U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

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56 pointselsewhen72 comments

This article mentions Dulles Airport's "mobile lounges", but doesn't explain their extraordinary history, which has absolutely nothing to do with the issues discussed in the article itself. [Dulles has no train connection yet].

If you've gone through DC's Dulles Airport, especially its international terminal, you may have experienced traveling in what must be described as a moving room, a kind of huge, wide bus. Long ago, these things were an experiment in a radical and wonderful 1960s approach to airport design which sadly couldn't work with our modern airport security.

The original design of Dulles airport was a single rectangular building: one huge atrium. There were no terminals at all, no gates at which airplanes parked. Airplanes stayed out on the tarmac somewhere. Instead, the building had an array of what might be best described as garage doors. When your flight was ready, a mobile lounge would drive over to a certain garage door and attach to it. The door would open and everyone on the flight would walk into the lounge. The lounge would then disengage and drive you over to the plane. There, it would lift vertically until it matched the plane door and attach to the plane. You'd then walk into the plane.

[Edit: yes, many european airports drive you out to the plane by bus: but you must still climb the entranceway to the airplane outdoors, and you must enter the bus in, well, traditional bus fashion. With the mobile lounges, it's as if you never went outdoors.]

It was an elegant and simple distributed system. Wikipedia says it failed because it couldn't keep up with passenger numbers: but I think, at least with Dulles Airport's one-single-massive-atrium-building design, it mostly failed because it was completely incompatible with a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. So the whole architectural design was doomed to failure. Over the years Dulles has grown terminals and security checks and underground passageways, and the lounges are now relegated to basically being buses between terminals.

Why do you think the"single point bottle neck " was the failure? While I disagree with the need for"modern security " surely you have your single point bottle neck to enter this large room. Once in the room, you are cleared and free to travel in the lounges.

Because Dulles had already been built prior to the need to redesign to provide the single point security design. I think there was no realistic way to add it after the fact and still retain the lounges attaching directly to the massive internal (effectively) one-room building.

> a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports.

Why could you not replicate the security procedure across all lobbies?

Money?

Presumably, instead of TSA, you'd need TTSA instead (Tens of Thousands Standing Around).

There's a certain minimum staffing level for any TSA checkpoint and the overhead doesn't scale down linearly to checkpoints serving fractions of the lanes today. I don't know what the minimum is, but it seems like it's at least 7 or 8 (1 on ID inspection, 1 on baggage scan, 1 on backscatter, 1 supervisor, 1-2 on baggage manual inspection who could also metal detect/manually inspect wheelchairs, 2 available for "male/female assist", 1 supervisor)

Surges are also better handled by centralizing the checkpoints. Whatever lounge is headed towards flight 123 is going to have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates in a current-design airport. If you have a queue at security outside the single lounge, are you really going to close the door and tell everyone in the queue they're missing their flight? Or will you put pressure on security to overlook things to keep things moving (providing an obvious attack vector for adversaries)? Add it all up, average it all out, move it 100 meters away, and a security delay seems more reasonably a passenger fault to arrive early enough.

> have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates

That’s a very good point. And, the airport itself has already balanced the departure times for all flights across the airport. Every flight has a pre-assigned departure window, so in theory, when you average all flights, you shouldn’t have (many) peaky surges in passenger load. Or at the very least, they would be predictable.

Hub airports tend to have large departure banks where all the flights arrive, hold, and depart within a certain time frame, for ease of connections. So this isn’t strictly true.

There's effectively two main schools of designing multiple-terminal airports. One school is to design each terminal as a separate island in a vast sea of tarmac, so that all of the inter-terminal transportation has to be done post-security. This is the model of, say, ATL or IAD. The other school is to put all of your terminals around a central cluster such that every terminal can have independent pre-security access. This is what, say, ORD or DFW do.

In the latter setup, each terminal gets independent security lines, but there is often (although, as in DCA, not always!) post-security connections between terminals that allow you to choose any security line you want, although at the potential expense of a lot of extra walking. But in the former setup, there really isn't any alternative to a single security line for everybody. And if you have an airport like IAD where space was never budgeted for that security line in the original terminal construction, it can get pretty bad.

i have seen airports where the security check is per gate. you don't get spikes on those because only the passengers for that particular flight will be in the queue

I have twice been in a situation where I had to deplane by mobile lounge at Dulles. For your standard modern medium-haul airplane, it takes at least two mobile lounges to fully support the passenger load, and it's a decently crowded standing-room-only affair.

Continuing the original vision, it's clear that passenger counts are absolutely incapable of supporting the "lounge" aspect of the mobile lounge design. You don't want to be on those things longer than you have to. It's still more comfortable than a trek on the tarmac, but it's definitely not superior to the modern gate system.

Just add more lounges? Scale out horizontally?

I’ve been on them a couple of times, an am not sure I would prefer them over a walk on the tarmac.

These things differ from buses in that they are noisier (big engines that probably are old, too, because replacing them is expensive), smellier (I don’t remember whether windows open at all but they have fewer windows per m²), slower (their high center of gravity makes turning more difficult) and don’t give passengers a nice ride (again likely because of their high center of gravity).

Because they take more passengers than regular buses and passengers enter through relatively narrow entries loading passengers also takes longer than with a regular bus. If they used regular buses, the first bus could often already be unloading before the first of these departs.

When I used them, it was easily 15 minutes or so between entering one of these and the start of the ride. You could walk a mile on the tarmac in that time. Certainly in evenings outside Washington’s snowy winter and hot summer, I think I would rather walk.

I watched the video linked in the article, and I am not sure how they are different from buses? They seem to be completely custom built, making them expensive to maintain or of to build newer larger ones.

Edit: I think I realise now that the difference is that you save having to walk up a flight of stairs to the plane, thus you'll never actually be outside. That is neat, but I am not sure it is worth the expense.

Other airports have gates where the plane is somewhere else, and it's just buses picking you up, since the buses arrive like regular buses, they don't have to wait for the other one to reverse out. And since they are just buses, getting more buses is easy, and possibly a lot cheaper.

Those things are terrible. I had a tight connection, was first or second in this movable room, and waited for 25 minutes for it to start moving. Then there was a security screening in the place it moved to, for another dozens of minutes. Terrible.

> but I think, at least with Dulles Airport's design, it mostly failed because it was completely incompatible with a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports.

MCI (Kansas City) has separate security areas for each handful of gates.

Here's a map showing the general shape of one of the three terminals: https://www.ifly.com/kansas-city-international-airport/MCI-C...

I don't see an online map with the security areas marked, but the way it works is that the outer edge is divided into segments for each few gates, and each segment is separate with its own security.

For a "mobile lounge" setup, I'd assume each docking area for the lounges would have a security entrance and it ought to work about as well as what MCI has.

Here’s a wonderful original marketing video [0] in support of the Dulles design.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyb4nLFeg5M

Built by the great Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.He also designed the St.Louis Arch.

There was an interesting issue with a rail connection on the Narita International Airport serving Tokyo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#C...

The airport was build in big style on the 60s on farmland forcefully bought from local farmers and should have been served by a Shinkansen high speed line directly from Tokyo station, making it's 50+ km distance from the city center an non-issue!

Lets say this did not go well with the farmers, who felt their rightful possession was forcefully taken and started what was effectively a major guerilla warfare campaign against the airport. There was a lot of sabotage, arson, general attacks and even high towers built near the Airport edge on still private land.

Over the years the airport project managed to prevail and the situation mostly quieted down (there is actually still one farmer quietly farmer who never sold tending his farm in the middle of the airport grounds, complete with a route access tunnel!).

Still, there was the problem of actually getting to the airport from Tokyo - no one wanted to risk another war with farmers for the land needed to build the Shinkansen line to the airport, so it ended up with a fully built Shinkansen station under the airport but no rail actually connecting to it. This got even more bizzare over the years as private railway companies creeped with their conventional lines ever closer to the airport yet the airport staunchly prevented anyone from using their shiny useless station with unworthy non-shinkansen trains.

The situation was untenable long term, with travelers having to travel to a nearby train station and then take a bus to the airport, causing delays. So finally in 1991 after immense political pressure the first rail connection to the airport opened and these days 3 different rail lines serve the airport, including a non-shinkanse high speed train that takes you to the center of Tokyo in 45 minutes with 160 km top speed (~ 1/2 of what modern shinkansen can do).

Wow, thanks for the background on this. I lived in Japan previously and I had always assumed that there was no Shinkansen to Narita due to airline lobbying. Most international flights go through Tokyo. If you live in Nagoya or Osaka and a direct Shinkansen connection was available to Narita for your international flight, I think a lot of people would choose to take the Shinkansen to/from the airport rather than the domestic flight.

Osaka has plenty of international flights. I don’t think they are served by a shinkansen either, though definitely by a lot more trains than Narita.

Part of the lessons learned by Japan at Narita was that a flat land parcel big enough for an airport is extremely difficult to assemble, extremely unpopular to assemble, and will probably be located way too far out to be convenient. After all, Haneda is still the busier airport today.

So now new airports tend to get built as artificial islands, since you are probably not trampling on anyone’s centuries-long family farm.

There’s still a taxiway at Narita which has a kink in the middle of it that blocks use of the adjacent runway when any plane is travelling on it. The kink is there because of a parcel of private land that the owner refuses to sell.

Link: https://goo.gl/maps/G83NUkot4i7JwwWBA

Well, there is that whole farm enveloped by the airport:

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7828401,140.3896393,403m/dat...

BBC article/video: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08kz96l/the-man-living-at-an...

It also didn’t help that by the 90s the JNR was so burdened with Shinkansen debt that the government took on all the debt in a dedicated bad bank and privatized the rest.

Now Haneda is taking international flights again so the point is moot. I think there is enough demand for both to exist, but Narita’s current situation is just a touch better than Montreal Mirabel.

You don't need guerilla farmers to end up in a situation like that. MUC, the Munich airport, has two rather shitty metro lines connecting it to Munich. These lines aren't even direct ones, instead they have stops at every tree and milk bottle.

Once they had a test with an ICE train stopping at the MUC metro train station. Worked like a charm.

Well, but politicians wanted the Transrapid, so no conventional train connection was done. Direct metro connections, which would already be fast enough for most purposes, usually vet shut down by disputes between the city of Munich, the counties of Erding and Freising, various political parties and DB (the German train company).

What really confused me when I visited Munich is that those two S-bahn lines pass through the centre in opposite directions on their way to the airport.

The airport is northeast of the city. All of the S-bahn lines pass through the centre of the city in a roughly east-west direction, and all the central stations have two S-bahn platforms- one for trains going west, one for trains going east.

If you want to take the S-bahn to the airport from the central station, you either take the S8 going east (towards Karlsplatz) or the S1 going west (towards Hackerbruecke).

OMG. I'd long wondered why the US had so many of these ridiculous boondoggles (eg AirTrain JFK) and now I know.

Unfortunately this comes too late for one airport that has absolutely miserable public transport, since they're already building their $2 billion boondoggle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover

AirTrain JFK exists because

- the circle of terminals is too wide to be well served by one or two stations without significant walking, but too small to have a full length subway or commuter train stop every terminal. If you built a direct heavy rail link, you would probably need something like the AirTrain still; BART has a similar setup at SFO, as does DFW

- JFK itself is located awkwardly. It is too far away from straight path rail lines. So you are either diverting everyone passing through on a time consuming detour via every terminal, or you are splitting frequency upstream and depriving commuters of train capacity they used to have.

The funding angle aside, there are still reasons why large airports have their own "terrible trains" (and buses) to connect to the transit system. There's usually just one airport stop in any case, which in a major airport, may (or may not) be convenient to one or two terminals but will require some sort of separate transportation system from at least part of the airport.

Large airports outside the US often do have one station per terminal, or a station conveniently between two terminals. See eg London Heathrow, Tokyo Haneda, Tokyo Narita, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi and many more.

Some do. Mostly when they're at the end of the line because you're mostly not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route such as in the case of San Francisco, say. Which didn't originally have a BART connection at all. (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.)

Large modern airports tend to be at the end of the line, because few cities have the space to build them anywhere near the center anymore. Then again, Sydney is 15 min from the city center and has two stops, one each for the international and domestic terminals, on a line that continues far into the burbs.

> (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.)

Terminal 4 at Heathrow is a different "route", in that trains go to Terminal 2/3, then 5 or 4 IIRC (and you have to switch if you get on the wrong one), but they go there.

> not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route

Generally, but see Sydney Airport here, where the Domestic and International terminals are very close to the Central station, which is in turn almost the start of the T8 line. I'm sure there are others as well.

I didn't remember what the details were. I just remember staying at a hotel connected to a Heathrow terminal and at the end of the day, getting to and from was a sufficient hassle thinking I should just have stayed in one of the non-connected hotels in the general area.

Schiphol disagrees with you. Its railway station services about 45 trains an hour, none of which terminate there.

Making a stop is a lot less of an issue if it also serves as a transfer hub. This can greatly reduce the congestion of downtown stations.

Schiphol also is one of the largest examples of a one-terminal airport, though.

This approach would work less well at, say, JFK, which features terminals arranged in a circle that is too wide to serve with a station or two without significant walking, but too small to have trains feasibly stop often enough to eliminate the walking problem.

It really depends on your airport design. Schiphol and Brandenburg both have a single centralized departure / arrival hall, with a train station right underneath it.

Using public transport is by far the fastest and most convenient way to get to or from the airport.

A lot of other airports simply aren't designed for convenience, but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible with a different design.

I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context.

Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0.

Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city metro system planning for a subway line that the airport planners also design to be integrated. The uncoordination of city infrastructure in the USA is too pervasive for us to have some NRT/HND/LHR/FRA style rail-to-airport intermodal paradise.

I cannot think of a single existing US airport where this could be taken advantage of in practice in the next 20 years. And the number of new major airport terminal buildings that have gone up in cities with metro systems in the last 20 years I can count on a single hand. We will be forever stuck with a shitty bus to LaGuardia.

And btw, our problem isn't getting subway lines to go to more terminals. It seems to be getting the subway to stop before it hits the terminal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw

Maybe we read a different article, but in this one it literally says:

> Silver Line in D.C

Is the one for which the rules were changed and the one in the process of being built, so that's at least one

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do.

And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?

I added in a paragraph with an edit that you probably didn't see, but to be clear these are separate problems. The plane trains are to get people around an airport. The subway/train connections are to get people to/from an airport.

He's wrong two ways. (1) most if not all major US airports are connected to rail and (2) international airports use plane trains and if they don't they have buses that do the same thing.

JFK certainly doesn't have a subway stop at the airport. You have to get off the subway, get a separate AirTrain ticket, and ride the AirTrain to the airport.

I think he's arguing that, with a different funding model, transportation between airport terminals would be integrated with the main transit systems. Which mostly works if the airport is at the end of the line--and, even so, it introduces some complications to the degree that intra-airport transportation is usually free.

That doesn't work because you would have to go through security when transferring between terminals.

And that's what you do at some airports. Even if there isn't a train post-security connecting terminals, at many airports, not all terminals are connected post-security.

LAX would like a word with you. Bring your walking shoes.

OAK is exactly the system the article describes: there’s a BART station far away at the Coliseum. To get to the airport you have to take a separate monorail that is slow and adds $6 to your fare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum%E2%80%93Oakland_Int...

I haven't flown into OAK for years. (Used to do it semi-regularly when I was flying JetBlue.) Back then it was buses which would get terribly backed up and overcrowded to the point where you might have to wait 30 minutes to get on one.

That makes it clearer what he's talking about. But still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. OAK and the others mentioned have spurs because of geography, not money. As an example, It'd be impractical to shunt the BART over to OAK and it would make the service a lot worse for those not going to OAk.

Yeah no. Not one of the three giant airports in the NYC area has a local or regional train that stops in any terminal at all. It’s a disaster.

LAX doesn’t have an airport station (well, there is an Aviation/LAX station on the green line, but it requires a 10 minute bus connection to the terminal).

SJC (San Jose is the biggest city in the Bay Area) has no airport station for either VTA (light rail) or CalTrain (heavy rail). Both pass within a quarter mile of the airport.

SAN has two light rail stations nearby, but not really at the airport.

Wish airport charts a fee to use thier train? The article mentions several times about a second fare, but I don't know if any airport that actually has a fare for their "skytrain"

JFK is one example, when you’re transferring to/from the subway/LIRR to the AirTrain, costs $7.75

JFK, Newark, Oakland. Two of those three airports are NYC airports, and I strongly suspect (especially from the train-to-the-train phrasing) that the author is mostly complaining about JFK's setup, which is an unusual setup for airports.

> This unique type of U.S. transportation has no commonly-recognized name, and I will soon arbitrarily assign a term for them just to make everything easier.

They're a kind of tram. I suspect the author is from New York, because the train-to-the-train of which he speaks largely doesn't exist in any other city in the US, and the concept of a two-car light rail-esque system seems astonishingly foreign to him. Especially because the tram style of light rail is quite rare in the US but rather more common in Europe.

> The train itself should just go to the airport, like they do in virtually every other airport with a mass transit connection in the world.

Let's look at cities in the US that have a large airport and a metrorail mass transit system:

* NYC, LaGuardia: accessible only by bus

* NYC, JFK: Tram system (electrified 3rd rail) that connects to two subway lines.

* NYC, Newark: Monorail that connects to commuter rail station

* DC, DCA: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the airport terminals.

* DC, Dulles: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the main airport terminal (although there is a very large surface lot between the two).

* Chicago, Midway: L stops literally at the terminal.

* Chicago, O'Hare: L stops in the middle of the three main terminals.

* Boston: T stop is roughly as far away as economy parking. No internal circulation over than buses.

* San Francisco, SFO: BART stops at the airport terminals (although it does a funny Y setup to get in there).

* San Francisco, Oakland: BART station is some distance from the Oakland airport. The tramline connecting them is a rubber-tired tram owned and operated by BART.

* Philadelphia: SEPTA has a connection to the airport that is a commuter rail connection, with stations at several terminals.

* Atlanta: MARTA stops literally at the airport terminal, in fact closer than the tram line stop to the rental car facility.

* LA: Metro does not have a particularly close stop to LAX. No tram-like system at LAX.

* Miami: Metro stop is at the rental car facility, terminal itself accessed via tram-like system.

* Baltimore: Light rail stop at the terminal itself. (No connection between the heavy rail at Baltimore and the airport).

* Cleveland: Metro stop at the airport terminal itself.

In summary, of 16 airports considered here, 4 have the pattern the author decries, 9 have rail transit stops directly baked into the terminal entries, and 3 do not have either pattern. Functionally speaking, the Oakland and JFK systems are effectively mass transit spurs not built to the same technology as the main mass transit system and having little other destination than the airport, neither of which it turns out are particularly uncommon (since airports tend to be massive tracts of land far removed from anything else, it's often uneconomical to extend regular mass transit all the way to the airport).

(There are basically two competing proposals to bring transit to LaGuardia. One would extend the N/W from Ditmars to the airport, the other would be an AirTrain-like system that extends to the 7/LIRR at Mets/Willet Point and is sometimes suggested to connect all the way to the existing AirTrain at Jamaica. Guess which one is moving forward.)

>San Francisco, SFO: BART stops at the airport terminals (although it does a funny Y setup to get in there).

I'd call SFO a train to a train. There's one BART station (which as you say is sort of a spur off the main line--which is why it didn't originally exist as part of the BART system). I'm not sure if you can walk to the BART station from any terminal but in my experience you take the AirTrain. There's probably a similar pattern at a fair number of major airports where you technically can walk to the transit station but, in practice, you may not want to.

The setup at SFO is really the exception to the rule. At ATL and DCA it's actually easier to get to the airport by train station than it is by car, since the connections are inside and above the main passenger pick-up/drop-off loops respectively. It is slightly less convenient in ORD, where the connection is underneath the main parking garage, but I'm also not a big fan of going through their pick-up loop. Those are the ones I've personally used on this list.

But you don’t pay for the AirTrain, do you? I got the impression that this was the authors main gripe. I don’t think an airport having an internal transportation system is all that controversial.

"These second types, which I will continue to refer to as people movers for convenience, are frustrating as hell, as it requires travelers—to mention airport employees—to take a train to the train, an unnecessary and expensive transfer that typically requires a second fare."

He seems to be complaining about both the fee (which I assume is referring to EWR and/or JFK) and the need to transfer.

> I'm not sure if you can walk to the BART station from any terminal but in my experience you take the AirTrain.

The BART station is right at the international terminal and a reasonable walk from Terminal 3.

It’s a pretty good way to get to San Francisco from abroad.

Boston Logan's 'Silver Line' (hybrid bus/trolleybuses using special dedicated tunnels) is its equivalent of the airport-only rail connection. The blue line 'airport' stop is literally over a mile from the checkin desks at Terminal B or C.

Of course, the Silver Line was basically designed for the purpose (in addition to providing a modicum of public transit in the developing Seaport area). As you say, the Blue Line just makes an East Boston stop in the general vicinity of the airport which may be closer than economy parking which is roughly in Canada.

LAX is getting a people mover from the light rail.

A couple of points:

* DC's Metro connection to Dulles isn't complete yet. It's slated for Fall 2021 (pushed back due to COVID).

* BWI is accessible via light rail from Baltimore, but not DC. (The WAS metropolitan airport code does include BWI.)

Denver: Commuter rail right to the single terminal.

What happens with the existing ones? We already have many large airports, and this article seems to imply new airports don’t have to do this.

The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed.

This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing.

The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use the system the way it is, seems to me that it is unlikely we will see any change for at least a few decades. This change is a significant overhaul of the organization and layout of an airport. Airports aren't changing that often and new ones don't pop up very often. Likewise, I am not sure the demand for the change is really there to pressure airports to change.

From the airport user's perspective, the only change is that they could now take public transportation directly to the terminal that their plane is at. This is different than the current system where you get off of public transportation at a main terminal, check your bags, get tickets, go through security, etc and then board an automated train to go to an auxiliary terminal where the plane is located.

>which was previously not allowed.

That wouldn't seem to be universally true. As noted elsewhere, the Silver Line in Boston (buses with a dedicated lane) serves terminals at the airport from one of the city's train stations in addition to serving some locations that were largely undeveloped when most of the city's subway system was created.

The issue is more with the specific pot of money. One could totally build what you’re describing, just not with Passenger Facility Charges.

Given the general poor state of public transit funding in the US not using that money means not building a train at all.

> On January 12, a time when most of us were distracted by other events pertaining to the federal government

Oh Vice, so close to admitting they liked a Trump Administration policy, but won't say his name, before spending an entire article essentially thanking Trump for doing what Republicans are supposed to do -- removing a stupid regulation.

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