Improved railroad service boosted
Would reduce delays at Buffalo airport
The lack of an integrated national transportation system, one that would put more short-haul passengers on high-speed trains, is to blame for an increasingly congested air travel network that serves Buffalo poorly.
Those are among the conclusions of a study being released today, one that says that Buffalo Niagara International Airport ranks low in a survey of on-time arrivals because the airports that feed it are even worse.
The study, “Expect Delays: An Analysis of Air Travel Trends in the United States,” is being released by the Brookings Institution and its Metropolitan Policy Program. It finds that most of the passengers flying in and out of Buffalo, and nearly half of those all across the nation, are making jaunts of less than 500 miles.
Such trips not only are the most polluting and least efficient, the study says, but they are also to blame for the spiraling number of backups across the whole of the nation’s air travel network. In the last two decades, says the report by researchers Adie Tomer and Robert Puentes, the number of commercial flights that arrived more than two hours late has more than doubled.
“Our data shows that the air travel system has never been under so much stress,” Tomer said. “On-time performance has improved recently because the number of people flying is at its lowest point since 9/11. But, as the economy bounces back, air passenger levels will grow, and on-time performance will likely resume its decline.”
The study extrapolated data from March into a figure of nearly 2.7 million passenger arrivals per year at the Buffalo airport, with 77.5 percent of those passengers arriving on time. That stands as the 25th worst among the top 100 metro areas.
But Buffalo suffers because nearly half of those arriving passengers, 1.1 million of them, were coming from airports in the New York City-Northern New Jersey metropolitan area. And that region’s on-time rate, 66.3 percent, was the nation’s worst. Other metro areas that were near the bottom for on-time performance, including Philadelphia (fourth worst), Atlanta (sixth) and Boston (11th), are also among the most popular connections or destinations for those going to and from Buffalo.
It also won’t help to flee to Rochester or Syracuse for airline connections, the study concludes, as Rochester has the seventh worst on-time arrival record and Syracuse the 10th.
“The short hauls are the most taxing in the air transit system,” Tomer said. “They generate the largest amount of pollutants per mile, are also the most energy intensive per mile, and they create the greatest stress on airport infrastructure. Their negative impacts affect every regional, domestic and international hub in the country.”
President Obama and Gov. David A. Paterson are among those promoting increased availability of high-speed rail travel. The president’s economic stimulus bill included $8 billion for such plans, and more is being sought.
But Paterson’s proposal alone, announced Tuesday, would cost $11.6 billion for a high-speed rail corridor running from Niagara Falls, through Buffalo, and on to Albany and New York City. And it is only one of many proposals from 24 states.
In evaluating which projects should be funded, study co-author Puentes said, attention should be paid to those that could ease airport congestion, as opposed to any political consideration of passing the money around.
“Transportation money is usually spread out very thinly, like peanut butter, all over the country,” Puentes said. “There is hope that these funds will be allocated on the basis of merit.”
Experience in other industrialized nations, the study says, shows that high-speed rail travel is just as quick as air travel, if not quicker, for trips of 300 to 500 miles. Even though the highest-speed trains are slower than airliners, passengers don’t have to travel as far from a city’s core to board, and they aren’t caught in bottlenecks caused by everything from weather conditions to security screenings.
But, the authors also note, other industrialized countries tend to have national transit systems where road, rail and air modes are designed to work together. Only in the United States, they say, are highways, railroads and air transportation systems designed, funded, regulated and managed by different agencies.
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