London Banter - View Single Post - Crossrail fares announced

Roland Perry · March 20th 18, 12:54 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 13:38:38 on Tue, 20 Mar
2018, remarked:
Given an airliner can use anything up to a ton of fuel (747) just to taxi
around a large airport such as Heathrow ,

Divided by the number of passengers then leaving by road.

It would be interesting to see how many people arrive by car or taxi vs
train/tube or bus/coach. I would guess the latter probably exceeds the
former
by an order of magnitude.

The figures are available online.

As usual, you are completely wrong:

"59% of passengers at Heathrow travel to the airport by car or taxi, 28%
use rail and 13% bus/coach."

Strange. I suppose minicabs will account for a lot too.

They are included in the car/taxi total, obviously.

No **** sherlock. It certainly won't be car drivers, there arn't enough parking
spaces.

You appear to be under the misapprehension that a significant number of
Heathrow passengers drive themselves to the airport and park for the
duration. The size of the available parking, let alone the cost, means
this simply "doesn't compute".

Apart from a handful of business passengers paying to park for a few
days using someone else's money (and probably costing more than the
flight itself).

While I don't claim to be a typical flyer, I do end up being "taxi-dad"
[fsvo 'dad'] for a significant number of flyers over the years.

In any one year I probably shuttle half a dozen family/friend flyers to
one or more airports (Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester dominate) but
it's many years since I drove myself (with or without family) to an
airport and parked there while *we* did a flight.

As this is UTL, I have to confess the last time was probably around
2010, and parking at Luton Airport *station* (as a backdoor) but only
because my return flights to Luton were after MML could be bothered to
provide any trains back to my home town.

And that's the tragedy, for the UK rail system.
--
Roland Perry