After a tumultuous week when hundreds of thousands of travelers were blocked from reaching their destinations by flight delays, cancellations, and reroutings, the website Flightaware.com reported that Friday, Dec. 29th, would be a good day for people trying to fly: The total number of delays was expected to be 14,606, and the total number of cancellations only 1,599. Delta, American, and United had recovered fairly quickly from the cancellations and delays of the previous week, but over Christmas, as many as 80 percent of Southwest’s flights failed to take off.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg lost no time making clear that Southwest would be held responsible for commitments it had made following Hurricane Ian last September to protect stranded passengers. “The Department will use the fullest extent of its investigative and enforcement powers to hold Southwest accountable,” he warned, “if it fails to adhere to the promises made to reimburse passengers for costs incurred for alternate transportation.”
Good for Buttigieg. But why has no official at any level of government noted that it is climate change that has made such airline failures almost predictable? We warn of climate change in the very abstract and the very particular, but when it comes to the responsibility of a powerful industry, we tend to focus on the failures of particular companies, like Southwest.
It isn’t only that climate change is responsible for airline failures like the one we have just experienced. Through their prodigious use of fossil fuels, the airlines are disproportionately responsible for polluting the environment. For example, according to the French consumer group Quechoisir, on short-haul flights, planes emit 77 times more greenhouse gasses per passenger than trains that cover the same distance.
As climate change produces more and more travel crises and airlines leave more and more passengers stranded, why has it occurred to no government agency to encourage passengers to use the train, which is cheaper, more convenient, and less subject to cancellations?
Think of France: In recent days, the French government received permission from the European Union to cancel short-haul flights where there is a train available on equivalent routes. For example, a passenger arriving at Paris’s Orly Airport who is going on from there to Nantes, Lyons, or Bordeaux can get there by train in less than two-and-a-half hours, so why take a plane? Urged by a citizen’s group founded by the Macron government, the French asked the EU for permission to cancel competing flights on these routes — in order to encourage passengers to spend less money, risk fewer cancellations or delays, and to contribute four times less global pollution than if they took a plane covering the same route.
Of course, the United States is a far larger country than France. Americans who are heading to the other side of the country to spend our brief Christmas holiday with family or friends are pretty much condemned to flying. But that ignores the significant number of short-haul flights in our system that connect, say, New York and Washington, D.C., Chicago and Minneapolis, or Austin and Houston, or San Francisco and Sacramento. Except for the Acela, which connects Boston to D.C. in seven hours, there is no decent train service to offer passengers a cheaper, more relaxing, and more reliable alternative to the short-haul flights connecting these cities.
Moreover, few American cities possess anything like the smooth connections between airports and the national train network that are found in Paris, Brussels, or Zurich. When I landed in Geneva on my way to Turin — only to find that my flight had been cancelled — I strolled downstairs from the airport’s arrival hall to board a train that got me to the Italian city inside of two hours.
This is not to claim that there are no improvements in the American airline network that a determined government could effect (and Secretary Buttigieg reportedly is on track to propose some). What is lacking is a failure of public imagination. We need to imagine a transportation network in which airlines do what they do best — carry passengers on long-haul flights — while trains are given the resources and the planning permissions to handle the short-haul routes for which they are most suited.
We should watch what happens in France as the Macron government’s train-friendly policy for short-distance travel goes into effect next year. My bet is that the airline industry will survive (after all, it makes most of its money on long-haul flights), while France’s efficient train network will substantially increase its ridership. Stay tuned!
Sidney Tarrow is the Maxwell Upson Emeritus Professor of Government at Cornell University and an adjunct professor at the Cornell Law School. His most recent book is “Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development,” from Cambridge University Press.