Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

LA to have the worst traffic on Thanksgiving getaway day

Posted on by

Add in more drivers this Thanksgiving and one firm says Los Angeles will have the worst getaway traffic on Wednesday:

Trips on Wednesday—deceptively nicknamed “getaway day”—are expected to take 36 percent longer on average, with peak times from 3 to 5 in the afternoon. Perhaps it would be more efficient for everyone to just Skype their family members while eating meals at home.

A rep for Inrix tells the LA Times that leaving either before or after the late afternoon peak times might spare drivers a little road pain, but that leaving the morning of Thanksgiving would be even better. The unfortunate folks picking up at LAX on Wednesday and traveling on the 110 south can expect the worst delays on their trip between 7 and 8 a.m., with delays of up to 15 minutes, which actually just sounds like regular holiday traffic at the airport.

Some interesting info – the data we have these days is pretty amazing – but this is such a limited issue. The two hour window in Los Angeles between 3 and 5 PM is expected to be worse and some of the other cities on the list have only one hour windows. If this is the case, then people should take note and try to leave at other times. Many people may not be able to help it given plane or work schedules but the traffic doesn’t have be as bad as suggested if people use the information well.

Predicting more Thanksgiving traffic due to a closed car-to-plane gap?

Posted on by

One way to predict traffic on the roads at Thanksgiving is to look at the car-to-plane travel gap:

Drivers will make up about 89.5 percent of holiday travelers this year, a gain of 0.1 percentage point from 2013, while air passengers will drop by the same amount to 7.5, forecasts prepared by Englewood, Colorado-based IHS Inc. show. A 0.1 point increase may not seem like a lot, but based on last year’s estimate that 39.6 million people traveled by car for Thanksgiving, that would roughly equate to at least another 40,000 people piling onto America’s highways.

The car-over-plane travel choice is made easier by the fact that airfares aren’t coming down like gasoline pump prices are. While the plunge in oil has driven down wholesale jet fuel prices 17 percent since August, almost matching the 18 percent drop in retail gasoline, airfares have risen 3.4 percent over that time, data compiled by industry groups show…

“Right now the airlines aren’t in the sharing mood,” Rick Seaney, chief executive officer of the Dallas-based travel website FareCompare.com, said. “They just went through six years of multi-megamergers and dividing the country up by city with little or no competition, so they’ll pocket whatever difference they may get for a while.”

Gasoline’s drop will save the average U.S. driver about $500 annually, helping boost consumer spending, according to IHS. U.S. auto sales have risen 5.5 percent to 13.7 million in the first 10 months of 2014, on pace to be the strongest in eight years, Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey-based data provider Autodata Corp. said.

A few thoughts:

1. Having 40,000 more people on the roads at Thanksgiving is going to complicate traffic all across the United States? Spread these people cross hundreds of metropolitan areas and assume they aren’t all leaving at the same time (Wednesday after work) and adding that kind of volume may not matter much at all.

2. The prediction of future traffic is interesting to me. This reminds me of Carmageddon fears, first in Los Angeles (twice) and then in Chicago earlier this year. This seems like the creation of news: get prepared for more Thanksgiving traffic now! It is the kind of fear-based reporting done by many local news outlets about things like weather or traffic, fairly mundane events that occasionally turn out to be horrible.

3. The Carmageddon cases hint at another piece of this prediction: making such claims could change future behavior. If Americans hear that there will be more drivers at Thanksgiving, even just a few of them changing their plans (not driving or changing their departure times) might go a long ways toward relieving the predicted traffic. Perhaps this forecast is all part of some plan to actually reduce Thanksgiving traffic?

4. Just from personal observation: plane tickets appear to be really high during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s this year. As the article notes, airlines are looking to make money and haven’t budged much in their prices even with the recent gas price drops.

 

 

Don’t blame Black Friday and Thanksgiving shopping; they just expose the consumerist system

Posted on by

As crowds gathered to shop on Thanksgiving and into Black Friday, there has been plenty of backlash from those who think this violates a sacred family holiday to those who don’t like that relatively low-paid retail workers have to work another day to those who bemoan the lengths Americans will go to fight over some doorbusters. All of this might be true but I think it misses the point: these two days simply lay bare American consumerism. In a similar way that Walmart and McDonald’s tend to take the brunt of complaints about big box stores and fast food restaurants, Black Friday and shopping on Thanksgiving share a similar fate: they simply make real what is true about Americans and what they want.

There is a whole system at work here. It involves buying single-family homes, talk about the American Dream (equated with acquiring certain items), dreams about scientific progress and mechanical abilities such that life will be easier, liking having choices more than enjoying the goods themselves, acquiring stuff, and an economy and financial system dependent on average citizens continuing to buy beyond subsistence items. This system involves some great advances put to interesting uses, things like the assembly line, the internal combustion engine, transistors and semiconductors, the mass production of houses, the rise of marketing, and mass media.

The lesson is that hardly any day all year long is sacrosanct any longer; more than family togetherness, more than patriotism, perhaps more than the Super Bowl (which combines all of these things in a different way), Americans enjoy shopping, good deals, and consumption. It is competitive and alluring and our collective retirement accounts may all very well depend on this behavior.

Did all American adults shop on Thanksgiving weekend?

Posted on by

The Weekly Standard takes a look at some figures on Thanksgiving weekend shopping as reported by the National Retail Federation:

“A record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites in the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday weekend this year, up 9% from 226 million last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation released Sunday,” the CNN reports reads. The headline reads: “247 million shoppers visited stores and websites Black Friday weekend.”

This would seem to mean, according to these statistics, that basically all Americans over the age of 14 went shopping this past weekend…

That means, if you subtract those who are too young to shop, 0-14 year olds, from the total U.S. population, there are 247,518,325 people in this country. The number of people CNN reports who went shopping this past weekend…

CNN’s numbers, however, include those who visited “websites.” The numbers [are?] so loose it could even include news website or the same person visiting multiple shopping websites.

Even if there is some double-counting in this data (and tracking across websites is difficult to do), these figures suggest a large majority of Americans went shopping after Thanksgiving. I’ve written before about the difficulty in getting 90% of Americans to agree about something but perhaps we could add the value of Black Friday shopping to the list. These figures also may add to the idea that shopping is the favorite sport of Americans.