Beijing/Shanghai HSR Link Leads To $175 Drop In Airfare

Via James Fallows, a chart of airfare between Beijing and Shanghai:

Truncating the Y-axis in this way exaggerates the impact of the new high-speed rail link, but it's still there. Over the medium term, the likely impact is fewer daily flights between Beijing and Shanghai. This is, I think, one of the most undersold benefits of high-speed rail construction. Space at airports is scarce. And for many purposes — flying from Beijing to Tokyo, or from Shanghai to Seoul — air travel is absolutely indispensable. But absent high-speed rail, the objective incentives point toward the use of a lot of runway space for things like flights from Seattle to Portland or Philadelphia to Boston. Even mid-speed rail has a beneficial impact on the demand for DC-NYC and NYC-Boston air travel. What's more, obviously, the train makes intermediate stops so the existence of the DC-NYC train route makes it feasible to go Baltimore-Philadelphia or Wilmington-New York.