A FORMER colleague has penned an eloquent farewell letter to air travel on the website of the Atlantic. The increasing indignity has led her to declare herself a driver or train passenger for any trip of less than 500 miles. I have a similar rule that has been evolving since I took this job in February. I discovered the hard way that it makes no sense to fly if the equivalent drive takes eight hours or less each way.

This is not what I initially expected. My city is home to the world’s busiest airport; my beat begins around Richmond, extends south to around Miami and west to the Arkansas-Tennessee border. I figured I’d fly pretty regularly. I learned pretty quickly, though, that many intra-South flights connect through Charlotte. Atlanta’s airport gets people into and out of the South pretty quickly, but getting to the northern part of my beat usually requires a trip through Douglas airport (direct flights are often several hundred dollars pricier than a one-stop hop through Charlotte). And between uncertain summer weather, frequent delays on the runway and the hassle of getting between home/meetings and airports, I can easily spend eight hours travelling for an hour in the air. Flights from Atlanta to Raleigh may take about 80 minutes, but the total travel time exceeds, or on a good day approaches, the total travel time of a drive. Then there’s the cost of a cab to the airport, a flight and a rental car, compared with the simplilcty of renting a car near my house and driving straight to my final destination. (I should say that the South lacks a decent rail network; if it had one I’d use it.)

Admittedly, I enjoy driving, and the South has more than its share of beautiful drives. The Selma-to-Meridian stretch of US-80, the Chattanooga-to-Nashville bit on I-24 and almost anywhere in rural West Virginia are current favourites. But more than that I hate wasting time, and air travel involves a lot of wasted time. When I drive I am accessible by phone and e-mail, and can always (and often do) pull over to the side of the road to conduct an interview; when travelling by air my phone is often required to be off, and even if it’s on, doing an interview from an airplane stuck on the runway or in an airport “lounge” (has ever a word been so misused?) is awkward. From my perspective—which I suspect is shared by plenty of other people who travel regionally for business—the indignity of air travel is annoying, but it is a personal problem; the inefficiency is a business issue. Junk-touching notwithstanding, driving lets me do my job; flying hinders me.

Corrections: The original version of this post referred to the Selma-to-Meridian section of I-80 and the Chattanooga-to-Nashville section of I-75. These have been corrected to US-80 and I-24 respectively.