Innovative Approaches to Addressing Aviation Capacity Issues in Coastal Mega-regions (2010) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 34-56
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From page 34... ...
• Plans for high-speed rail investment now under consideration in both coastal mega-regions could result in a total diversion of up to 15 million air trips per year in the long term. • The scale of diversion in the established literature is much higher in the West Coast study area than in the East Coast study area.
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From page 35... ...
airline presently offers a joint air-plus-rail ticket to a series of rail stations in the East Coast Mega-region. 2.1 Demand for HSR in Travel from City Center to City Center The available data and experience suggest that there is a very strong potential role for HSR in the East and West Coast Mega-regions as a substitution for present aviation trips.
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From page 36... ...
On the one hand, the role of existing services tends to focus on a small number of successful state-sponsored short-distance services. On the other hand, the role of possible future HSR has been examined at a level of detail more intensive than is available in the East Coast study area or anywhere else.
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From page 37... ...
By contrast, there are about 320,000 passengers flying between San Diego and the Los Angeles area, including Santa Barbara, which is the northernmost terminal of the Amtrak Surfliner service. Most of these air passengers are connecting to/from longer distance flights.
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From page 38... ...
Thus, these ridership numbers should be seen as a good summary of the information now being reviewed by the California HSRA and may indeed change.14 Figure 2.6 shows the mode-share forecasts for each of the major intra-California corridors discussed in this chapter. 2.2.2.1 Analysis of Future Ridership in the West Coast Mega-regions As expected, the volume of rail passengers shown in Figure 2.5 between Los Angeles and San Diego at above 20 million riders, is more than double the volume of rail passengers 38 14 To maximize their legibility, the figures are presented in color for the Adobe PDF file version of the report.
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From page 39... ...
Looking exclusively at year 2030 forecasts, if there were about 25 million travelers between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the reported decrease in market share (compared with the present share) would represent about 5 million air passengers diverted to rail.15 If there were about 14 million travelers between Los Angeles and Sacramento, air would capture 3.6 million or 2 million passengers would be diverted to rail.
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From page 40... ...
The scale is massive: given the assumption of a continued growth rate for total volumes between 2020 and 2030, an estimate of over 10 million air diversions in 2030 is not inconsistent in general scale with the earlier work on diversion. As noted in Figure 2.7, the California North–South system was expected to attract comparatively few air travelers at rail speeds of 150 mph or less.
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From page 41... ...
41 Forecast High-Speed Rail Mode Shares from Some Recent Studies Corridor (with HSR top speed and study year) FORECAST MODE SHARE FRA Commercial Feasibility Studies North–South California (150; 1998)
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From page 42... ...
As is discussed in the following section, the cost of incrementally improving the present NEC facility to attain the originally defined travel-time objectives has been estimated at about $14 billion. 2.3 Rail Services in the Eastern Mega-region that Could Influence Aviation Capacity Issues 2.3.1 Market Share Impacts of Improved Travel Time Almost all of the analysis presented for the Western Megaregions concerned the creation of entirely new services, built "from scratch" to gain very significant market share, and lowering overall intra-California air passenger volumes by a possible 10 million passengers per year in 2030.
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From page 43... ...
show that rail has already established a market dominance in these areas and that most air traffic in these city-pair corridors is for the purpose of connecting flights, not OD travel. This will have significant implications for later analysis for the ability to divert short-distance flights out of New York and Philadelphia airports.
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From page 44... ...
Roughly 11 percent of air travelers would divert to HSR at scenario 1 travel times. This would provide congestion relief at NEC airports and in NEC airspace.
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From page 45... ...
The study pointed out that there are essentially two markets for HSR services in the Empire Corridor and the possibility of some synergistic connection between the two markets: • The west corridor, comprising travel between all station pairs between Buffalo/Niagara Falls and Albany–Rensselaer; • The south corridor, comprising travel between all station pairs between Albany and NYC (Penn Station) ; and • Through, comprising all travel between all stations in the west corridor and the south corridor.
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From page 46... ...
It has been repeatedly noted that the so-called Moynihan Terminal project, immediately to the west of NY Penn Station, will improve the quality of pedestrian access and egress to/from the platforms, but not increase the throughput of the station. At this point, a strategy to provide additional capacity for longer distance HSR has not been developed.
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From page 47... ...
Using airport-pair expansion factors developed in the FACT 2 project, airport-to-airport trip tables were constructed for the future year, 2025. The airports were then aggregated into regions for the analysis of air travel within the study area, as shown in Figure 2.2 for the West Coast Mega-regions and in Figure 2.9 for the East Coast Mega-region.
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From page 48... ...
By way of comparison, California's absolute value of diverted riders is somewhat more than twice the high estimate for the northeast for 2025 (as extrapolated.) In general, short-distance air trip generation rates in the West Coast study area are more than three times those of the East Coast study area.
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From page 49... ...
This underscores the essential message of Chapter 5: the primary issue in aviation capacity in the two mega-regions is the need for airport managers to have more control and more accountability for improving the throughput of their facilities. 2.5 Rail as a Complementary Mode to the Aviation System Because of an extensive literature base on the subject of potential diversion from air travel stemming from new HSR services from city center to city center, it has been possible to establish a sense of scale for the amount of diversion from air passenger traffic that might be possible and to briefly observe how the market has responded in one case study corridor (BOS–NYC)
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From page 50... ...
2.5.1.2 GAO Report on Air/Rail Complementarity A recent congressionally mandated study by the GAO focused on the connections to nationwide systems for several reasons. In answer to the question of why the GAO undertook the study, the agency notes that: Increases in the number of passengers traveling to and from airports will place greater strains on our nation's airport access roads and airport capacity, which can have a number of negative economic and social effects.
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From page 51... ...
will have to be designed to serve the needs of air passengers. Reportedly, Amtrak was at one point considering an airport stop on its regional service, but not on the high-speed Acela service.
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From page 52... ...
Thus, passengers could book all the way to the final destinations at ZWS and QKL, respectively. The train ride fully substitutes a feeder flight and has a minimum connection time of 45 min in Frankfurt.
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From page 53... ...
Figure 2.18 shows that roughly one out of six passengers used the AIRail service in this market. The 2-hour train frequency between the Stuttgart rail station and FRA and the continued operation of the parallel Lufthansa flights combine to explain the generally smaller AIRail market share compared with the connection to the Cologne train station.
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From page 54... ...
Rise in AIRail market share between Frankfurt Airport and Cologne train stations (20)
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From page 55... ...
Appendix B includes a review of what is known about the bottlenecks and sources of congestion in the East Coast Mega-region; it reviews highway demands and capacities at the region's key locations. Areas where demand significantly outweighs capacity are documented for the East Coast.
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From page 56... ...
transportation planning process, including the development of statewide planning using techniques originally developed for metropolitan planning. Clearly, better integration of aviation planning with long-distance surface transportation planning could be undertaken.
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