Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Comment Archives: stories: Columns: City Sage: Today
Re: “Fighting gravity at the Colorado Springs Airport”
A rail line will soon be open between Denver and DIA, which will launch a building boom along it's path. When the DC area built its Metro Subway, the transit lines helped greatly to transform the region into an economic powerhouse. Expect jobs to go to Denver metro area, not here.
It'll be the final nail in the coffin for COS Airport AND our city's economic future.
Between clownish evangelicals, the idiotic TABOR, and our moron in Congress, our city is a joke to most of the country; a laughing stock of a city in a job-poor nation. Except for economic bottom fishers with low-wage jobs for a dumbed-down tea-party population, no reputable firm will consider moving here.
Posted by
OldCrank
on 05/22/2013 at 10:07 AM
Re: “Fighting gravity at the Colorado Springs Airport”
Airline deregulation, signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1978, began the impact on dozens if not hundreds of small regional airports that culminates in what we see today at COS airport. The act removed government over fares, routes, and market entry of new airlines from commercial aviation and phased out the Civil Aviation Bureau's regulation powers. The CAB had created a bottleneck of bureaucracy that stood in the way of innovation and service. Deregulation created a free-market environment for air service which delighted all, well, free-marketers and their airlines, increasing competition but eventually eroding service to less-profitable routes and cities. Like ours. Precisely because we did not deregulate phone service and other utilities in the same manor, considering them to be essential life services, people living in rural areas have access to those services. In the case of air service, free-market capitalists got what they wanted, the airlines got what they wanted, and the flying public gets what's left. In our case: bupkis. Coffee and newspapers from the mayor do not constitute the needed economic incentives to both sides of air commerce. They constitute amateur hour.
Posted by
Stephen Bowlby
on 05/22/2013 at 10:01 AM
Re: “Fighting gravity at the Colorado Springs Airport”
Stephen, exactly so.
De-regulation is a dangerous concept for any industry, especially transportation, in which case deregulation was a form of ignorance that failed to grasp sophisticated concepts that such services ARE a form of public utility requiring regulatory oversight to assure all of the public are well served at fair prices and without abuses. We were so much smarter in years past; the modern era of American history is turning out to be a disaster, save for a few of the hustlers on Wall Street who fleece the entire nation.
Though the CAB (and the ICC) were hidebound bureaucracies, that could've been easily fixed with new leadership and a revamp of the rules. Instead, the idiot from Harvard (Alfred Kahn) through out the baby with the bath water. The best aviation industry the world has ever seen was sacrificed on the alter of fare wars.
Low fares pleased the masses but the masses are truly ignorant of what's good for their own best personal and national interests, especially in the longer term. We've destroyed most airlines and eventually will get down to a de facto duopoly where two huge airlines achieve sufficient market dominance to allow monopolistic fare prices, at which time profitability will return to the industry so the survivors can avoid bankruptcy. We're almost there and are now seeing fares a good deal higher. I laugh at whiners, the ones who preach that everything should pay its own full cost, but scream like stuck pigs pay about today's airfares which are finally starting to cover the full cost of the service, plus that sacred free market profit factor.
Vaporous dreams of free market theorists that deregulation would give us an industry full of snazzy new start up airlines that serve even tiny towns with sparkling new planes and voluptuous cabin attendants at convenient times of the day has become an apocalyptic nightmare.
The true bare knuckle, fight for your life, no holds barred, free market reality has arrived: bankruptcies, crashes, wage cuts, service cuts, disappearing pension funds (with taxpayers picking up the tab via the PBGC) and the humiliation of hub/spoke flying patterns that treat people like a package on FEDEX, i.e., y'all get to fly via a hub airport before we'll take you where it is you wanna go....so here's a stale bagel, now shut up, sit down, and buckle up.
The same mental midgets that love doug bruce love deregulation. Idiots.