Quote:
Originally Posted by Canadian Mind
Interesting ideas.
But with regards to the airports, Vancouver is already losing passengers to Seattle because Seattle prices are cheaper. I don't see how interconnecting the cities airpots could help. The airport's goal is to increase the number of flights to and from it, both to make it more money, and to make it and the city more prominent, which would mean even more money.
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It's expensive to expand an airport. While you don't pay the Airport Improvement fee at YVR separately, it's still there included in the ticket. As well, YVR pays rent to the federal government and who knows what they charge for fees to the airlines. When you have so many flights and want to offer more, it costs more money to upgrade your facilities.
As well, YVR is less efficient than SEA. YVR had 337,802 Aircraft Movements and 17,852,459 passengers in 2008. SEA had 345,242 Aircraft movements but had 32,196,528 passengers. Thus, YVR averages 53 passengers per plane and SEA averages 93 passengers per plane. Paying just the rent of the land works out to a cost of around $5 per passenger at YVR, and that doesn't include the cost of the buildings or services the airport offers.
But I think one of the main reasons flights are so expensive out of YVR is because they can be. Not only are a lot of international travelers from Vancouver very wealthy, but they have somewhat of a captive audience in Vancouver. The next closest airport is in another country and if you are traveling to Asia, who wants to go through US airport customs OR sit on a small bus for hours to fly out of SeaTac. And the road crossings suffer from very varied boarder wait times, whereas a train is more scheduled.
A high speed rail link would take some customers from YVR, but there is room for them and the airlines to lower prices to get those fliers back. Or they can continue to cater to the wealthy traveler while the flier looking for a discount can keep going to SeaTac (its up to them).
But a high speed rail link between Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland would automatically link the airports regardless of intent. But by offering a direct high speed connection to Abbostford airport between Vancouver and Seattle, YVR can offload some of the low volume regional flights to YXX.
By connecting the airports with high speed rail it would reduce the need for all airports to offer all flights as you can just travel to the other airport on a high speed train and fly from there as well as reduce the need for the flights that currently fly between the airports. By reducing the number of flights airlines need to provide to remain competitive, it reduces the cost of operating other flights and increases passengers per plane.
As the example someone used, a flight SEA -> YVR -> Japan was cheaper getting on in SEA than YVR. That's because it's expensive to land a plane pay airport fees, do a maintenance check, buy fuel, then take off again just to pick up some passengers. Landing and taking off again is probably adding 50% onto the cost of the flight, and probably less than 25% of passengers are boarding in YVR so it sort of makes sense. But I bet the airline would love it (and be cheaper for them thus cheaper for passengers) if they didn't need to do that because the airports were served by high speed trains.
And lowering the number of total flights in the entire region is also good for the environment. Connecting Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland by high speed rail is one of those situations where offering choice to the consumer will actually reduce waste (planes that aren't full).
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