Fly or drive?

[SSOWorld]

It would be pretty obivous the choice if you were going overseas, but

if traveling within the lower 48 - where do you draw the line between flying and driving?

Vacation days are at a premium for me - and reserving days for emergencies tends also to be necessary.

Cost also tends to be a factor as well.  A four-day trip via road is likely more expensive than a four-hour flight (assuming you fly coach with 1 checked bag and don't buy too many amenities)

[Bryant5493]

I prefer to drive, but flying is okay.


Be well,

Bryant

[corco]

It comes down to the time spent travelling to the time spent there ratio. Anything 10 hours or less I'll just drive, especially since I'm a 2 hour drive away from an airport.

If it's more than that, I'll do whatever means spending less then half my time traveling. So if I have 6 days and a two day drive each way, it's not worth it. If I have 8 days and a 2 day drive each way, I'll drive.

For instance, when I go back to my parents house in Idaho for Thanksgiving, I fly, since it's a 12 hour drive and I only have five days and if the roads are even the slightest bit bad (they almost always are somewhere between eastern Wyoming and north central Idaho at that time of year) then it becomes a two day drive.

For Christmas, however, where I'm there for three weeks, I wouldn't even consider flying

[Dougtone]

For me, it depends on what is more effective, both in time and in money.  While I have driven from Upstate NY (Albany, which is where I lived at the time) to Chicago and Tennessee, somewhere that would normally be a 10-12 hour drive would be a good maximum distance for me to drive, and even less in most cases.  Instead, I make what should be a 5 hour trip into a 15 hour trip.

Beyond that, flying becomes more feasible, especially if I am traveling alone.  Occasionally, even taking a ferry is a good idea.  Last year, I took a trip to Nova Scotia.  I found it was quickest and least expensive to just drive from New York to Portland, Maine, then take a ferry across to Nova Scotia.  It was even cheaper to leave my car in Maine, walk on to the ferry as a walk-on passenger, and rent a car once in Nova Scotia.

[njroadhorse]

Anything over two days drive is flying.  The furthest I have ever driven from home is from my house in North Jersey to Myrtle Beach.  That took two days with overnight in Emporia, VA.

[Alps]

I originally said 600 miles, but that got stretched to 700 miles, and now it's closer to 800.  Basically, anything I can drive to in a single day (assuming that it's not part of a chained trip between several places).

[hbelkins]

I don't fly. Guess that means I'll never go to Hawaii.

[SSOWorld]

afraid of flying HB?

[oscar]

I don't mind driving cross-country, time permitting, and indeed did so twice last year (taking advantage of an unexpected and prolonged workload lull), as well as several times previously, plus some other really long trips from D.C. to El Paso, Newfoundland (via auto ferries to/from Nova Scotia), and several times to Colorado and Florida.  I also drove to Alaska on my first visit there (it helped that I had two months off that summer), though later trips there I flew out.

But even though I'm not crazy about flying, sometimes I'll fly, particularly for a combo road trip/family visit to California, or combo business/road trip like to Austin this June.  I once flew out to a road enthusiast meet in St. Louis, tacking on a two-day road trip after that visit; that let me do the trip with only one day off work.

[Truvelo]

If I had the time I would really like to drive from one end of the country to the other. The furthest I've been by road is from Nova Scotia to Ohio taking three days.

Of course, to get to the country in the first place means a 7+ hour flight

[Scott5114]

I avoid flying. If I drive I do not have to remove shoes or various other garments, and a small child will never kick my seatback!

[froggie]

Over the past 12 years, I have flown for vacation/mini-vacation only three times, with only one of those being since 9/11.  I also took the train once.  Otherwise, I drive.

That isn't to say I haven't flown.  I have.  But all (except the one) of my flights over the past 8 years have been work-related.

[hbelkins]

afraid of flying HB?

A bit, yes. Quite honestly, it unnerves me.

And I much prefer the feeling of being in control of my own agenda and schedule, and not having to worry about packing light or anything like that. If I want to take extra clothing, plenty of snacks and soft drinks, two laptops, two cameras, a video camera, etc., I can't very easily do that on a plane.

Plus, I *like* to drive. Getting there is three-quarters of the fun.

Really, the only place I've ever gone for non-personal reasons that flying would have been an option was Washington DC. And to me, flying to DC is just not worth it. It's approximately an 8 1/2-hour drive for me. I live nearly two hours in the other direction from the nearest commercial airport. By the time I drive west to Lexington, I can be into West Virginia. If I am supposed to be at the airport 90 minutes before the flight departs, I can already be past Charleston, on either I-79 or the WV Turnpike. It may or may not be a direct flight; if it's not a direct flight I'd lose even more time going to Pittsburgh or Atlanta. And if I have to change planes, more time lost. And there is always the possibility of lost luggage.

So all things considered, I'd rather drive.

[mightyace]

Anything under 500 or 600 miles, I'll drive.

Even up to 800 or 900 miles, it depends on how much time I have.  Over Thanksgiving, I flew up to my dad's house.  Now I have an hour to the airport on this end and two hours from Philly to my dad's house.  Even the  closest airports are an hour away from his house.  But, I'd have to change planes to get to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton (AVP) airport while Southwest has non-stop flights between Nashville and Philly.  So, flying into Philly and renting a car is about the same total time or even faster.

And, that's assuming there are no delays.  Last Thanksgiving, we (my brother and I) got bumped from our connection in Cincinnati and had to stay overnight, fortunately at the airlines expense!  That was frustrating as we could have driven to Nashville in five hour if a car had been available.  When you add that overnight in, we could have driven from Bloomsburg to Nashville in the same amount of time!

Plus, I find it hard to pack light, which makes things easier when driving and why I've only once ever flown at Christmas!

And, IMHO, most of the TSA "security" measures provide more of an illusion of security than real security.

[J N Winkler]

I don't have set criteria.  If time is no object, I always prefer to drive, as this gives me more exposure to scenery at the ground level and frees me from having to consider packing constraints.  But there are times when I have flown to save time and money.  Last winter I flew round-trip from Wichita to Tucson to visit my uncle at a cost of about $270, which was faster and about the same cost compared to borrowing a car and paying for fuel and overnight lodging.  (The trip between Wichita and Tucson is about 1000 miles and takes 2 days each way by car.  That means a total fuel cost of $140, assuming 30 MPG and $2 per gallon, and an estimated overnight lodging cost of about $80 assuming $40 per night at motels.)  Similarly, two friends and I visited Alaska by airplane in summer 2004.  My time was less constrained, but my travelling companions had only a 10-day hole, and the entirety of that would have been consumed just getting to and from Alaska by car.  I think the plane was more expensive on a per-person basis but not by a large margin.

For relatively short distances (under 1000 miles), I would prefer to take a high-speed train rather than fly.  You still have to go through security before you board a TGV-class train but the inspection procedures are far less onerous (no requirement to take shoes off, etc.) although passport control tends to be stricter.  I think Eurostar now has nominal luggage weight limits but no active enforcement.  I have taken the Eurostar between Paris and London a few times, TGV between Bordeaux and Lourdes, AVE between Córdoba and Madrid, and Eurostar (Italia) between Rome and Milan, Venice and Florence, and Assisi and Rome.

[hm insulators]

I prefer to drive. I'll be driving to Los Angeles for the holidays, for example. It's about seven hours from Phoenix.

[hbelkins]

A friend of mine is en route from Kentucky to NYC (for the UK-UConn game tomorrow night in MSG). He flew out of Cincinnati, which is about a 90-minute drive from where he lives. He was routed through Chicago, where he had all sorts of problems with snow, delays, missing the connecting flight, baggage checks, etc. I don't think he's on the ground yet. I presume he's flying into Newark because he's staying in Jersey and taking the train into NYC. He left home around 3 a.m. He could probably be near or past Allentown on I-78 right now if he'd driven, without all the headaches.

[SSOWorld]

Snowstorms tend to do that to people. 

[froggie]

He'd have had different headaches had he driven.  Not the least of which being where to keep his car in NYC (or Jersey).

[SSOWorld]

He'd have had different headaches had he driven.  Not the least of which being where to keep his car in NYC (or Jersey).

Cause it might be stolen?

[SP Cook]

I do not mind flying, but I live in "flyover country" where our local airport is a place you catch a small plane to a larger "hub" where you catch a real airplane to where you really want to go.  That means that if the place is less than five hours away, its shorter in time to just drive. 

I usually set the line at one day if traveling with my family, and a day and a half if traveling alone.  I modify that rule outward if I need a car where I am going, and inward if I am going to an east coast big city, where a car is a liability and you can take the subway.

For example, I would certainly drive from my place to Florida, which is one HARD day of driving.  But I would usually take the plane to DC, because driving is 5 to 6 hours, a car is a liability in DC, and I can fly straight to DCA (Ronald Reagan National Airport) where the subway stops inside the terminal.

[Alps]

He'd have had different headaches had he driven.  Not the least of which being where to keep his car in NYC (or Jersey).

It's not hard to keep a car in Jersey...

[froggie]

and I can fly straight to DCA (Ronald Reagan National Airport) where the subway stops inside the terminal.

One of the nice perks with DCA (technically not inside the terminal, but just outside with skyways across into the terminal).  The catch being that, for the flights I'd be dealing with, DCA is usually $100+ more expensive than flying into Dulles or BWI.  So I've tended to fly my S.O. into BWI for this reason.  And my one non-work flight here was out of Dulles, though that was due more to better flight schedules than cost.

It's not hard to keep a car in Jersey...

In my experience, once you're near/west of the Parkway, that's the case.  But if the goal is to visit NYC, being that far out adds time to the trip in.

[hbelkins]

He'd have had different headaches had he driven.  Not the least of which being where to keep his car in NYC (or Jersey).

When my wife went a couple of years ago, things worked very well when she drove to Metropark near Metuchen and then took NJ Transit into the city.

[Alps]

It's not hard to keep a car in Jersey...

In my experience, once you're near/west of the Parkway, that's the case.  But if the goal is to visit NYC, being that far out adds time to the trip in.

Well I sure live west of the Parkway - I live west of I-287 even.  I have a one-seat ride to downtown on a bus that takes about 45 minutes.  I don't see this as much of a problem, and in fact it's faster than the ride I used to take from Livingston to Newark (less than 10 miles).