I’ve spoken to several Des Moines residents this week, people who were deeply opposed to the Third Runway, but wish the Port would “get its act together and do something about those long lines at the airport!”
Or… they hate the noise, but on the other hand, the $45 flights from Boise are just the best!
Human beings, right? 😃
At SeaTacNoise.Info, we often say that the airport is like a factory. But we’ve been rethinking that metaphor, because an airport is also like an exit ramp onto the freeway. Or maybe it’s like a grocery store. (We’re still working on the whole metaphor thing.)
Freeways and grocery stores are set up to handle some average capacity. But everyone knows there is no ‘average’. We all learn to accept some form of “rush hour” at certain times of the day. Drivers clump together. Shoppers at grocery stores clump together. Commerce is usually about “dealing with the rush” several times a day. In the real world, very few things move at a constant rate.
Flight arrivals and takeoffs, parking, and all activities inside the airport, also clump together nowadays.
It was a different time…
But that’s not what airports used to do before 1978, the year of airline deregulation. Before that, the airlines all negotiated a truly elaborate system with each other, the FAA, and, most crucially, every State in the Union. They had to go through this every year in order to keep things moving smoothly.
And also back then, when you went to many Soviet grocery stores you made a reservation to go in and buy your bread and milk. It wasn’t always convenient, but there were no lines, comrade. That was the airline biz until, wait for it, Jimmy Carter–not exactly the face of free-market capitalism.
The irony being that 1978, two years after The Sea-Tac Communities Plan was signed, was also the high-water mark for airport community activists nationwide. Until deregulation, everyone, including the FAA and the airlines, had gotten used to the idea that they might have to work with nearby communities for the long haul.
Because it wasn’t the airlines who were the prime movers of deregulation. Just like those darned Russkies, the airline industry appreciated the stability and predictability of a fixed system which guaranteed them a 12% annual return. Like AT&T and other de facto monopolies of the era, they were terrified of the Wild West that might ensue should they be forced into any real competition. Which is exactly what happened.
Actually, deregulation was pushed more by consumers and credit card companies, not to mention all the piddly little community airports which were super-popular at the time who kept demanding more ‘choice’. Even perceived ‘liberals’ like Jimmy Carter (the President who put solar panels on the roof of the White House!) thought they were doing everyone a favor at the time.
Historically, on every major vote affecting aviation capacity, every member of every Washington delegation, House and Senate, has voted Yea. (Actually, there was one vote in 1990 where one guy didn’t show up for the vote.) And when every airline began losing their shirts, Congress did not roll back the new system, it created a system which provides artificially low fares, subsidized by a galaxy of kickbacks, both from add-on taxes and frequent flyer mile programs. That is the ‘free market’ we’ve settled on, without which no airline can exist.
Reality Check
There is no way to make any aspect of airport life, including flights or even those lines within airport terminals without returning to 1972, when men were men, and airlines were heavily regulated by those damned socialists. You know, like Nixon. 😃
Clumping is just what happens when you let everyone in a market go ‘buck wild’ 1as statisticians like to put it.
Grocery contain a bajillion check stands, but they never have cashier at all of them. If there’s no line, they’re not making money. Grocers manage clumping by deploying a small number of people for short bursts–like a steam valve to release the pressure. They are the masters of knowing what customers are willing to put up with.
Freeways also manage clumping by metering exit ramps or enacting tolls. Highway planners can meter and toll because, when it comes to roads, all road planners have made the great conceptual leap: we will not continue to build capacity. Your car may be electric. It may be hydrogen. It may be powered by hopes and dreams. Whatehvs. We’re not adding lanes to I-5.
Airports cannot utilize either of these strategies. Terminals are not designed for any rapid deployment strategy. And any technique for managing demand is illegal.
You have to choose…
But the question is not, would travelers want some form of demand management? Obviously, for consumers and electeds, ‘convenience’ and ‘choice’ trump all other considerations.
The real question is, would you, the person who says you “hate the noise!” be willing to go back?
Assuming the world could go back fifty years, would you be willing to have a drip, drip, drip of flights equally spaced throughout the day? Or do you prefer the current system, with gaps throughout the day, and then a constant pounding every 45 seconds during ‘the rushes’?
Since there are no technological or political solutions on the horizon to ‘make the planes go away’, your choices are:
a) Convince people to fly less, by encouraging them to further embrace Remote Work. As we’ve just seen, that reduced flights by 40% and the world kept right on spinning. Currently, there are no electeds in any aviation market (including Washington) who are on record as supporting this kind of legislation.
b) Advocate for policies that create a constant drip, drip, drip. That covers basically all proposed reforms to NextGen. Consumers would hate it, every neighborhood except yours would hate it, airlines would hate it.
c) Embrace the clumping. And perhaps dream of doing so in exchange for policies that create longer stretches of calm during off-peak times (aka ‘curfews’.) Airlines are not as averse to this as you might think. It’s those peak times that matter most to them.
But if you do not buy option a) be careful what you wish for. It is still unclear as to which is more damaging to human health over the long term: b) or c).
Or not…
There are, of course, options d) and e)
d) I reject your choices!
e) I’m moving!
Option d) is what most everyone who stays here does at the moment. But either d) or e) are perfectly fine with the airline industry, the Port, and basically all your electeds. Keep complaining. The airlines can’t hear you. And electeds live for opportunities to demonstrate how they’re just as frustrated as you are. Please ask them what solutions they can implement and on what timeline.
Option e) is especially attractive because, regardless of any negative impacts from the airport, when you leave, your replacement is statistically far less likely to be one of those ‘agitators’. So… Adiós, whiner.
If you’re old enough to recall the Soviet Union, you probably also remember a now largely dis-credited form of psychotherapy referred to as primal scream therapy. It turns out that simply yelling about past trauma does not help one solve problems. Often, it simply leads to endless sessions on the couch.
1That is absolutely not what statisticians like to say. But ‘clumping’ is a proper term to describe one aspect of ‘rush hour’ phenomena.