If they’re US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they’ve ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it’s likely the only one available to them.
Signed, -An American
I was going to say “almost every American takes a school bus at one point in their life” then I looked it up and was disgusted to find that recently more children are driven to school than take the bus.
It’s absolutely ridiculous how many people drive their kids to school. The traffic reduction during fall break last week was astounding.
It is honestly necessary sometimes. My daughter was eventually taken out of school by us entirely and put in a (public) online school because of how severely she was being bullied, but before that, we had to take her to school because she could handle getting on the bus with all the kids being horrible to her every morning and afternoon.
For a while, she was allowed to listen to an mp3 player with earbuds, but then they started just shouting over the earbuds. And bus drivers barely give a shit considering how low they’re paid.
So yeah, sometimes people drive their kids to school for a reason.
Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you’re running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
And you’re in very close proximity for a very long time. I don’t know how HVAC works on an aircraft but I assume there’s a large amount of recirculation.
I was on buses and trains this morning. They weren’t nearly as crowded, the trips were a lot shorter, the air moved around at every stop, and like you said, they’re all pretty local, so low risk of someone importing weird diseases. At least on the subways, you should still wear a mask if only because of the air quality. There’s a lot of brake dust floating around.