India is seeing the beginnings of a cheap flight growth with worrying implications for global warming. Although the scale would not compare to the USA, it is still a bad precedent. There's an interesting reflection at the end of the Guardian article.
"'Really we should be modernising our railways so that the time taken by rail is comparable to airlines, especially on these shorter trips,' said Dr Pachauri. 'But there is no one ministry that deals with transport. So nobody weighs up the pros and cons between transport modes. No one is building a Japanese bullet train in India. Instead, our railways are fading away, rather like what happened in America in the 30s. I am afraid that we will end up looking like America where planes shuttle people between cities, rather than France or Japan where people take the train."
It's the qwerty effect: happenstance at crucial junctures embedding structures that are then very difficult to change and may not be for the best.
Guardian Unlimited Travel | News | Indian airspace buzzes with first-time flyers as budget airlines stage a revolution:
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