You don't have to go that far. Quite a few people I know drive from Cincinnati to Indy because Indy is so much cheaper (another indication of market forces at work).
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14 years ago
Verdict in: electric cars more efficient that biofuel-powered
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14 years ago
Or maybe not...does Indy subsidize AirTran or another discount carrier to get that? Wichita does, for example, to the tune of $1M/yr or more. As a consequence, since they started the other carriers' fares have come down significantly.
As for the distance, there is no other airport of any size between here and those places. Even w/ the above subsidies, Amarillo generally is still cheaper but they may also be subsidizing somebody there; that I don't know.
But, air fares etc., weren't the point; simply an example of one reason that electric isn't _necessarily_ the answer even if the study of the post were fair and unbiased (which I still doubt given such a large disparity I still think there's at least one or more factors not being accounted for).
The success of the producers here in converting to enough biodiesel to run their operation from the production of roughly 1/8-th their acreage satisfies me the net benefit is pretty good irrespective of any other study. Of course, there's another whole market area of heavy equipment, stationary equipment, trucks, etc., that electric isn't going to touch (other than perhaps diesel-electric like locomotives) any time soon.
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14 years ago
Nope. Just that no single carrier has more than 30-40% of the flights. We are nobody's hub (like Cincy for instance) so nobody runs enough flights that they can raise rates.
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14 years ago
Even more significant is the volume is sufficient to attract enough carriers to make it a competitive market so there is more than one carrier per destination/direction for the most part.
Looking I find Indianapolis is served by 11 airlines averaging 154 daily departures. Wichita has 43 flights/day.
Smaller markets that struggle to get more than a few carriers have a much harder time in having any influence on rates--the overall business is such a small fraction that the carriers really don't care--complain too much and they'll just leave entirely and never notice the loss in revenue off past the number of significant digits kept in the summary P&L statements...
The commercial service out of local airport consists of a morning and evening flight from/to Denver. That's it. The two slightly larger that are 60/80 miles do have alternate service to KC as well as Denver. But the cost of those local fares generally approaches or exceeds that of the rest of the trip whatever it is.
Still this is a distant sidebar to the point I was after...
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