Shared Journey?: Planes, Trains & Buses

There’s partnership between air travel and its land-based equivalents, but there is a competitive battle. James Dark investigates what brings the two sectors together and what divides them, and asks whether planes, train and buses are coming together.

An easyBus-branded coach

An easyBus-branded coach

As a proportion of the passenger transport sector, aviation is relatively small. Of the 7.7 billion journeys made by passenger transport in the UK in 2007/08 only 0.3% were made on domestic flights (22 million journeys). With international flights this figure climbs to 200 million journeys a year. However, this is still tiny when compared to the 1.2 billion journeys made each year on the national rail network, the 1.1 billion on the London Underground and the massive 5.1 billion on buses.

And...