“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
― 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!