Aero-automobility: getting there by ground and by air

Abstract

Automobility and aeromobility have largely been treated as separate systems in work on the social and cultural aspects of transportation and movement. To the extent that scholars have considered the two together, it has generally been in terms of accessing one of multiple airports within large metropolitan areas. However, for travelers from the smaller cities that are spokes in the North American hub-and-spoke network, the long-distance air journey inevitably involves consideration of the automobile. Based on interviews with ‘spoke travelers’ from four small cities around Chicago, this paper demonstrates the hybrid system of aero-automobility as a form of long-distance travel.

Keywords:

• Aeromobility
• automobility
• airports
• long-distance travel
• travel behavior
• North America

Notes

1. Champaign and Bloomington have three and five trains respectively per day to Union Station in Chicago, from which it is a half an hour to an hour's ride to O’Hare. The on-time performance of those trains ranges from 45 to 66% as of 2014 (Ingraham 2014), which means the train is generally not considered an acceptable means of accessing O'Hare.

2. In 2014, for example, O'Hare had 5% of all US departures but 11% of all canceled flights (BTS 2014).