Airports make the indignities inherent to air travel cohere with its fantasies
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
2. This drivel reads like an essay by a struggling humanities undergraduate. The whole piece could be replaced by two words, "airports suck", with no loss of information.
There has to be a word for that sort of ponderous pretension.
... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue.
Yeah. This seems more like a reason for you to reflect and relax.
I've got anxiety issues of my own, but they tend to surface at the airport. Waiting at the gate is a perfect time to go through my mental checklist of what I packed, and await the realization that I've forgotten something critical (deodorant? socks? laptop adapter? to book a hotel?) or to look forward to everything that can go wrong during the trip (that airplane looks pretty old. Will I have time to visit with everyone I want to? Will I have to visit people I don't want to see? Will I get downtime to myself? What if I get sick while I'm there? What if I get sick right before I'm leaving?)
I'm 6 feet tall and the lack of legroom and claustrophobia is tough to deal with, especially if the person in front of me inconsiderably leans their seat back.
The last three flights I was on had us sitting on the tarmac 40 minutes each time before take-off due to various maintenance/ATC issues. Of course, you couldn't open your laptop either (but I did anyway).
The flight attendants also have a habit of asking me to close my laptop when it isn't anywhere near time to land yet.
My parents home is in Houston, Texas and I flew to college at Hobby Airport. The waiting and gate area was large and big, it had free wifi and a ton of places where I can eat (breakfast, lunch, or dinner food) or sit down.
When I was going back home from college, I had to wait at LaGuardia. LaGuardia's terminal for my airplane company of choice is depressing and always packed to the point where there was nowhere to sit. It also only had two places to buy food and both were breakfast places (Dunkin' Donuts). I eventually timed the train/taxi to the airport such that I spent as little time as possible waiting there.
Anyway, that's a rant I've been meaning to make for a while if you'll excuse me. A bad airport is anxiety-inducing.
It is nice to have a meal, watch people, observe the infrastructure, see where you could go from there, and so on.
Why, in short, do I need to wait at all?
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
> If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
> In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
This is mostly true, but:
1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane.
2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way.
> … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable!
I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
I was once delayed on an Amtrak train for 24 hours. Twenty-four hours, sitting motionless on a siding in the middle of nowhere. A professional cyclist could have beaten me to my destination, even with one 8-hour stop to sleep. Never again. Even a coach bus would be preferable.
I've yet to see another parking lot as neat as PDX. There's an ultrasonic sensor above each spot with a red/green LED that shows if the spot is open(green for clear).
Makes it incredibly easy to find out if there's an open spot down a parking lane.
Take the parking you highlighted for example, unless someone is ranking it as a home airport AND they don't take uber/lyft to get there, it's completely irrelevant. I tend to enjoy layovers in LAX because I like their sky club, which is completely irrelevant to anyone not flying sky team.
I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/
There's so much I like about the atmosphere. There's this sleepy peacefulness mixed with hurrying productivity that I love to watch. Stretches of quietness give way to an abundance of people, some happy, some professional, some weary, or a mix of all three in the families jostling about.
Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds.
Your phone doesn't work so you read your book non-stop. You get an accidental chance to remember what bad coffee is like. Dim expectations of plans (or longings for home) percolate all the while.
Maybe not perfectly pretty, conventionally, but if I had to pick a term "Airport Aesthetic" rings pretty true to me.
This is the closest I've found: http://tabletopaudio.com/ track "Dome City Center"; give it a try. (Direct link: http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_Ci...)
Old enough to have real character, and nobody seems terribly inclined to gut it and fill it up with soulless blondwood veneer. I've never seen it much more active than in the photo, either. Really, a significant part of the reason why I prefer train travel to flying is because when I choose the former, I have the privilege of leaving from and returning to Penn, rather than the modernist Skinner-box nightmare that is BWI.
I'm sure things were much slower paced back then however. Perhaps it was an entirely different experience!
Airports seem to be built with no concept of door to door travel time. For sample, SF to LA by plane. Use muni to get to BART, wait for BART, take it to the little airport train thing, then a line at checkin, security, and all the long walks in between.
Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience. It's a sign of how we're moving backwards despite all the technology.
I spent some of a 4 hour delay walking this path.
The blue dotted line, go north then along the river: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.1581/-0.1632
Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).
It's an environmental catastrophe if the best travel experience is also the least efficient.
It's the same for busses, boats, etc.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/debate-settled-flying-way-effi...
I don't think it's fair to say that it's "certainly" not true, as this study has not been reviewed and plenty of reasonable people believe that the evidence suggests a different conclusion. Here's a fairly straightforward critique of its methodology:
https://thinkprogress.org/no-flying-is-not-greener-than-driv...
In fact, can you name any other study which comes to the same conclusion as this one?
I agree the original article isn't great, but the one you offered is equally insubstantial. It shouldn't be shocking to find the trip type impacts the energy use.
I think that what it's saying is this:
* The most wasteful car trips are solo local commutes. Carbon-per-inch, flying is more efficient than driving when the driving is a solo local commutes.
* For longer trips, in a light duty vehicle like a sedan or SUV, driving usually smashes flying. If you have 4 people in the car, even in an inefficient car, you are using less than half the fuel of those same people flying.
The Michigan study simply averaged these together, which is obviously senseless because there is no flight equivalent of a 3-mile commute. It only makes sense to compare flights against highway mileage, and it's not unfair to assume >= 2.2 people in the car.
That's the way I read the critique.
One bus followed by one train. It certainly took less time (and way less money) than Uber was estimating.
Hi all, Agreed - from our vantage perspective, a majority of US airports still have a long way to go before they match best-in-class industry standards. We’ve been privileged to see (and contribute to) improvements across planning, traveler engagement, terminal design (cool stuff happening here) and much more. US airport leaders like PDX and CVG (recognized by travelers and Skytrax awards) are contributing to best practices that are slowly but widely being adopted.
From a personal perspective (as the founder of flightSpeak), I’m more optimistic about airports b/c of the human element that is largely untapped. The noise of wait times and lack of information has drowned out the fascination of discovery at airports, which we’re working on changing.
If you’d like to find out more of what your local airport is doing, do a search for “<IATA> master plan” You’ll be surprised there’s a ton you can also contribute to as a traveler and resident (if you’re in the area of the airport).