America vs. Europe: who overrates whom?

Not an aviation-related note, but given that many of my readers are also plugged into the travel industry, here’s an interesting diablogue between Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen.

Bryan:

When Americans visit Europe, they see a lot to like: Charming boulevards, delicious food, and historic cities that feel safe.  When Europeans visit the U.S., it’s not so pretty: While major American cities are impressive, their inhabitants can be more than a little scary even after the sharp decline in crime rates.  From an American or European tourist’s point of view, Europe seems not just more aesthetic than the U.S., but more hospitable.

He argues that American tourists see the quaintest and nicest parts of Europe, while most Europeans live in less appealing suburbs, and those who live in the attractive urban centers cannot afford to enjoy it much. Meanwhile, European tourists see some of America’s grungiest places (“NYC and SF are basically uglier, scarier versions of the premiere European cities”) but avoid the attractive suburbs where most Americans (happily) live.

“Europe is a better place for most people to visit,” he concludes. “But America is a better place for most people to live.”

Tyler, with a dig at modernist architecture:

Bryan gives some good reasons why America is better for 37-year-olds with young children, namely lots of living space and easy shopping.  But I view much of Western Europe as better for the elderly, if only because it requires less driving and they are more likely to live close to their children and perhaps also they receive more respect.  Western Europe is probably better for children too, for reasons related to safety and health care”

My alternative view is that Americans rate European life so highly (in part) because the buildings from previous eras are so striking and attractive.  If all of the U.S. looked like U.S. postwar construction, the country would still impress more or less as it does.  If all of Europe looked like its postwar construction, Americans would be less likely to admire European policies and political institutions.  Yes I know about Lille, and contemporary Spanish architecture, but in reality most Americans would think of Europe as some kind of dump.

What do you think?

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Nothing to see here

Echoing Terry Maxon and Cranky, let me just say that the attempt by members of Congress to limit carry-on bag sizes by statute is a classic example of congressional kibitzing in the private business affairs of private-sector businesses. This is also, however, a bill that will go nowhere. Like many other minor pieces of legislation, it is introduced to make a stand, win the member some plaudits in the district, and die silently because it is not actually an issue worth Congress’s attention.

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Let your left hand not know what your right hand is doing….

The Senate is set to vote on a bill that would “establish a nonprofit corporation to run a nationally coordinated travel promotion program.”

[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said the corporation “would market the U.S. around the globe as a tourist destination.” Reid told reporters earlier in the week that the bill could create 40,000 new jobs in the U.S. [B.S.–ed.]

Initially the corporation would receive $10 million in federal funding from money collected from travelers under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) system currently being established by the Department of Homeland Secretary. After Fiscal 2010, the corporation would have to raise matching contributions to qualify for additional federal funding.

Radley Balko comments that “this is all because tourism is down, due all the money we’ve spent on post 9-11 efforts to make it more difficult for foreigners to come here.” (Reason piles on, too.) I’m sympathetic to that line of reasoning — want to talk about winning hearts and minds around the world? Then try making it not so much of a hassle to get through our ports of entry. But the numbers just don’t back Balko up. According to a 2008 report (with data up to 2007) from the Department of Commerce, after dropping off sharply post-9/11, foreign tourism began to rebound (not from every country, but a slight upward trend is clear). It wasn’t until after the financial crisis last year that foreign arrivals began to tank year on year, continuing to post steep declines in the first part of this year.

The fact is, regardless of the effectiveness of U.S. border security policies, the downturn in tourism is primarily due to the current economic contraction, not post-9/11 security procedures.

Now, whether it’s helpful for the government to get involved in the tourism marketing business is something else altogether. But I guess with all the work the administration has done to discourage U.S. companies to bring tourist dollars to places like Vegas, it might as well make up the balance by bringing in some foreigners.

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Okay, this is fascinating: more on airlines and the flu

Matt Phillips digs up a 2006 PLoS Medicine article by John S. Brownstein, Cecily J. Wolfe, and Kenneth D. Mandl that found a correlation between the grounding of commercial aircraft in the days after 9/11 and the later peak of the 2001-2002 flu season, which peaked at the normal time in countries that did not ground their aircraft. The takeaway from this? “At the regional level, our results suggest an important influence of international air travel on influenza timing as well as an influence of domestic air travel on influenza spread in the US.”

[O]ur results suggest that inter-regional spread occurs by a different mechanism, where air travel may be an important mode of long-range dissemination of influenza. We find that the effect of airline volume on regional influenza spread is largely based on travel in November. Though influenza activity is highest between January and March, initial regional seeding of infection may occur earlier. Our results suggest that for a non-pandemic year, travel during the Thanksgiving holiday may be central to the yearly national spread of influenza in the US. Similarly, we found that international airline travel influences the absolute timing of seasonal influenza mortality.

The flight ban in the US after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent depression of the air travel market provided a natural experiment for the evaluation of the effect of flight restrictions on disease spread. The importance of airline activity was highlighted by the delayed peak of influenza in 2001–2002 following the period of reduced flying activity. This finding is further validated by the absence of a similar delay in influenza activity in France, where flight restrictions were not imposed.

Thus, even though air travel is a major agent in spreading flu, by the time infections peak, the virus has already been seeded around the country and the world.

Matt interviewed John Brownstein, and their discussion is available at the Middle Seat Terminal blog post.

For more: yesterday’s post.

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Good riddance to Dutch travel tax

The Dutch travel tax has been so successful, it has to be scrapped:

The Dutch Government is to scrap from July 1 its air passenger ticket tax, first dubbed the ‘eco’ tax when it was introduced against major opposition by aviation and local industry last year. The controversial departure tax, which ranges from 11 to 45 euros, is blamed for a steep decline in passenger traffic at the main Dutch airports, particularly at Amsterdam Schiphol.

The tax was billed as a “green tax,” meaning that it was intended to raise the cost of flying sufficiently to deter passenger travel — and hence greenhouse gas emissions — on the margin. It apparently did this swimmingly well, better than I would have expected:

Schiphol Airport, Europe’s fifth biggest in terms of passenger enplanements, recorded a drop of 430,000 passengers in February, a 13.7% fall against the same month a year ago. The number of locally boarding passengers fell by 17.7%. The number of transfer passengers, who were exempted from the tax, declined by 8.5%.

As the story notes, this tax was not levied on transfer passengers in an attempt to keep KLM and its Schiphol hub competitive with airlines based at Paris, London Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Copenhagen. Since transfer passengers make up a huge share of Schiphol’s business, the surcharge would never have made much of a dent in the Netherlands’ aviation carbon footprint. The fact that transfer passengers were exempted and that the tax is pulled just when it seems to be working vindicates the complaints that it is a “revenue grab.”

The suspension of this tax also illustrates a tax problem. In an age of free movement across jurisdictional boundaries, tax competition is heightened, especially in areas like the low countries where a competing, lower-tax airport may be just a short drive away. “The airport operator along with Dutch carrier KLM had previously warned that potential passengers would try to avoid the tax by flying from airports across the border in Belgium or Germany,” the story report. “The Belgian Government has already abandoned a proposal to introduce a similar tax.” Unless the EU or a larger jurisdiction is going to impose a charge like this one, countries that impose it on themselves in a global downturn are making an economic death wish.

See my previous posts on the Dutch travel tax here, here, and here.

[H/T: Cranky]

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New aviation resources

In addition to his podcast series, my friend Addison Schonland has recently unveiled a couple of nifty and useful resources for those who follow the airline industry. One is AirportButler.com, which offers reports that offer targeted results from DOT consumer air travel data. Even better is AirInsight.com, which makes the useful information logged in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ endless spreadsheets and data sets easy to access and use. Take a look!

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Sunday stumper: optimizing your run from one end of the terminal to the other

Here’s a air-travel problem for the mathematically inclined:

Suppose you are trying to get from one end A of a terminal to the other end B.  (For simplicity, assume the terminal is a one-dimensional line segment.)  Some portions of the terminal have moving walkways (in both directions); other portions do not.  Your walking speed is a constant , but while on a walkway, it is boosted by the speed of the walkway for a net speed of .  (Obviously, given a choice, one would only take those walkways that are going in the direction one wishes to travel in.)  Your objective is to get from A to B in the shortest time possible.

1. Suppose you need to pause for some period of time, say to tie your shoe.  Is it more efficient to do so while on a walkway, or off the walkway?  Assume the period of time required is the same in both cases.
2. Suppose you have a limited amount of energy available to run and increase your speed to a higher quantity (or , if you are on a walkway).  Is it more efficient to run while on a walkway, or off the walkway?  Assume that the energy expenditure is the same in both cases.
3. Do the answers to the above questions change if one takes into account the various effects of special relativity?  (This is of course an academic question rather than a practical one.  But presumably it should be the time in the airport frame that one wants to minimise, not time in one’s personal frame.)

[H/T: Greg Mankiw]

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Britain keeps, raises Air Passenger Duty

Britain is keeping in place — and raising — its Air Passenger Duty, a per-passenger charge levied on airline itineraries originating in Britain. The government had promised to design a new charge based on aircraft; the current charge does not correlate actual emissions to charges for them. Two aircraft of identical capacity but with different fuel efficiencies are assessed the same amount of APD. Even worse, private aircraft, cargo aircraft, and transfer passengers (mostly at Heathrow) are exempt from APD, meaning that commercial travelers to destinations in Britain are bearing the brunt of aviation’s climate impact there. If Britain is serious about taxing its own travelers and airlines to mitigate climate change, then it needs to align charges with actual impacts.

See also my earlier post on the challenges of green taxation in aviation.

UK flight taxes to rise as reform dropped [FT]

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Obesity rule upheld in Canada

I don’t know why the blogosphere has erupted over this just now (I saw several posts on the subject in my non-aviation-related categories on Google Reader), but I’ll mention it: the Canadian Transport Agency’s January ruling on obese travelers was challenged by Air Canada and WestJet, upheld by a lower court, and appealed to Canada’s high court, which declined to hear the case, meaning that the CTA’s rule stands. According to a blog post I wrote in January, the regulation requires airlines to give an extra seat to a person who needs it due to being “functionally disabled by obesity for purposes of air travel.” But as I wrote then, the rule is sneaky: it specifically excludes “persons who are obese but not disabled as a result of their obesity.” But then defines “functionally disabled by obesity” according to Southwest Airlines’ practice of “screen[ing] for entitlement to an additional seat by determining whether a person can lower the seat’s armrests.” Basically, anyone who spills over the armrest gets an extra seat. And there are plenty of functional folks who meet this criterion.

So . . . it looks like Derrie-Air won’t be flying to the Great North anytime soon. . . .

Top court backs free seat ruling for some disabled, obese travellers [CBC]
Canada rules obese get second seat free on flights in Canada [WalletPop]

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Bankruptcy, not bailouts

I bet you’re thinking, how would a bailout of the “big three” U.S.-based automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler — affect a bailout of the airline industry? Tellingly, a few observers have compared the situation with the car-makers (Scene: Washington. Detroit: Give us big money money; our bankruptcy is your DOOM. Congress: Sure, always happy to help the UAW, but let’s install a car czar to apply industrial policy and oversee green car production.) with the airline bailout in 2001. A while back, I warned that as troubles persist in the airline industry, we should look out for a revival of the Air Transportation Stabilization Board. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Paul Ingrassia holds up the ATSB as a model for Detroit:

If public dollars are the only way to keep General Motors afloat, as the company contends, a complete restructuring under a government overseer or oversight board has to be the price.

That is essentially the role played by the federal Air Transportation Stabilization Board in doling out taxpayer dollars to the airlines in the wake of 9/11. The board consisted of senior government officials with a staff recruited largely from the private sector. It was no figurehead. When one airline brought in a lengthy, convoluted restructuring plan, a board official ordered it to come back with something simpler and sustainable. uniThe Stabilization Board did its job — selling government-guaranteed airline loans and warrants to private investors, monitoring airline bankruptcies to protect the interests of taxpayers — and even returned money to the government.

William Swelbar provides a little more background:

On multiple occasions, United applied for an ATSB-backed loan prior to its decision to file for bankruptcy protection in late 2002. The ATSB continually found that United had failed to file a business plan that was sustainable. Ultimately United filed for bankruptcy protection and continues its restructuring today. The ATSB simply was not prepared to provide United a bridge loan to nowhere. Today, United is in a much better place as a result. Not out of the woods completely, but the prospects for tomorrow are much brighter.

The travel industry disintegration after 9/11 was an unexpected external shock, but for airlines like United, it unmasked the unsustainable labor obligations and management decisions that were obscured in the heady boom time of 1999-2001. Some airlines, the ATSB determined, could do with a small loan guarantee in order to get through a rough time not of the airlines’ making. But for legacy carriers with legacy cost structures, a bailout would only postpone the reckoning to come, possibly making the pain worse later. United, Delta, and Northwest all needed a run through bankruptcy court. (I’ll say that United did not do enough to help itself in bankruptcy court. For example, management threw out silly ideas like Ted and didn’t simplify its fleet sufficiently.)

What does this have to do with Detroit? As I said back in June, the times today do not call for an airline bailout. Nor do they call for a bailout for Detroit. The big three’s special pleading notwithstanding, its problems are due entirely to bad management and extraordinary concessions to labor unions. As Swelbar adds, “It is my hope that we do nothing unless a radical transformation of the legacy issues that make the auto industry non-competitive are insisted upon.”

So where does that leave the big three? Exactly where legacy airlines were left: in bankruptcy court. Michael Levine — an aviation policy expert, natch — points out in today’s Wall Street Journal, “GM as it is cannot survive without long-term government life support. If it gets that support, it can’t change enough and won’t change fast enough. Contrary to [GM CEO Rick] Wagoner’s brave declaration, bankruptcy is an option. In fact, it’s the only option that merits public support and actually has a chance at succeeding.”

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