When the train beats the plane

A flight from Chicago to Milwaukee is scheduled at about fifty minutes. That number has almost nothing to do with how long the trip takes.

Earlier this year we looked at 1,300 trips our customers booked where the scheduled travel time was under four hours, and measured them door to door instead: leave the house, arrive at the meeting. The results changed what Pioneer offers first.

What we measured

For each trip we added up the parts the schedule leaves out:

• Getting to the airport or the station, at that hour, from the traveler's home.
• Arriving early enough for security, or for a train, which is a few minutes.
• The scheduled time itself, and the median delay for that route and hour.
• Getting from the arrival point to the actual destination.

What we found

On routes under about 250 miles with good rail service, the train won door to door more often than not. Chicago to Milwaukee, Seattle to Portland, Philadelphia to New York and Boston to Providence were not close. The flight saved time on paper and lost it at both ends.

On longer routes, or where the train runs twice a day, the plane still won. We did not find that rail is always better. We found that the schedule is a bad way to decide.

The flight saved forty minutes in the air and lost ninety on the ground.

The time you can use

There is also the question of what the hours are like. A two-hour train ride with a table and a working connection is two hours of work. A fifty-minute flight is fifty minutes of not working, bracketed by an hour of lines on each side. Several customers told us their people simply prefer the train once they have taken it once.

Cost mostly favored rail too, though less dramatically than we expected. The bigger savings came from fewer rental cars and shorter hotel stays when people could leave later and still arrive on time.

Where the plane still wins

It is worth being plain about the other side. Across the Mountain West and most of the South, there is no train worth taking for a business trip, and nothing in this post applies. Early meetings also favor the plane on several routes, simply because the first train leaves too late. And a trip with three stops in one day is still a job for a rental car. The point is not to replace flying. It is to stop assuming it.

What changed in Pioneer

For any trip under four hours where rail service exists, Pioneer now shows the train first, with the door-to-door time beside the flight's. It is a soft preference by default: the traveler can still pick the plane without asking anyone.

Teams that want to go further can make it a hard rule in their policy, with flights on those routes needing an approval. A handful of customers have done exactly that, mostly the ones whose people already liked the train.

We will keep measuring. The next routes we are watching are in Texas and the Southeast, where new service is coming and the answer may change.