Airplanes: Public Transport?

There was a time when public transport was relevant to travel for ordinary citizens. Between then and now, a lot has come to pass. Or has it? Perhaps the meaning of what public transport is simply should to be tweaked for the 21st century.

I travel a lot throughout the world, having been to every habitable continent on Earth. While at these places, I strive to utilize nothing but the public transport systems in the respective cities. Most of the time, this is not only possible, but also very easy. In English and Spanish speaking countries, I also expand my options out beyond trains and BRT to ordinary buses as well. Rarely do I resort to taking a taxi (or most likely, Uber). But I digress... how do I get to all of these places?

Over the last year, I have flown to many places

What about airplanes? Public transportation or not? As previously discussed, "public transport" can have a lot of meanings for different people, but here are some general things to take in to account.

Air travel relies heavily on public infrastructure and subsidies. Like all modes of transportation, air travel is not immune to tax subsidies. Airports are public places, runways are public 'roads' (albeit specialty ones), airport security and border control officers are public employees, and aircraft controllers are also public. Certain routes are even subsidized in the United States by the federal government under the Essential Air Service program. The system is largely organized in blocks of airspace with rules, certifications, airworthiness directives, and more. European manufacturer "Airbus" doesn't even hide its similarity with public transport. However, while the direct costs of running an airplane from point A to point B are mostly hidden from the consumer, they are widely regarded as completely privatized and for-profit. Despite this, subsidies are rampant in all forms of public transport (and air). Two graphs sum this up pretty well, although it is a bit dated now:

Source: US Department of Transportation

Plainly, air travel received the second largest subsidies, after transit. Things have changed a bit since fluctuations in fuel prices, the declining fuel tax for the highway fund (due to more efficient vehicles and inflation, among other things), as well as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent recession. Unfortunately, more recent data is not available from the DOT.

Air travel has a competitive energy consumption. This comes as a surprise to many people. Energy use for an airplane isn't radically skewed:

Source: US Department of Energy

a Includes passenger cars, vans, and small buses operating in response to calls from passengers to the transit operator who dispatches the vehicles.
b Data are not available.
c Energy use is estimated.
d Only domestic service and domestic energy use are shown on this table.  (Previous editions included half of international energy.)  These energy intensities may be inflated because all energy use is attributed to passengers–cargo energy use is not taken into account.

These are kJ per passenger-kilometer. It is probably safe to say that your Toyota Prius has better energy efficiency than a Boeing 747, but that may be comparing two radically different things used for different purposes - like goods trucks, which of course would look terrible if they were in this chart due to the fact that they aren't designed to carry passengers (they would over 20,000 kJ per "passenger"-kilometer, according to the US Department of Transportation). There are about 4 kJ per Calorie if you wanted to turn that ice cream you had last night in to an indicator for flying around the world. The verdict? Data seems to suggest it is one of the most efficient ways to transport passengers, at least domestically (which is all that is considered in this chart).

Paths and hubs are strikingly similar. Most transit agencies rely on a "hub and spoke" system, and the vast majority of air carriers do exactly the same thing. Here is a map of Houston, Texas' downtown area, "the Metro":

This is a terrible way to show routes, but there will be a post on that some other time

It's plain to see that many routes converge in one place (and for many agencies, particularly larger systems, there are also smaller satellite nodes in the outskirts).

Here is Fort Worth, Texas' hub-and-spoke system:

Fort Worth's system, "The T", has got hub-and-spoke syndrome bad!

Minneapolis-St. Paul's METRO system is a great example of a multi-hub-and-spoke system, with Minneapolis and St.Paul both acting as massive feeders of routes for one another. Unfortunately, their system lacks user friendliness, and they do not have a complete system map at all. More on system maps another time, as well as why everyone likes to call their systems the bland name of "Metro."

Airlines, by comparison are no different, although they are a bit larger in scale both geographically and monetarily:

Delta's route map as of February 2016. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport is the world's busiest

Spirit's route map, as of February 2016

Airlines, whether large or small, low cost or mainline, domestic or intercontinental, all use a hub-and-spoke system. The only exception seems to be Southwest Airlines, although they do operate point-to-point with focus cities. This exception is about as rare in airlines as it is in transit. Is a hub and spoke system a good thing? It depends - more on that some other time.

Corridors and frequencies are also similar, and what we would expect from transit as well. Between city pairs such as Los Angeles and San Francisco (one of the most frequent and heavily used air corridors in the United States and the world), Seattle and Portland, Houston and Dallas, and all along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, frequencies are what we would expect from typical transit services. Some of these flights operate hourly, half-hourly, or even more frequently during certain parts of the day and days of the week.

I would be pretty happy if my transit ran as often as my flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland. That's right, Google Flights is showing 80 departures on a weekday between LAX and SFO/OAK.

There are many other things one could analyze in regards the similarities (and differences) between airlines and public transport - so the final question is the one in the title. Are airplanes public transport?

I think yes.