
Never underestimate the effect of racism on these decisions as well. As white people left the cities the desire to fund the services that made the cities worked went down in large part because white people didnt want their taxes supporting services black people would use.
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or it doesn’t take you 4 days to get there.
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I’d be charitable enough to say that suburbanites didn’t want their taxes to fund services that they wouldn’t use. I suspect the ethnicity of the beneficiaries wasn’t the major concern.
We had one too. we’re now in the midst of a multi-billion dollar project boring a tunnel through all of the Broadway Corridor. for the 2010 Olympics they actually revived one of these lines running from Granville Island to Waterfront Station.
Not really a factor in the Ottawa situation, but yes, it would have been in many US cities.
Almost 40 years ago my father was Canadian consul general in Atlanta. He lived in the northern suburbs, at the time almost universally white. As it happened, his residence was less than ten minutes walk from a MARTA station, and at the time the consulate was adjacent to the old Omni in what is now the CNN Center. Door to door, it was a 40 minute trip without fail. By car, it was almost always an hour. So he just took MARTA. His neighbours thought he was a lunatic. White people don’t take MARTA.
The reality is the system brings working class black domestics to the suburbs in the morning, and runs empty into the city. In the afternoon the flow reverses. The few times I took the trip with him, we had a car to ourselves.
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Agreed. I wasn’t thinking about the subsidies however, so my statement was wrong in that regard.
But for the rest of your reply, I’d argue that’s the “free market” operating as it should, which is why regulation is so important.
It’s one of those cases where “both sides” actually rings true, isn’t it? Despite the initial work done under the Conservatives, Labour campaigned on reversing the closures in 1964, only to backtrack on this and continue it?
Can’t see either party emerging from this with much credit. But that’s also what I’m referring to with my earlier post of a failure of imagination.
To a degree sure, but you have to consider one of the driving factors in causing the growth of the suburbs was to get away from minorities. So even if the primary reason for not wanting to fund inner city services was because they weren’t going to use, you have to factor in why they were not in the cities to use them anymore. But we also have enough evidence of people being willing to cut of their nose despite their face in terms of funding community services they didnt want black people to have the option of using.
As always these things have complex explanations with lots of moving parts, but even when other issues might ostensibly be identified, the impact of racism isnt too far from that. Kind of like the idea between stated vs revealed preferences.
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I can tell you in 1980’s Atlanta, the wealthy whites were absolutely explicit about not wanting to expand the system to improve access. They were fine with their black maids having to walk 30 minutes to the station, they did not want ‘THEM’ to come to the suburbs. The polite ones said ‘them’.
I don’t know how to put it properly. It seems that when people have money, they do all the wrong things because they can afford it.
The distance between Dhaka (our capital) and Chottogram/Chittagong (our biggest port) is about 250km. There are some luxurious buses which will take you there in 5-6 hours. The train link is 320km and a journey on the premium trains takes 6-7 hours. Yet, six local airlines are operating nearly 200 flights every week. Most of these flights are during weekdays. During weekends, the traffic mostly shifts to Cox’s Bazaar (our beach town), roughly 150km south of Chottogram.
Another thing, most of our business conglomerates now have their own private/business jets. Please do remember, these aren’t giants like Samsung or Microsoft.
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