Booing Domestic Flight Bans

Some time ago Betsy, Elsea, and Daisy went for a little walk between Grosvenor square and Parliament square.  Along this walk we saw many wonderful and amazing things,

It was good to see cousin Fred here, although we don’t necessarily agree with his views

however surely the most amazing of all to us economist cows was the following sign:

Taking a train from London to Aberdeen would take you 7 hours.  Taking a plane from London to Aberdeen would take you 1.75 hours.  I don’t know about you, but I would hate to see this clearly quicker option disappear completely.

I do not disagree that the amount of domestic aviation should be decreased, but calling for a complete ban on domestic flights seems like a boneheaded idea because it takes away the consumer’s choice of a faster mode of travel.  It would be like saying we should ban cars and trains and go back to the good old days of the slower, but emissionless, horse and carriage  – in fact even these are not emissionless (like cows, horses have emissions too!).

So how do we propose to lower the amount of domestic flights without enacting a command and control type ban on them?  It is quite simple really.  Let’s pretend that you had to travel from London to Aberdeen and you had, for simplicity’s sake, just two choices: the plane or the train.  How would you decide which mode of transport to take?

Obviously the first factor you would look at, apart from the time, is the monetary cost of each mode of transport.  Then you would go into the comfort, the accessibility of each mode of transport, oh, and if you care about the environment, the carbon footprint.

Obviously there are many people out there who value their time over their carbon footprint and the difference in costs of the two modes of transport.  However, what if we made that difference in the costs of the two modes of transport much more?  The more expensive a particular mode of transport is, the less the demand for it will be and vice versa… hence the shift from train to plane once cheaper domestic flights were introduced.

But how can we make flying more expensive than going with train and by how much?  An extra tax, say on aviation fuel, could be one option, where tax would be equal to the cost of the carbon footprint.  Environmental economists see such a tax as a way for the price of flying to reflect all of its cost and making the passengers pay for the environmental damage as well as other costs.  This is a way of ensuring that passengers factor in their carbon footprint into the decision on which mode of transport they wanted to take in case they had not already taken it into account.

There are of course other ways of reflecting the carbon cost of flying in airway bills. Including aviation in carbon trading is another – which incorporates the environmental costs through a different mechanism. For more information on including aviation in carbon trading, see the Committee on Climate Change’s advice to the UK government on reducing global aviation emissions.

Either way, the aim is to make flying a much more expensive choice, hence while it would still be available, only people who value their time a lot more would decide to take the plane.

Oh, and much further along the route we came across these people:

We like this option too!