Furthermore, I think you might have a skewed sense of what a fair price is to fly 2,500 miles. A flight from Lisbon to Moscow (about the same distance) is more expensive than a flight from LA to NYC. It is a long way and expensive to operate planes. Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares. If you want to convert an airline over to fixed price tickets, the ticket price would likely be considerably higher than what you deem "fair."
Finally, the way cities are built in the US does not lend themselves to public transit. NYC has decent transit because the population density is so high as to make it the only viable option. There are no other cities in the US like that with the exception of maybe San Francisco which has a significantly smaller population. In Europe, many cities are high density and have good mass transit. Unless we encourage density, we're unlikely to see good urban mass transit since most people would rather drive all things being equal.
It's a little known fact that much of the Queens subway lines were built when the area was still mostly farmland. Check this article out: http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2010/06/the-futureny...
We Americans are fond of saying that we can't have muni rail because our cities aren't dense enough. Well, reliable rail is the only thing that allows for greater density. In some cases city planners are starting to realize this and work with developers to add density and transit simultaneously. But it takes real leadership (or cojones, depending on your view) to build municipal rail that won't reach its potential for ten or twenty years -- but that's exactly what happened in New York and it has seemed to pay of very well.
There's a wonderful documentary on the NYC subway. At the end of the director's career - he basically stated he could keep building the subway for as long as he wanted - the subway would still fill to capacity.
I think one of the biggest problems was caused by the interstate system that went through cities. I can understand ring roads - but cities like Hartford, Providence, and Worcester are cleaved in two. It's just horrible.
It looks like your account was killed (maybe due to being inactive for 562 days?).
The car is the most inefficient, economically infeasible mode of transit known to human kind. For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job.
Airlines should be aiming for $0.05 per mile per person. If you pack people that tightly, there's no reason that it shouldn't be possible. European airlines do it. Fire deadwood (start with your 389 VPs) until you can deliver a fair price.
Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares.
There are the "gamey" cheap fares ($25 for NYC-LAX) that obviously exist to draw people in but don't actually produce profit, and then there are reasonably cheap ones ($150-300) on which the airline still makes a profit. There's no reason the latter needs to be offset by outright robbery (which the last-minute effect is).
The problem with the airlines is that they aren't even good at being greedy. They need to be bailed out every 3 years or so. If they were making "too much" profit, the solution would be obvious: buy their stock. But that's not the problem. The reason the tickets are so expensive is that they have hundreds of unnecessary executives paid 6- and 7-figure salaries to do absolutely nothing.
Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time to be negligible, so that you don't need to consider it even in a context where they are talking about a cost meter ticking at 8 cents per minute or so.
There are annoying rhetorical tricks in the other direction employed by fans of cars, like pointedly ignoring the cost of pollution or pointedly pretending that expensive required-by-law facilities (notably parking) are not costs. But as much as those pro-car rhetorical tricks distort reality, they seldom seem to distort the reality of the situation as badly as the anti-car trick of treating the value of the traveller's time as negligible. Across the people who can afford to travel by car, "negligible compared to $4.80/hr" is an extremely bad approximation for the value of time.
Who says it's a panglossian necessity to spend 8+1 hours in an office and commuting 2 ways every day?
Best of possible worlds my ass.
Give everyone a Mininum Guaranteed Income, automate what can be automated with frickin' robots, turn most desk jobs into remote jobs, and let everyone else have a ROWE (Results Only Work Environment). Oh, and coddle the fuck out of everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur. (As opposed to jabbing them with bureaucratic spears and wishing for their doom as is currently done by society).
As the old saying goes, an idle mind is the devil's workshop. Productive work gives you a sense of accomplishment and purpose. People who don't have that, often turn into troublemakers of one kind or another.
Oh and read this if you're not convinced about the Guaranteed Minimum Income: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc...
Here's another good read: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Also, one of the top 5 death bed regrets is working too much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239
So rather than address cost, I want to see an Uber bus that transports people from residential areas downtown to replace crowded subways. The grown up version of a school bus. Market it as a fun experience and alternative to crowded trains. I wouldn't mind paying a premium for it.
The bus lanes have ticket-issuing cameras to ensure they stay free of cars for the buses to speed through. It might not be as fast as a subway on a good day, but at least there are attempts to offer new services.
Btw ... Uber is still cars. On a typical day, the NYC subway system carries 4 million riders. The estimate for taxis is far far less (probably less than 500K people).
By scanning I mean taking any object (or living form) and shoot it with some wave to obtain a matrix image (like MRI) but on an atom level.
By printing I mean you will have an .ato file just like a CAD drawing and printer will print a 3d object but instead of using plastic or some material it will print using single atoms.
This technology will ultimately solve all human problems, lets only pray that it will be developed by some consortium of civilized and reasonable countries.
Transportation will be fixed by ability to "teleport" people. your atom map will be saved and transferred over Internet to a destination, where a printer will print you out. Within the time once mastered this, we will be able to solve all health problems. You will be scanned and all your health issues fixed by an algorithm working on your image file, then from your image reprinted healthy, perhaps even without that pot belly.
Our cities will be rebuild (reprinted) from a scratch by this technology.
I know this sounds like a heavy delusional science fiction, but todays scientists are already able to change metal into gold by shifting atoms, its just process alone is extremely expensive, making it useless from a financial point of view.
If you want to go from New York to Los Angeles, you have a sub-5% chance of paying a fair price. Most often, you'll find yourself paying a ridiculously high price because you booked your ticket to close to the date, too far away from it, on the wrong day of the week, or in the wrong season. Then you get shitty service the whole way, including 40-minute security lines and $25 baggage-check fees. If you spring for business class (domestic first) you get service that was almost as good as what coach offered 30 years ago, when flying wasn't horrible.
Trains aren't even an option for mid-distance travel, due to the infrequent schedules, equally absurd fares, and slow speeds (comparable to cars, except on Acela, a "high speed" service that goes 120 mph).
We have good highways in the U.S., and people drive a lot in this country because it's the only mode of transportation that actually works (for a family of four, it's cheaper than air and rail, which is just fucking absurd) but it's just not safe to drive them faster than 80-90 mph average speed, and legally you can't even go that fast.
New York is the only city with "decent" (by American standards) public transit, and that's still not enough to slash housing prices to where they'd be with an extensive transit network. (Note to all: if you pay urban rents, you'd benefit from a better public transit system even if you never used it, because it would de-crowd the city.)
We're amazingly good at shipping electrons, but we've given up entirely on moving humans.