Unfettered Blather

Every city has different kinds of drivers. In Dallas we’re pretty aggressive, in Houston they are just as aggressive but without the same appreciation for the value of human life, in North Virginia they tend to just be outright rude, in College Station they’re generally oblivious, and in Austin they’re batshit insane.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma the drivers are generally kind of easy going, not surprising for a city smack dab in the middle of rural America. However, should you ever find yourself at a red light and it turns green, do not charge out into the intersection. Another car is coming through, I don’t care if your light has been green for a few seconds now. If you want to avoid a wreck, be sure that all cross traffic has stopped. Apparently there is some kind of unwritten rule in Tulsa that says just because the light has turned red doesn’t mean you actually have to stop.

Travelling to Tulsa, OK from Dallas, TX is about a 4 hour experience. The only way to reduce that is wait until the last minute to go to the airport, which means you have to operate under the assumption that nothing will go wrong, security lines will be short, and you won’t get caught by random screenings or drive like a maniac (if you choose not to fly that is). Of course, when I say “4 hours” I am also assuming the flight is running on time, which might be a big assumption depending on what time of day you travel. For instance, morning flights almost always go on time because you’re typically the first people to be flying on the airplane that day.

In reality, you are probably going to leave about 2 hours before your flight, arrive at the airport, spend another hour on the plane, and likely another hour getting out of the airport, finding transportation, and getting to your actual destination. All of this is about a 4 hour process. Driving to the same destination, 4 hours. Essentially it is the same.

Last week I decided to drive to Tulsa instead of flying. I have to say I liked the experience better. There are some inherent advantages to flying. For one thing I can read a book or get some work done before and during the flight. Those are nice perks, but on such short flights I can’t say I missed them all that much. I didn’t have to go through security, I can take as much luggage as will fit in my trunk (I’m a light traveller, but even so I wanted to bring two bags to separate work and casual clothes for a change) and I can bring on any size liquid that I want. Furthermore, I am able to carry my little Swiss Army knife with impunity, a tool I have found to be quite useful on numerous occasions and which I hate to be without.

Driving through Oklahoma is relatively painless aside from Oklahoma City. Some of my colleagues have managed to avoid it, but for me to take the same route would add to my drive so it looks like I will be enduring that part of my trip. For those that don’t know, Oklahoma City is synonymous in my mind with “perpetual road construction”, and this last trip did not disappoint.

Overall, I don’t see the advantage to flying for a short trip. I haven’t even brought cost into the equation yet, and for now I’m not going to. I will say that the cost to the project is cheaper, and just leave it at that. I have more flexibility and greater convenience in exchange for a somewhat less convenient trip. After all, I can’t read in the car or watch a movie. I can listen to podcasts if I so choose, and that is likely to be a regular routine.

In short, after this first drive up, I have decided that the only time I will fly in the future will be when my destination is simply to far to do otherwise. With the current restrictions plus the airline schedules and other nuisances I just don’t see the advantage to short hops anymore.

Here’s a great example of bad capitalism at a Hilton Hotel in Dallas.

I really get irritated with people who respond to things like this with “They can do whatever they want, it’s a business!”. That or hiding behind the banner of “welcome to Capitalism”.

I’m a big believer in Capitalism, I think pushing it to the forefront of American society has allowed us to have the economy and prosperity we have today. Only in America do a majority of households in what we consider the poverty level have things like refrigerators, television sets, and VCR’s. What I don’t believe in is bad capitalism. I don’t think things like gouging your customers or taking advantage of their circumstances is a good business practice. Capitalism should ultimately produce benefit for the consumer as well as making money for the companies that provide products and services. If companies are making money but not providing benefit, or at least only providing benefit at exhorbant cost, then we’re breaking the system.

My experience with Hilton Hotels can be summarized into my favorite statement about them. “If they could charge for air, they would.” Fortunately, oxygen remains in the public domain. When someone comes forward and complains about a service, such as in the link above where Hilton charged $175 per individual for internet access in a conference room, that is helping to inform other consumers. I don’t get the same treatment from Holiday Inn or Marriott, and in fact they offer a wide range of free services that Hilton insists on charging for.

Consumer knowledge is the best weapon against bad business practices. It’s not that I want to see any business fail or be punished, but I do want them to have enough pressure put on them that they’ll be inclined to change. If not, they deserve to lose business. Competition is ultimately good for the consumer even though most businesses would prefer to not have to mess with it.

We’re currently making travel plans by the week because our business unit isn’t sure how long we’ll be flying out to a particular site right now. That means that I literally make my travel plans just days before I have to leave sometimes.

The only two airlines with direct flights to where I am going is Southwest Airlines and American Airlines.

Let’s start off with price. SWA costs about $200 to get where I am going. If I can book three weeks in advance it will be about $175. AA costs about $550 and the only time it comes down is if I can book three weeks out, in which case it is about $200. The $25 difference is not significant to me at that point, but it is interesting to note that AA is still higher.

SWA flies 737’s exclusively. Most of the flights with AA are on EMBERJ-145’s, a much smaller plane.

Arriving at Dallas Love Field SWA has donuts, coffee, and orange juice in the lounge. AA has…nothing. Unfortunately, the ride was so rough that I never got to find out what the inflight service was like. I know that AA has continually chintzed on their inflight service though, to the point you’ll feel lucky to get a drink.

I don’t know what the EMBERJ-145’s interior is like yet, but I do know that most of the AA 737 fleet I flew on where all looking pretty raggedy. Occassionally you’d get one with fairly nice upholstery and good functioning trays and seat pockets. That might sound odd, but a good number of the 737’s I flew on with AA had problems with both. When I got on the SWA 737 on Monday morning I could tell it was a somewhat older jet, but the seats were very nice and the airplane was obviously maintained very well. The only real clues I had that it was an older plane were just little things on the plane, such as overhead bin latches or some of the serving areas showing some extended wear. Everything was obviously well maintained and cared for though.

Oddly, the lack of assigned seating was not a real problem, even though I was not even in the first half to board the plane. The entire plane was seated in 20 minutes. The average time for an AA flight to board, whether it was a 737 or MD-80, was 30 minutes.

The real interesting thing was that the SWA flight was nowhere close to full, which actually made for a more comfortable ride. One thing I noticed after flying with AA for a year is that they’d rather use the smallest plane possible and pack it out then have even a single seat go unsold. I routinely saw AA overbook their flights and have to ask people to take a different flight.

All of this makes me wonder if SWA is really hurting AA all that bad, or if AA is the one hurting AA. I’ve flown SWA before in the distant past and they were a lot like I remembered. Good customer service, reasonable cost, and a tolerable flight experience. My experiences with AA were largely negative despite being a Platinum member. It was somewhat difficult to make myself book a SWA flight because of my Platinum status and the benefits that come with it. Again, SWA has a program that does not stratify their customer base and create different classes of service. The message SWA sends is that all of their customers are important to them.

SWA costs less but they offer more. They especially offer more for the regular traveller as opposed to the dedicated road warrior. AA has chosen to focus on their business travellers at the expense of any other customer. This might be a fair business plan, but even for their business travellers you really aren’t anything to them until you hit at least Platinum. Yet despite their higher costs and insistence on flying the smallest plane with the lowest cost, AA feels like SWA is a threat. The only threat I see from SWA is that they expose how bad AA really is.

You know why we have so many accidents on Memorial Day Weekend?

It’s not just because there are a lot of cars on the road. That certainly adds to the problem but it isn’t the actual problem.

The actual problem, especially going home, is that you have all these people going the same way, forced to share the road for an extended period of time, who are all tired and worn out with their nerves frayed from constantly having to watch out for all the traffic that surrounds them. Throw in a liberal helping of thoughtless jackasses who drive like clueless morons convinced that they are making better time than everyone else but still end up passing me at least four times and don’t get anywhere any faster while they continually slow down traffic with their hare-brained antics and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

When you have that many people on the road it is impossible to assume that they can all pay attention the whole time. I saw an SUV back right up into another SUV in a Wendy’s parking lot. The truck they hit was already behind them, the driver simply didn’t look. It was a completely avoidable accident. Hell, almost all “accidents” are avoidable.

Yet in a four hour trip from Austin to Dallas we were nearly run off the road by a driver trying to change lanes without looking and saw two accidents along the way, not counting the parking lot incident. Sad to say, that is about par for the course for that stretch of road on a holiday weekend. If only one person attempts to swap paint with me along the way, I consider that a good trip.

What was really frustrating were the people constantly jockeying for position, but really just slowing down the flow of traffic. It was one of those idiots that nearly hit us, and I had to repeatedly honk the horn because even after they started coming over and I honked the horn a few times they just kept coming! It the people doing this weave in-and-out from one lane to another that cause a majority of the accidents. I was following way too close to the car in front of me the whole way because it was safer to tailgate than deal with the constant barrage of people trying to squeeze in just inches from my bumper at 70mph.

Holiday weekends wouldn’t be so bad if people would just use some common sense. Something I often wonder about when I’m driving and watching people doing unsafe, insane, and/or idiotic things is that I can’t imagine that person feels like they are in such a rush that it’s worth dying for, nor is it worth killing anyone else for.

Of course, that realization would require them to drop their oblivious shielding long enough to realize that taking out a family of four so they can arrive five minutes earlier isn’t worth it.