The TSA said Friday’s travel broke a record set in November of nearly 2.91 million air passengers screened.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it screened 2.95 million airline passengers on Friday, the highest number ever on a single day.
The record travel coincides with the Memorial Day weekend that marks the beginning of the U.S. summer travel season. Last week, a group representing major U.S. airlines forecast record summer travel with airlines expected to transport 271 million passengers, up 6.3% from last year.
The TSA said Friday’s travel broke a record set in November of nearly 2.91 million air passengers screened. Five of the 10 busiest ever travel days have been since May 16, the agency said.
If we had high speed rail in the US, this number would be far lower.
Maybe a bit lower, but I’d hesitate to say “far lower”. Rail would reduce the demand for very short (hour or less) flights, and that’s why countries like France have banned such flights entirely. But even in countries with very developed rail, the cost of rail travel often ends up more than the cost of flying for medium to long distances. That was my experience in China, which has plenty of rail options, but everyone loves to use Japan as the example to follow for “ideal rail”, so I’ll look at Japan to compare.
According to Japan Rail, a 1-way bullet train ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto is about ¥8,000, plus either a roughly ¥5,000 (reserved) or ¥6,000 (non-reserved) surcharge, so you’re looking at ¥26,000 round trip, taking about 3 hours each way. Or, going to Japan Airlines, you can fly round trip from Tokyo to Kyoto and back for about ¥13,000, taking 1.5 hours each way. I was able to find cheaper flights listed on Google Flights as well.
Despite supposedly having a very robust, very comfortable rail experience in Japan, flying is half the time and half the price. I don’t know if that’s a result of government subsidies supporting air travel over rail travel or what, but to me it seems hard to compete.
The only difference is that you can apparently just waltz up to a train station in Tokyo and buy a ticket day-of, no security to get through and no checked baggage to worry about, but I can’t imagine such spur-of-the-moment travel over such distances is the norm.
“Screens”, ha. TSA screens passengers like Saran Wrap’s a viable condom. Hell, Saran Wrap alone’d be better airport security than these fascist fucknuts. 🤌🏽
downvote all you want, magats. 😘
It’s all security theatre.
How many of them were in the bathroom?
I read this with the homonyms for both “screens” and “records” and I could not figure out what it meant.
