Category: Travel

Why Your Plane is Always Full

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Jim Fallows:

I learned long ago the cruel but true principle: other people’s travel problems are not interesting.* Corollaries: other people’s traffic problems, and other people’s weather (“you won’t believe how hot/cold/dry/wet/windy it is here!”), also are not interesting. We feign sympathy, but as long as our own flight is on time, traffic on our highway moves along, the weather’s nice where we are, we don’t really care. (*Exception: unless the occasion for an otherwise-interesting travel narrative, from Paul Theroux to Atlantic site posts.)



Therefore I obviously am not “complaining” in mentioning that I got up before 5:30am today to get an 8:15am flight out of Dulles, only to find an email from the airline saying that the flight had been delayed to 10:45. The inbound flight — from Dubai! — is late, and there are no spare planes to go on to San Francisco. OK — gladder to know now than before leaving the house for the airport, though ideally it would have great to know last night. Nothing to be done. But it was a serendipitous intro to the very next item in the email inbox: a report on how substantially airline capacity continues to be cut. There just are fewer flights anywhere, and more of them are full, than in yesteryear.

Airlines have been very successful at using information technology to slice and dice pricing and demand. Overall, fares are certainly up for most travellers….

Strolling Through 19th Century London Today

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Brian Barrett:

Augmented reality might be the future, but my favorite application of it yet transports you far into past. StreetMuseum—an iPhone app from the Museum of London—overlays four hundred years of historic images on today’s city streets.



StreetMuseum makes creative use of Google Maps and geo-tagging to show users how London used to look. You can use it to check out pictures and info about nearby historic locations, which is has more of a straightforward walking tour feel. But the fun starts when you’re actually standing in front of a location in the database. That’s when the AR “3D view” kicks in, with views that may look something like this:

Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields

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Oscar Villalon:

It’s hard to wrap your brain around the numbers, to make sense of what they portend. Mexico, home to the world’s richest man, has had more than 10,000 people killed — often horrifically — since January 2007, just a month after President Felipe Calderon declared a literal war on drugs in his country.


Calderon has flooded the country with nearly 50,000 soldiers and federal police to combat the various regional cartels — Juarez, Sinaloa, Gulf and Zetas — mostly in the northern and northwest parts of Mexico. The United States, through the Merida Initiative, has committed $1.4 billion to fund the effort. The results have been less than stellar.



According to the Los Angeles Times (the only major U.S. newspaper that has been extensively covering this political and social calamity), not only has the military racked up more than 3,400 alleged violations with Mexico’s human rights commission, but in Juarez, the bloodiest of this war’s battlefields — if you can call a city of about 1.2 million people a battlefield — the army’s presence coincided with an increase in slayings. Since 2008, more than 4,000 people have been killed there, though Juarez was being patrolled by about 10,000 troops and federal police. In 2007, there were about 2,300 drug-related killings — in the entire country.

I visited Juarez 26 years ago…. during a trip into Mexico. The people were wonderful to a stranger.