The Country’s Busiest Air Routes and a Call for High-Speed Rail (Source: www.wsj.com)

New York-Miami Busiest Air Route in the U.S.? - The Middle Seat Terminal - WSJ

The Country’s Busiest Air Routes and a Call for High-Speed Rail

By Scott McCartney

A new Brookings Institution study on U.S. air travel concluded–unsurprisingly–that delays will worsen when travel rebounds, and that delays are generally concentrated in the busiest metropolitan areas. But the study also includes interesting data on the country’s most heavily-traveled air corridors.

For many years, the airline industry has seen New York LaGuardia-Boston Logan as the busiest short-haul route in the U.S. and LAX-New York JFK as the most heavily traveled long-haul route. Brookings analyzed the data with a slightly broader lens, lumping all airports together in metropolitan areas.

The ten busiest air corridors will familiar to frequent travelers. The No. 1 route may be the most surprising, the result of JetBlue’s push to make South Florida New York’s sixth borough with frequent flights and low fares, and the competitive response from other airlines. There are eight commercial airports in the New York and Miami regions, and they supported 8.7 million travelers on that route over the 12-month period ending March 2009. The New York-Miami route is so busy that it saw 2.4 million more passengers than the No. 2 route, between Northern and Southern California.

Top 10 Corridors Based on Number of Passengers
1. Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and New York City area
2. Los Angeles Basin area and San Francisco Bay area
3. Atlanta area and Miami area
4. Chicago area and New York area
5. Atlanta area and New York area
6. Los Angeles area and New York area
7. New York area and Orlando, Fl., area
8. New York area and London, U.K.
9. Las Vegas area and Los Angeles area
10. Los Angeles area and Phoenix area

The Brookings report recommends that these air-travel statistics be used to prioritize investment in high-speed rail. At 400 miles or less, high-speed rail can been air travel in time, typically with less pollution. That makes Los Angeles-San Francisco, Las Vegas-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-Phoenix and Dallas-Houston the most likely candidates for high-speed rail, in that order.

More than 6 million people fly between the Los Angeles basin and San Francisco Bay per year, the study said. In the northeast corridor, Amtrak carried 11.7 million people on Acela and Northeast Regional lines in fiscal 2008, hitting 14 metropolitan areas. The Amtrak ridership suggests high-speed rail would be viable in out busiest air corridors, the study concluded.

Would you be interested in high-speed rail as an alternative to air travel?