I happened to be flying into Minneapolis the very day
that Northwest Airlines announced its merger with Delta --Delta to be
the more senior (more equal) partner -- in effect, to absorb Northwest
and run its operations. Many observers are not optimistic that the
merger will rescue these companies in any case, since both airlines are
financial basket-cases, but it's a sort of last-ditch effort to save
them both.
It was less than great news up around Minneapolis, Northwest's
corporate headquarters. A lot of people I talked to were anxious that
Delta would cut service to a lot of little cities in the upper Great
Lakes and northern prairie region, places like Duluth, Grand Forks,
Green Bay, Traverse City and many other towns. Instead of one or two
flights a day, they may end up with one or two a week, or none at all,
they feared.
The Northwest pilots were none too pleased, either, because Delta
was making noises about their own pilots seniority counting for more
than Northwest's pilot's seniority in terms of preferred assignments
and scheduling. In fact, the Northwest pilots were so pissed off they
threatened to scuttle the merger.
That part of the country is a big region of wide open spaces
Things are very far apart. You wouldn't want to drive a car from Des
Moines to Rapid City, even if gasoline was a good bit less than the
$3.50 a gallon it is now. Driving around the prairie is especially
tedious -- and dangerous because of the tedium. The landscape is
boring. The roads are dead straight and mostly dead flat.
It happened, also, that I got a little guided tour of Minneapolis
from the author-shlepping service that my publisher engaged. We rode
past the old Minneapolis central train station. He said no trains stop
there anymore (there's a dinky afterthought of a station next door in
St. Paul). Anyway, the only train that comes through the Twin Cities is
the pokey once-a-day Amtrak to Seattle.
In other words, this region of the country
has next-to-zero railroad service. Can we pause a moment here to ask:
exactly how far does America have its head up its ass? Do you get the
picture? Can you connect the dots? The airline industry is dying and
absolutely no thought is being given to how people will get around this
big country -- except to make the stupid assumption that we can just
drive our cars instead. Even during the several days I was around
Minneapolis, no news media or politician raised the subject of reviving
passenger railroad service.
In point of fact, these are exactly the kind of trips that would
be better served by rail, anyway -- the towns that are less than five
hundred miles apart. The travel time between trains and planes would be
comparable, considering the two hours or so that you have to add to
every airplane trip because of all the security crap, not to mention
the delays. As a matter of fact, USA today ran a front page story two
days after the Delta / Northwest announcement saying "Air Trips Slowest
[now than] in Past 20 Years." Subhead: "Trend likely to persist as
congestion worsens."
One big reason for the airport congestion, of course, is that the
runways are cluttered up with planes making trips of only a few hundred
miles. This has been a problem for quite a while. Periodically, it gets
so bad that the media gets all excited and sometimes (last summer, for
instance) the President makes a statement deploring it. Since the
current president is a knucklehead, it apparently hasn't occurred to
him to get behind a revival of the passenger rail system. But Mr. Bush
is apparently not the only elected knucklehead in this country, because
absolutely nobody is talking about this.
Now get this: we
are sleepwalking into a transportation crisis. As I already said, the
airline industry is dying. The price of petroleum-based aviation fuel
is killing it. And forget the fantasies about running it on bio-diesel
or used french-fry oil. Driving cars will not be an adequate
substitute, either. It's imperative that this country gets serious
about restoring the passenger rail system. We can't not talk about it
for another year. We must demand that the candidates for president
speak to this issue. If you who are reading this are active reporters
or editors in the news media, you've got to raise your voices behind
this issue.
