This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. Putting Cars and Trains Up Against the Airlines July 2, 2002 By JOE SHARKEY SAN DIEGO -- I've tried driving to avoid this," a businessman from Tucson told my wife as Southwest Airlines customers herded themselves toward Flight 1761, bound for Tucson, 400 miles away. "This" was the milling mob at San Diego International Airport preparing for the dash onto the plane to claim a seat, while loudspeakers barked competing flight announcements into the din. "But there's no question that flying to Tucson is easier than driving," noted the businessman, who didn't want to give his name but said he owned a company that made medical and other products for diabetics. "Once you get past that first hour out of San Diego, out of the mountains, there's just a bunch of nothing all the way to Tucson," he explained to her. I can attest to the accuracy of this observation because I was at the same moment pushing east out of San Diego in a rented car on Interstate 8, with the mountains ahead and the desert beyond. The man turned out to be quite right. Once I finally emerged from those mountains, there was literally a bunch of nothing all the way to Tucson. After the chaotic summer of airline delays in 2000, and the airport problems that developed in the months after Sept. 11, business travelers throughout the country say they have sometimes opted to drive, or take a train if available, on trips of about 150 to 400 miles that they used to make exclusively by airplane. The advantages of driving or taking the train between various points on the northeastern United States urban corridor are readily apparent. But it's a little more complicated out West, as my wife and I found when we both recently had business trips to Southern California, with a short diversion to Arizona, and then back to San Diego. She flew to Tucson on Southwest. The one-way fare was $54.50. I asked her to keep a brief diary of the trip, as I set off on the same route by rental car. We both left the hotel in San Diego at about 3:50 p.m. Her notes read in part: "4:30 p.m., arrive at airport; 6:20 p.m., plane takes off. We have a great view of the harbor, the mountains and the dunes in the desert near Yuma." At 4:30, I was still pushing east through the rush hour out of San Diego on Interstate 8, with the traffic reporter on the local jazz station, KSDS, moaning helplessly that "traffic is just horrible all over." There was a visual hint of mountains through the soupy haze to the east. By the time my wife's Southwest plane departed, I had watched the suburbs buffering the Interstate give way to the mountains, and then to the desert and the vast, sun-blasted Imperial Valley. The speed limit was by now 75 miles an hour. Every radio station on the dial seemed to specialize in all mariachi, all the time. Fortified by a sound wall of happy trumpets, I opened the window for some Sonora desert air, which rushed like a belch from a Bessemer furnace. At about 7 p.m., beyond the expansive Sahara-like Imperial sand dunes that ought to be marked with a sign saying "Last Interesting Thing to Look at Before Tucson," the Arizona state border signs rushed into sight across the tiny Colorado River, which the Interstate bridged without a glance. At 7:30, over a quick dinner at a Carl's Jr. fast-food joint in somnambulant Yuma, Ariz., where the temperature remained at 100 degrees despite the time of day, I perused The Yuma Sun, whose weather page reported that the next day would be "sunny and warm," with a high of 105. Back on the Interstate, where a road sign announced that Tucson was still 225 miles away, I wondered idly what kind of day it must take to get The Yuma Sun to use the word "hot." The empty desert stretched endlessly ahead in lengthening shadow. My wife's just-the-facts diary will serve to cut to the chase: "7:20 p.m., land at Tucson airport," she wrote. "8:30 p.m., check in at hotel; 8:55 p.m., beer and snack; 9:20 p.m., relax in room watching TV; 11:20 P.M., husband arrives." So the airplane wins that one. A week later, now traveling alone, I tried a more even-money match, this one between train and car on a business trip from San Diego to Los Angeles. "The train is by far the way to go; have a look," said Denise Jones, a business consultant who was working at her laptop in the dome car of the Pacific Surfliner, the train between San Diego and San Luis Obispo operated by Amtrak in partnership with the State of California. She gestured toward traffic that was slowing in the morning rush on Interstate 5, the main highway to Los Angeles. The Surfliner lives up to its name only on parts of the trip, where it hugs the Pacific Ocean. Surfers can be seen riding the waves. On the other parts, it runs beside the Interstate. Even with seven stops between the Santa Fe Depot in San Diego and Union Station in Los Angeles, the train takes 2 hours and 45 minutes. Cars on the congested highway don't keep pace. The Surfliner, which rail planners hope will one day be upgraded to accommodate high-speed service, makes 11 daily round trips between San Diego and Los Angeles and carries more than a million passengers a year, making it Amtrak's second most popular rail line after the Northeast Corridor. The regular round-trip fare is $54. An extra $22 buys a round-trip upgrade to business class. Ms. Jones said that she was headed to Burbank, which can be as much as a 90-minute drive from downtown. There is a car-rental counter at Union Station, but she said she was sticking to the rails. "You'd be crazy to drive," she said, uttering a sentence that not very long ago would have itself sounded crazy in Southern California. "At Union Station, I hop on the Metro Red Line, a subway that goes out all the way through the hills to the Valley. And I'm in Burbank in half an hour after I get off the train." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/business/02ROAD.html?ex=1026713579&ei=1&en=ad58a7e8bc8fede1 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company