SFO and HSR

This comes from an April 2005 interview with John Martin, the head of San Francisco International Airport.

Q: How do airport managers feel about establishing high-speed rail for California? Do you support the high-speed rail initiative?

A: The airport commission has come on record in support of high-speed rail. We think it would reduce the number of flights here, and we would see a 5 to 8 percent drop in passenger traffic if high-speed rail is introduced. The markets it would help us with — markets like Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego — are markets that are primarily served by smaller aircraft. So we might see an even bigger percentage reduction in the number of flights.

At SFO, we would like to see a station right across the freeway from the international terminal and we would extend our AirTrain system to connect to the high-speed rail.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/29/columnists/challenges_and_opportunities/20050429_co03_challenges.txt

So again, we see that airports and high speed rail can work in concert. If they clear out the smaller planes, they gain capacity, especially runway capacity, for bigger planes. The airport makes more money from bigger planes. Rail covers the markets it can serve best, feeding the markets that airplanes serve best. SFO grows as an interchange.

United Against Southwest

Interesting comment from Terry Tamminen, the former Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and Cabinet Secretary, the Chief Policy Advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger of California.

"When the high-speed rail authority in California qualified the bond measure to put a bond on the ballot to build high-speed rail from north to south California, Herb Kelleher, who was the chief executive of Southwest, said, "We've got a $20 million war chest sitting here at Southwest to advertise against that and kill it if it ever comes in front of the voters."

Nice. Glad I always fly United. They are not against high speed rail in California, because they can see it as a partner, and could even possibly be the operator of the system. They understand that they are in the transportation business, and high speed rail has been proven worldwide to be an effective form of transportation. Instead of small, expensive planes feeding United flights, they see the worth of a network of trains feeding their planes.

Why doesn't Southwest? Why are they ready to fight? Why fly Southwest?