The end of travel

High oil prices are crippling airlines and travellers alike and we may only be at the start of a new, global class divide between the stranded and the mobile

In Europe’s late medieval period, the labouring masses rarely travelled further than a few dozen miles from where they were born. For them, travel was dangerous, onerous and slow.

But wealthy aristocrats travelled far and wide in the name of diplomacy, meeting leaders from other countries and extending their power and influence.


For Steven Flusty, an associate professor of geography at York University, this is what society could once again look like if predictions that the lower-middle classes will no longer be able to afford to fly in just a few years come true.

It would be tremendously debilitating and could wind up “breaking down everything below a certain class level, where they are being held in space as if it’s some kind of a container,” he says.

The North American airline industry is under siege, with exorbitant fuel costs, a slowing economy and competition from Asia and the Middle East leading to employee layoffs and flight reductions.

Within a year or two, insists writer James Howard Kunstler and others, it will all be over. They predict the demise of the commercial airline industry as it currently exists.

And then, like in the medieval age, society will split into two groups: the mobile, and the stranded.

Toronto Star