Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
The ATA Smart Brief for the past couple of weeks has been nothing but doom and gloom. Losses, capacity cuts, aircraft decommissioning. What a pleasure to get today's headline: Southwest Airlines reports 15% increase in second quarter profits. Southwest, their incredible hedging, their on-time performance, their amazing sometimes sub 20 ...
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
BART's service tweaks coupled with gas prices and tourism seem to have paid off: BART to SFO ridership jumps 65% As a loyal BART rider, I'm glad to see this sort of positive feedback to increased service. Hopefully they'll consider extending rush hour service past 6pm for the late-night grad ...
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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Carl Pope, the Sierra Club president, was on the Colbert Report on Monday July 21. Highlights include Stephen asking Carl if he flew from San Francisco, his home, to DC for the interview on a spotted owl, as well as Stephen thanking him at the end for emitting 2 tons ...
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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Today's NY Times has an opinion piece by Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters. In this piece, Peters advocates strongly for peak-period or demand-based pricing and notes the inefficiencies presented by the current weight-based fee. She explains economic principles using aviation examples. She notes the contradictory nature of the airlines ...
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
On a recent trip to Cleveland, I had the (surprising) pleasure of flying Continental. Ever since I caught Continental's talk at the 2008 Transportation research Board annual meeting on their environmental practices, I've been wanting to see if it was PR or reality. Well, after 1. being yelled at ...
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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Today I had the misfortune of wanting to travel from Fairfax VA to Northwest DC during rush hour, a usually inconvenient but not impossible feat. Throw in a tree down between west falls church and east falls church metro stations and this becomes a sweaty, messy, fight your way through ...
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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Richard Branson is really moving up on my list: first raising awareness and plunking lots of research dollars into aviation and climate change, and now sponsoring a major marathon! According to runblogrun, Virgin is sponsoring the 2010 London Marathon, which is one of 5 marathons in the world marathon majors.
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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Thanks to Evan Sparks's aviation policy blog I was alerted to FAA statements that carbon neutrality is within reach of the US aviation system (article here). This is a very interesting claim and while I haven't crunched any numbers, questions I have is what is the scope of the system ...
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Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
With all the talk over a gas tax holiday, I thought I would reference an excellent paper by Marty Wachs, titled "A Dozen Reasons to Raise the Gas Tax." Marty outlines 12 reasons to not only keep the gas tax but to raise it.
My comment is that a gas tax ...
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Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Virgin Atlantic completed it's flight with a biofuel blend - about 20-25% biofuel, the rest was the current aviation fuel, Jet A (kerosene). The flight was on a 747-400 from Heathrow to Amsterdam. Two very notable things about the flight: the fuel is a drop in fuel (no retrofitting of ...
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