Airlines Log Busiest Days Since Early 2020 over Thanksgiving but Omicron Poses New Challenge

U.S. airlines over Thanksgiving week had some of their busiest days since before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic as travelers returned in droves to reunite with family after a subdued holiday last year.

The Transportation Security Administration screened nearly 2.5 million people on Sunday, the most since Feb. 15, 2020. That was about 15% below the number of people TSA screened two years earlier.

Airports, planes, and parking lots were packed but travelers and airlines lucked out with mostly good weather and small numbers of cancellations, unlike the mass disruptions that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers during several episodes since this summer.

Despite the surge in air travel over the holiday, airlines are now facing a new challenge as more countries report cases of the omicron variant of COVID-19, just as international travel was rebounding as more nations loosened travel rules.

Airline executives said bookings surged when travel restrictions that barred international tourism from more than 30 countries in the U.S. were lifted on November 8. International travel is key to carriers’ financial recovery from the pandemic.

Scientists in South Africa were the first to detect the new variant. The Biden administration starting Monday is temporarily banning visitors from South Africa and seven other southern African nations, less than one month after it lifted pandemic rules that barred visitors from South Africa, the U.K. and more than 30 other countries.

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Is the On-Demand Model Foundational to the Future of Transit?

The Infrastructure Bill Is Big, but It Will Not Transform America’s Focus on Cars

 

While the massive law is a historic achievement in a time of toxic partisanship, some analysts, transit advocates, and environmentalists say it does not go far enough in upending the fundamental emphasis on automobiles embedded in federal transportation policy. It contains $110 billion in new spending for highways, roads, and bridges, compared with $39 billion in new spending on public transit — close to the usual ratio. The president had wanted $85 billion for transit. Voluminous research has shown that widening roads does not cure traffic congestion because of “induced demand,” an econometrics term that says, basically, “If you build it, they will come.”

The new law, however, has the potential to dramatically improve infrastructure and road safety for people who get around cities by bicycling or walking, advocates of so-called active transportation say. It includes 60% more for the federal Transportation Alternatives program, and increasing every year over five years. Local governments compete for grants under the program to pay for bike lanes, sidewalk improvements, shared-use trails, and other projects that make walking and cycling easier and safer.

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