Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
One of the Porter flights between Moncton and Billy Bishop in Toronto includes a station stop in Ottawa (the other flighttot Billy Bishop is direct).
I have been on the flight that makes a pit stop in Ottawa a couple of times, and my observation is that there is a lot of traffic just between Moncton and Ottawa, About half the passengers disembarked there, but the plane was filled again by Ottawa passenger heading to Toronto. Because of this a stop in Ottawa nade economic sense because both legs of the trip were at high capacity.
For a station stop in Saint John, the same sort of situation would have to exist. A lot of passengers would have to get on and off the plane in SJ to make such a routing viable. If most passengers just stayed on the plane, then why do the station stop in the first place?
A plane is not like a bus or a train. There is a big fuel and time penalty for doing a station stop.
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There's already a market for flights between Saint John and Toronto, and now Saint John and Halifax. The passengers exist in all three markets. Is it that ridiculous to want to see something to make up for the shafting YSJ got from being left out of the PAL pilot program?
If government subsidized a "milk run" between St. John's, Halifax, and Toronto, via Saint John, it would more than make up for Saint John (and St. John's) being left out of the PAL pilot program.
Beyond getting YSJ some more routes, the whole Maritimes deserves a robustly connected bus network to get people to the region's 6 airports. We might not ever see the return of passenger rail to NB and NS, but we should all want to see the Maritimes invest in a very good bus system, and airport shuttle services to facilitate customers getting between 6 airports in 3 provinces.
I figured there was a reason Bathurst had an airport, so I figured the bus should at least go that far... and as they say, there's no shore like the north shore.
Having an improved bus system wouldn't just connect people to the region's 6 airports better, it would better connect the people in all the 3 maritime provinces.
Tim Houston is talking about Nova Scotia becoming a wind superpower, and there being enough energy to power a third of Canada from Nova Scotia's off shore wind potential alone. Maybe one day the busses and airport shuttles of the Maritimes will be mostly powered by wind, solar, and nuclear.
It's unlikely anyone alive today will live long enough to see the electric airplanes equivalent of a jumbo jet, but the busses already do exist. Electric airport shuttles are something that NB's regional service commissions should be taking much more serious look at, and maybe one day, we could even look at airport shuttles running
between NB's three CMAs.
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