Ruling on seat sizes favors air passenger group
FAA must reconsider a petition against further squeezes.
A passenger rights group that petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to stop airlines from further shrinking seats won a court victory Friday.
Although the win by Florida-based Flyersrights.org doesn’t mean that airlines are barred from further squeezing passenger space, it opens the door for further review.
Flyersrights.org submitted a request to the FAA in 2015, asking the federal agency to look into creating minimum seat standards to prevent airlines from further reducing legroom and seat width.
The organization argued that the average seat pitch — the distance between the back of one seat and the back of the next — has shrunk from 35 inches to 31 inches, while the width has shrunk from 18.5 inches to 17 inches in the last decade or so. The group said the shrinking space makes it harder to exit quickly during an emergency.
The FAA dismissed the petition last year, saying tests have shown that passengers can still escape a plane quickly even with such small seats.
However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday ruled against the FAA, saying that some of the tests cited by the federal agency were outdated and that others were not submitted on the record. The court also noted that the tests did not take into account that passengers have grown larger over the years.
“While we do not require much of the agency at this juncture, we do require something,” the ruling said. “And information critically relied upon by the agency that no one can see does not count.”
The ruling requires the FAA to reconsider the petition and said that if the request is again rejected, the agency must provide reports and studies to justify the decision.
Paul Hudson, president of Flyersrights.org, said the ruling may force the FAA to take the problem of shrinking seats seriously. “I think we are somewhat optimistic,” he said.
Uber and Lyft are outpacing taxis
Uber and Lyft, the two leading ride-hailing companies, are becoming even more popular among business travelers while taxis and car rentals are falling further behind.
But don’t count out the taxi industry just yet.
Business travelers used taxis and car rentals less in the three months that ended June 30, with each category losing two percentage points compared with the previous quarter, according to a report from Certify, the nation’s largest online expense report management company. Uber and Lyft picked up that business, with usage rising 2 percentage points for each.
Certify analyzed more than 10 million receipts and expense reports that were filed using its cloud-based system to determine what types of ground transportation business travelers pick.
The latest Certify report shows that taxi use, for the first time, dropped to single digits (8%) of ground transportation expense reports.
Car rental expense reports dropped to 29% of the total number of ground transportation reports in the second quarter from 31% in the first quarter. Uber showed up in 55% of secondquarter expenses and Lyft in 8%, the Certify report said.
The reason for the growing popularity of Uber and Lyft may be simple economics. The average expense receipt for Uber was $24.49 and for Lyft was $21.28. The average taxi cab expense was $31.06, according to the report.
But the taxi industry is working on a comeback in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Taxi Commission, which oversees taxi rules in the city, replaced its taxi driver written test earlier this year with a classroom training course. The change has reversed a decline in taxi drivers in the city, said Eric Spiegelman, president of the commission.
“We are now finally adding new drivers to the rolls,” he said. “That means several millions of dollars a year” in fees to the city.
The bad news, Spiegelman said, is that taxi companies are still unwilling to cut their rates to better compete with Uber and Lyft.