Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that you get stuck in a local maximum.

Nobody really wants to be at an airport. They are located on the outskirts of cities due to noise issues, and you still have to spend quite a lot of time traveling to downtown or even the completely opposite side of the city. It is also extremely difficult to actually build things near the train station due to all the space being required for the airport itself.

Compare the Orlando terminal[0] with a train station like Amsterdam Zuid[1], which is going to be the terminus for high-speed trains in the near future. Orlando has rental cars and taxis. Amsterdam Zuid has 32 semi-local trains per hour, 3 metro lines each serving 6 trains per hour in either direction, 9 bus lines with similar frequencies, and 2 comparable tram lines.

The Orlando terminal is within walking distance of Orlando Airport terminal C. Amsterdam Zuid is within walking distance of a major hospital, a major university, and offices for multinationals like Google, Accenture, and the European Medicine Agency.

When you have to rent a car to get to your destination anyways, why bother taking a train?

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brightline+Orlando+Train+S...

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Amsterdam+Zuid/@52.334522,...

To get an answer your question, consider the PI on a grant who's located in, say, Champaign, IL, or Carbondale, IL, and who needs to fly internationally to attend a conference. (Or, perhaps more direly, needs to attend some family emergency.)

With rail alignments going, say, STL-CHM-CHI and STL-CDL-NVL, and with those alignments being wallclock time-competitive with just driving, the opportunity exists now for those PIs not to have to worry about, e.g., the roadworthiness of their cars or whether they'll have to account for traffic for the two- or three-hour commute to the airport.

Extend this to cover other folks who live away from major metropolises but who could be served with better airport access, or college students from those metropolises (or even internationally) whose schools are in places not particularly conveniently served by air, and this plan might start to appear to do measurable good.

To compare this with Europe, flying into FRA out of ORD (after a cramped puddle jumper flight out of STL and several hours' layover) and taking the ICE to Offenburg to visit family for Easter was a thing I did for years, and I found the German side far less agonizing. There were some years when I never even bothered to purchase my Bahn fare until I could get to the DB Reisezentrum in the basement of FRA because the frequency of the trains made it certain I'd not have to wait long.

Link: https://www.orlandoairports.net/parking-transportation/

Orlando (MCO) has:

Local public Lynx buses with red color at front - are located At Terminal A, level 1, at Commercial Lane spaces A38-A41 and serve the following areas: (current bus fare is $2): - To Downtown Orlando (40 mins): Lynx bus 11 via Orange Avenue; Lynx bus 51via Conway; - To International Drive (60 mins): Lynx Bus 42 . - To Forida Mall /Sea World (45 mins): Lynx bus 111. - To new Sand Lake Road SunRail Station* (3 miles from Airport): take the local Lynx bus stopping at Terminal A, level 1, at Commercial Lane spaces A38-41. Local buses are also available to Winter Park/ Maitland; Lake Buena Vista, Kissimmee, Disney's Maingate, & Walt Disney World.

(Not counting all of the hotel buses or cruise ship buses)

* Uber and Lyft near infinite transport in addition to taxi’s

By Train: * The SunRail runs between DeBary (northwest of Sanford) and Sand Lake Road) For more information on SunRail service call 1-855--RAIL-411 or visit: sunrail.com/default.aspx. NOTE: The Lynx bus located on the A-side of the Terminal, at level 1, commercial lane spaces A38-A41 - connects to the Sand Lake Road SunRail station. For Amtrak service located at 250 Columbia Street, Orlando - 12 miles from the Airport - you can take the Lynx bus 11 to Orange Avenue & Columbia Street - taking a total of 30 minutes. The Amtrak station is about half a mile from the bus stop, down Columbia Street, then left onto Sligh Blvd.

- this is in addition to the new BrightLine

* By Car

- Personal travel, rental car, guests picking you up or local parking lots both on premises and off premises (private lots)

I don’t think Orlando and Zurich compare.

Are you going to walk off the Orlando airport to somewhere else without being on some sort of transportation? No. But you aren’t going to do that at Oslo airport either. You need to take a train or bus for example to Oslo Central Station or elsewhere - similar to Zurich.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like the bus and train stations are that close together. Local buses stop at Terminal A, while the train pulls in to the new intermodal station off Terminal C [1], almost a mile away. At least there's an automated people mover connecting them, but it hardly seems like a convenient interchange.

Buses are not even marked on the airport terminal map, which is split into separate maps for terminals A & B [2] and C [3]. That's going to make things more challenging for people to figure out.

1: https://www.orlandoairports.net/getting-around-mco/train-sta...

2: https://www.orlandoairports.net/getting-around-mco/#map-wayf...

3: https://www.orlandoairports.net/getting-around-mco/#map-wayf...

I mean train has to stop somewhere and Terminal C made the most sense. It’s external to the main airport. A and B are near identical.

Walking to it isn’t a big deal. Not sure if you have been to the airport or any in general but walking is generally accepted. There’s the airport internal shuttle to save you walking an additional mile. It’s a busy airport.

Having to walk for 10 minutes through the airport when your flight leaves in an hour isn't a big deal.

However, it's a different story when you don't even want to be at the airport. At a lot of airports you can step out of a train, walk through the airport following a huge sign saying "BUSES THIS WAY", and step into a bus less than five minutes later. Having a short and well-signed intermodal connection is essential if you expect people to actually use it. Hiding it in an unmarked corner two walks and a people mover ride away isn't exactly what I would call convenient.

I don’t think many airports outside the US are the size and scale of our airports. China maybe

Interesting! I found https://www.orlando-international-airport.com/, which only mentions car rental and undefined "Airport Shuttles"/"Hotel Shuttles"/"Taxis & Limos", and they did not show up on Google Maps. That's indeed quite a lot more.

The Lynx buses at 30/60-minute intervals seem quite usable for most purposes, too bad they don't have a convenient transfer from the train.

The next phase of the train is to the Orlando Convention Center / Universal Studios, then to Disney World, and eventually to Tampa.

Why not do both? Have the train have stops both downtown and at an airport?

If you just want to do stuff downtown that doesn't need a car, take the train to that stop. If you are going to need to rent a car, take the train to the airport.

Depends on the opportunity cost, really.

If stopping at the airport adds 15-20 minutes to the trip to downtown, it probably isn't worth it and you want to run separate trains.

On the other hand, the high-speed train going to Amsterdam Zuid via the shortest possible route literally passes through the airport Schiphol already - a stop only adds 2 minutes or so and is therefore a no-brainer.

Isn't that because bar a few exceptions, US cities do not have an historical "city center" in the same sense as cities in europe and latin america?

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