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The airline industry has no future. The same is true for airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available to world markets dwindles rapidly.
Interestingly enough, I'd never thought about that before but it makes a great deal of sense. What this article doesn't point out but I coincidentally discussed at a party I attended last week is how trains have been forgotten in our culture. The only image conjured by train travel in America is Amtrak, and it's a failed business. It's a operating failed business—thanks to government subsidies—but failed nonetheless. There are two primary problems with the current incarnation of Amtrak:
Hence, no pressure at all to do any better than physically keep up and running. The point I was making at the party was that train travel is actually kind of fun, and all Amtrak needs is to get off their ass and play by the same rules everyone else in capitalism needs to play. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they need to start marketing. For real. This doesn't count.
They need commercials on television, ads in newspapers, synergistic partnerships... I'm talkin' the whole nine. They need to drop the line of "you should ride the train instead of flying because riding the train is sooooo fun. Yeah, it is fun, but that's not a reason that has enough draw with most people to overcome the downside of a trip time that is literally an order of magnitude longer (even if it's 150% cheaper). They need to start riding the carbon wave. Point out exactly how much better a train is for your carbon footprint. Start investing in alternative energy (hybrid, hydrogen) engines. It would be a shoe-in to get congress to toss them a grant to buy a few hybrid trains.
With reletively little effort, the train can become the travel method of The People again.
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