JetBlue doubles down in Washington and New York

JETBLUE, the low-cost American carrier, won an auction last week for the right to operate eight additional round-trips from both Washington's Ronald Reagan airport (DCA) and New York's LaGuardia airport (LGA), essentially doubling its presence at both sites.

JetBlue bid $72m for the slots, over $26m more than its rival Southwest. The deal is widely seen as part of JetBlue's recent effort to gain more of a following among business travellers, especially because Reagan and LaGuardia are so close to their respective downtowns. Reagan in particular is a favourite of business travellers; it is right on the Potomac and much closer to Washington's central business district than either of its larger rivals, Washington Dulles (IAD) and Thurgood Marshall (BWI). It's also on two of the city's main Metro lines; the best public-transport connection LaGuardia can offer, by contrast, is the M60 bus. Smart business travellers take cabs from LaGuardia; the bus isn't really worth the hassle.

At some point, New York will probably reopen the debate over linking LaGuardia to existing subway lines. (A plan to connect the airport to the N line, which ends just three miles away, was under serious consideration for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s.)

But in the longer term, the real question for Reagan and LaGuardia is whether Amtrak will ever operate true high-speed rail service between New York and Washington. The existing Acela Express service between the two cities takes under three hours, and is relatively competitive in terms of speed and price with flying—especially when taxis to and from LaGuardia are taken into account. Penn Station, where the Acela stops in New York, is in the heart of midtown Manhattan; Washington's Union Station is just steps from the US Capitol. It's hard to imagine flying could remain competitive if Amtrak were to cut travel time between New York and Washington to under two hours.

That's a big if, of course. But both Reagan and LaGuardia could be better used. Current federal rules will force JetBlue to use the slots it won at auction "for destinations within 1,500 miles of LaGuardia and 1,250 miles of Reagan," according to the Wall Street Journal. That's silly. America should—as Matthew Yglesias, a blogger, has argued—"let airports be airports." You could—and, I think, should, if it actually existed—take high-speed rail between Washington and New York, Washington and Pittsburgh, or Washington and Boston. But building a high-speed rail link between Washington and Los Angeles wouldn't be a very good use of resources, and taking a train between those two cities would take far longer than flying. For some trips, air travel is the clearly superior option. Ideally, takeoff and landing slots at popular, centrally located airports such as DCA and LGA would be used for those sorts of flights—not one-hour puddle hops to cities a few hundred miles away.

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