Why is it so hard to build an airport? | Hacker News Reader

Why is it so hard to build an airport?

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262 pointsgmays555 comments

If you fly into Tokyo you might come in via Narita Airport (NRT) which is actually quite a distance out from tokyo. Violence is extremely uncommon in modern Japan but NRT was the site of violent resistance over several decades.

Opposition forces killed several police officers, rioted on several occasions and constructed a giant 200 ft tower to interfere with test flights. Hundreds of acts of vandalism have occurred over the years, even into recent times.

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

The next couple airports in Japan to be built were built over water on artificial islands:

Kansai International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport

Kobe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_Airport

Kitakyushu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitakyushu_Airport

Chubu International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubu_Centrair_International_A...

I flew into Kansai in 2003(?), with a J-rail foreigner pass and fell asleep on the Shinkansen (which I wasn't supposed to be on). 9 hours & ~1100 miles of train rides later I ended up at my buddy's place in Tokushima. It cost 110 yen, locally.

That was the first time I appreciated how hard it is to navigate the modern world if you're illiterate.

If flying into NRT and on the way to Tokyo, ~$200ish for the taxi ride. Ooops.

Keisei Skyliner and Narita Express are 1/10th of the cost and twice as fast.

There is a train though which even people on expense accounts usually take.

I expensed the taxi. It was 1am. Train another 2-2.5 hours..

It’s Japan. Obviously I knew about the train lol. Their trains are awesome!

That must have been an unusual situation, as Narita closes at 23.00.

It was. Been back other times in the morning and afternoon and took the train. Easy peasy.

Taxi is not the main way to leave airports in large part of the world.

It definitely is not for narita, NEX brings you to Tokyo in an hour.

And that's the most confortable way, there are even cheaper alternatives like the Keisei line.

For anyone doing travel planning based on reading here: often your best option is actually a bus (coach). This is because although they're slow, they go straight to many major hotels in the city. This removes the need to negotiate the subway with luggage or deal with Tokyo's idiosyncratic taxis while jetlagged.

For anyone looking for actual pro-move here: pack what you need for the next day or two in the carry-on, and ship your heavy luggage to the hotel, and then take the fastest train you can afford to get where you’re going.

Some of the Japans biggest shipping companies (I’ve personally only used Kuroneko Yamato; but I’m pretty sure others do this too) will pick up your luggage from the airport, and deliver it to your room for ~15 USD per bag.

This also works in reverse, and even between cities — don’t take your heavy bags on Shinkansen, have a concierge or front desk ship them to your next hotel.

The Google keyword for this are ta-q-bin/takkyubin.

Or just pack lighter if you can.

Trains are great in general. They also tend to be a poor fit for anything much more than carry-on. I've done it and managed but it's better not to if you can.

I generally agree with you - I spent years flying across the world with a carry-on only and I still miss that lifestyle.

But Japan is the kind of place that people want to bring a whole lot of stuff back - I know a lot of people who basically fly out with empty suitcases and just fill them to the brim with random tchotchkes over here — and hey, whatever makes them happy.

Having traveled to Japan quite a bit, I can definitely see that. Though I'm also at the stage of my life where I do not want anything else to enter my house. :-) (And I have quite a bit of stuff from Japan my dad brought back from when he was traveling there a lot.)

Or the Keisei Skyliner to Nippori Station (on the Yamanote line) in 40 minutes.

I went digging out of curiosity, and it seems you are correct. According to this article [1], around 80 of the top 100 airports have rapid transit connections.

[1] https://www.ptua.org.au/2015/10/29/busiest-airports-rail/

Even in the US, there are increasingly transit options. Oddly enough, there are sorta options in NYC but they aren't the greatest.

What do you mean, you don't love taking the airtrain to the bus to the subway to your destination?

Melbourne’s airport is very annoying when compared to Sydney. To get to the CBD you have to go and stand outside to wait for a bus that comes every ~15 minutes and takes half an hour to get there (or pay an exorbitant price for a taxi or Uber), whereas in Sydney you’ve got a direct train that gets to the city in 15 minutes.

It's been a while since I caught the train to or from Sydney airport but, in true Sydney fashion, it's privatised and costs an absolute fortune. From memory it costs more than Melbourne's SkyBus.

Just checked, $17.00! ($11USD)

In Australia that's not cheap :)

And it's a bit stupid because the stations before and after the airport are the normal cheap price.

Yep, it’s an international embarrassment

I am flying (in Europe) very often, almost once a month, and I very rarely use a taxi. Most of the time public transport gets me to the center faster, more convenient, and cheaper (even though price is not the priority - I often travel for work and can expense it).

It’s still a long time to get into Tokyo and even then you might be far from where you want to go. As far as I remember the rapid line from Marita only stops at shinjuku and Tokyo station.

In addition to the fantastic trains the other commenters mentioned, you could also take a bus for $20 to any major hub or hotel.

Depends what time you get there and what you are willing to put up with especially when it isn’t on your dime.

Took the bus back from the hotel.

I had a cab driver refuse to take me to NRT because it would be too expensive. He told me to take the train from Ueno.

If you want to pay ~$200 and get to Tokyo faster, you should fly into HND instead of NRT, full stop.

And from Hnd either the monorail or the airport limousine are very cheap ways into the city. I use the airport limousine to get to Disney and it’s really convenient. WAY cheaper than a taxi

Agree with others just take the train to Tokyo Station or Shinigawa station. If it’s your first time just remember to exit on the gate that is staffed because gate adjustments can get tricky. The ticket I selected at NRT was apparently not enough money, as expected they were super helpful and nice about it though.

There are also fare adjustment machines, you put your ticket in and it tells you what difference to pay to "upgrade" your ticket.

Many travelers will just grab a ticket that sounds vaguely correct and then fare adjust at the end. Grabbing an IC card or one of the apps is the easiest course for virtually everyone though.

You use an airport bus or a train to get to and from Narita.

You'd be an idiot to use a taxi.

Or it's some exceptional situation (flight super delayed?)

An uber from Sea-Tac airport into Seattle can easily reach $80, and almost $100 with tip.

Given how far NRT is from Tokyo, $200 doesn't seem too bad...

€60-80 from Paris de Gaulle also. Or a really slow RER ride through some really bad areas with all your luggage.

My wife and I landed in NRT a couple months ago and had a taxi leave us high and dry. We had to book a taxi there and then and it cost $450 to Tokyo in a standard taxi. The pre booked taxi that left us H&M was $200.

[flagged]

Japan is well known for violent political clashes.

There is still a very obvious house in the middle of Narita Airport that you can see when flying in or out. There are roads to it underneath the airport.

This is shocking to me

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narita-airport-farm-takao-shito...

"The best outcome would be for the airport to shut down," he said. "But what's important is to keep farming my ancestral land."

I imagine most countries would just use eminent domain?

that article says that what he refers to as his ancestral lands have been farmed by his family for only a 100 years. hard for me to get worked up about such a short time

It doesn't matter if you or I get worked up about their land, it matters if they get worked up about their land and their heritage.

They haven't owned the land since before WWII, and they yadda yadda over why they weren't allowed to buy, reasons are related to military and took place during WWII.

> they yadda yadda

They are talking about their lives and families, which they know intimately and on which much of their life depends. I don't know anything about them. Now if they talked about me, about whom they know nothing, then they'd be yadda yaddaing if you take my meaning.

No. That's not what I said or close.

Trying again: they were banned from buying land for reasons that are politely obscured, beyond it relating to their actions in the Japanese military during WWII.

Gotta start somewhere, and I'm sure it means way more to him that it does to you. 100 years is a lifetime, do you never get worked up at all? Why bother, such a short lifespan we all live.

This is a whole other level than "worked up" - speaking of lifetimes - 12 people have died over it. Did you read it?

We're talking about a guy and his ancestral home. Is he the reason 12 people died?

Yes, according TFA and I'd argue yes as well, but it's a discussion.

What would you consider a medium amount of time?

Also https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cf343b06-f4a8-46fc-b124-1c61392...

I wonder if all of the airport pollution and particulates adds any flavor to what is grown there

"I imagine most countries would just use eminent domain"

Japan also did it in this case in general, but not everywhere. Because having a law and enforcing a law is not the same - because there was determined resistance of all kinds. And by law they could have also expropriated that land, but that would have sparked more violent opposition. Apparently letting this farm as it is, was one of the compromises to have the airport at all, without riot police guarding it 24/7.

> And since it sits smack in the middle of the airport, one of Narita's two runways had to be built around it.

That's not a runway, but a taxiway. Runways have no curves ever.

Sometimes they do, eg;

https://www.airnav.com/airport/S90

Ok yeah but that's really a bush strip, I was thinking of international airports :) But good point, fair enough.

PS: That's really pretty dangerous, imagine having to compensate for crosswind changing directions, avoiding the trees at each side etc.. wow.

I mean, it’s not even in the middle. It’s on the edge. On the opposite side of the airport is “The Museum of Aeronautical Sciences”. I don’t see any particular moral reason why that should exist instead of this persons farm.

BBC video about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhYm1oXBN2Y

There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation.

One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. I'm doubtful it happens, since that means building a major airport _and_ a new train.

> One of the interesting ideas [...] is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there.

While reading this article, I thought about something like that too. Build an airport quite a while away from the big city, and provide a high-speed, maybe even maglev train there. Make it free for customers.

Also, make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport by other means, only allow cargo delivery there through the road network. This disincentives people from e.g. building hotels close to the airport, which would then attract further settlement, which would ultimately lead to noise complaints again.

The aforementioned setup nearly always means the closer airport ends up getting upgraded later to meet convenience demands, leaving the newer-but-inconvenient airport out to dry.

See: Haneda (HND) vs. Narita (NRT) in Tokyo, Itami (ITM) vs. Kansai (KIX) in Osaka, etc.

Didn't happen with Denver or Hong Kong.

Or Paris.

In Washington DC, Washington National Airport (WAS) is just across a river from downtown and connected by subway, and Dulles International Airport (IAD) was way out past the exurbs when it was constructed and only just got a subway connection several decades later. IAD gets way more traffic and has as long as I can remember. I'd guess that's because it's not possible to add many more flights to WAS.

This is wrong. Reagan National is DCA, not WAS. Also, DCA handles more passengers than IAD.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/18/nat...

Sorry, I take the train 10x more than I fly, I mixed up the airport with Union Station.

Flights to/from WAS are artificially restricted by congress: https://www.mwaa.com/protecting-dca-perimeter

DCA and IAD have their work-load shared due to regulatory action:

> The Perimeter Rule is a federal regulation established in 1966 when jet aircraft began operating at Reagan National. The initial Perimeter Rule limited non-stop service to/from Reagan National to 650 statute miles, with some exceptions for previously existing service. By the mid-1980s, Congress had expanded Reagan National non-stop service to 1,250 statute miles (49 U.S. Code § 49109). Ultimately, Reagan National serves primarily as a "short-haul" airport while Washington Dulles International Airport serves as the region's "long-haul" growth airport.

> Congress must propose and approve federal legislation to allow the U.S. Department of Transportation to issue "beyond-perimeter" exemptions which allows an airline to operate non-stop service to cities outside the perimeter. As a result of recent federal exemptions, non-stop service is now offered between Reagan National and the following cities: Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Juan, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

https://www.flyreagan.com/about-airport/aircraft-noise-infor...

Not if the old airport gets closed - like Tegel and Tempelhof were in Berlin, even though the new one next to Schonefeld wasn't ready yet due to it being a fiasco of colossal proportions.

Sure, like in the case of Hiroshima Airport (HIJ) and its predecessor (HIW), but even then most people (not necessarily including the politicians) end up longing for the one that was more convenient.

When DFW was built Congress passed the Wright Amendment which kneecapped Dallas Love Field (DAL) to only serve domestic and immediately adjacent state travel. Personally I prefer DAL but I can see how DFW would have potentially withered on the vine if it hadn't been passed. I'm happy its finally expired though and now DAL can offer international flights.

Although now that there's a Whataburger at DFW one big argument for me for DAL is a bit less strong. When the Silver Line finally gets built, I imagine almost all my air travel will go to DFW.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Dallas_Area_Rapid...

Jesus. I just read the Wright Amendment article and it’s absolutely disgusting the level of regulatory capture and corporate cronyism enmeshed in our government in this country. There is no reason the federal government should be involving itself in these petty airline disputes, and certainly shouldn’t be helping maintain monopolies for reasons as bad as “American Airlines is the largest employer in North Texas”.

I largely agree with these opinions and dislike the cronyism that is a part of this deal. Looking at it a bit more holistically and seeing the growth of the DFW metroplex from 1980-now though, I think it makes sense for DFW airport to have succeeded. Having the very centralized airport with (theoretically) good rail service to both major cities makes a heck of a lot of sense and have been a good thing for the DFW economy. It would be nearly impossible to build the airport as it is now post that growth, but there's a good chance it wouldn't have survived in the early days given how far out there it was in 1979.

So short answer, I hate the cronyism, but many of the positive end goals marketed here ultimately did come true here. And it didn't fully kill DAL or Southwest in the end.

The issue for Seatac is that it's on a relatively small piece of land and can't really expand. They would definitely just go that route if they could.

I live in Tokyo where we have both Narita, far out but well-ish connected by train with NEX and Haneda, with direct access to the city.

Haneda is vastly more convenient.

I fly into Haneda whenever I can, because even though the train is super convenient, for a train, it’s nicer to just throw your bags in a taxi and head straight to your hotel after 13 hours on a plane.

I tend to travel pretty light but trains get inconvenient with any amount of luggage. I'm coming into NY by ship after a longish trip, continuing on home by train at the end of May. I came to the conclusion I should take advantage of a not too expensive luggage shipping service because dealing with the luggage was going to be just too big of a hassle.

That's a key if you want a "rail to plane" setup - if you do it right (read-nobody will do it) you check in for the train with your baggage and your flight at the same time, and give the bags over to a dedicated baggage car that handles everything for you.

Hong Kong recently added this, called In-town Check-in [1]. You can check in and drop your bags at the MTR Hong Kong station when taking the Airport Express. Can even drop off the bags up to a day in advance. Currently only open to Cathay Pacific customers though.

[1] https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/services/complom_checkin....

Yeah, any airline could set something like this up. Cathay has always had pretty primo service though.

This is not a recent addition. It is more than 10 years old but was shut down during Covid. They are slowly starting to bring it back. It also wasn’t restricted to just Cathay before, but a large number of major airlines had counters at HK Station for check-in services. It’s wonderful - you can check in your bags before heading to work in the morning and in the evening take the train to the airport directly.

It's not recent - I have been using it since the mid-2000s, it's fantastic. It might have been shut during COVID, and just re-opened though.

I used it over 10 years ago too, It's great if you can use it. There are still a lot of stipulations though.

Right airline, right boarding time etc... It's not available for 100% of flights out of HKG.

Luggage tags can take a rail stop as a final destination. Integrate further! Have a person load the bags onto the train for you!

There are luggage services that will take your luggage from your home to a hotel. You pay for it obviously but it's not a bad option if you're looking to simplify things.

How very 1800s of you. Curious minds wonder what you do to be able to have that kind of time for travel. The amount of time you require in just travel is more than most Americans receive in a year's vacation

Fairly routine tech jobs. In a prior long-term job I got up to about 4 weeks of vacation after a time and did some month-long vacations, especially Nepal treks. I was pretty careful to preserve time off for single vacations for the most part and had flexibility to take a few hours here and there without tapping into my pool.

I'm pretty close to that currently--although it's combined sick/personal/vacation. I've done a number of 3-week workcations in my current role and also had a few weeks of vacation banked from a prior paid time off scheme. I've long had a pretty generous amount of vacation time and I've always leveraged work travel (which I used to do a lot of) for sightseeing and related activities.

I'd add that I've always been pretty religious about taking all my vacation and I've seen a lot of people shocked that I just took off for a month. But I've done so deliberately and with an eye to future commitments and it's never been an issue.

> Curious minds wonder what you do to be able to have that kind of time for travel

In developed countries outside the US annual multi-week vacations are routine for the middle classes

yes, and in developed countries outside the US, healthcare is something covered by the state. neither of which has anything to do with the discussion at hand. you're comparing an apple to a kumquat.

    > Haneda is vastly more convenient.

Many (millions) would disagree. After the opening of the Keisei Skyliner[1], a very fast train from north Tokyo to Narita, from Shinjuku station (west side, busiest train station in the world), it is the same time to either Haneda ("Tokyo Int'l") or Narita.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyliner

and if you're not in a big hurry you can just ride the metro-through line that might be slow but certainly scenic.

I prefer to take a taxi. Also 99% can’t choose. Either you‘re on premium market destinations and carriers (JAL/ANA/LH) or you have no choice to go to NRT.

This very much depends on where in Tokyo you live, no?

Even though NRT is in the middle of nowhere, getting there from my place in Asakusa still is faster then getting across the city to get to HND.

Only allow cargo delivery via rail as well. This way this deincentivize road traffic as much as possible.

Allow only short distance deliveries by truck

This guy simcities. Original game you could build rail everywhere instead of roads at all :)

> make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport by other means

Absolutely not! High-speed train have many advantages, but serving stations with large, long-term parking lots is not one of them.

After all, you don't need to disincentivize the approach: you just need to make it clear that the airport is there to stay, and maybe to grow three-fold, and that noise complaints will never be receivable.

> noise complaints will never be receivable.

But they are always receivable. Complainers will vote, will take control of local government, will lobby state and national government...

"Complaints aren't receivable" policies never last.

'"Complaints aren't receivable" policies never last.'

Oh depends, you can always build some gulags and get rid of those annoying elections. It's crazy how quick you are into dictatorship realm, with some harmles sounding ideas taken one step further.

> Complainers will vote, will take control of local government

And you won't care, because you have surrendered the zone surrounding the airport to a national authority, whose mandate is clearly linked to the mobility and who is not to report to local council.

I don't think you ever traveled international or your plane got delayed or cancelled.

I don't want to carry 4 big bags in the train when I travel international

I don't want to travel 30 miles if my plane get cancelled.

One option would be to have people check in, drop off their luggage, and even go through security in some convenient location in the city center and then take a high-speed train "inside security" to the gate. (Maybe you could even have trains to two different fields.)

That would be fantastic. I'm almost salivating thinking about how appealing that would be in Manhattan (or DC, or even SF).

God yeah it's like a hypothetical version of the AirTrain that isn't a huge pain. Last time I flew out of JFK from Manhattan IIRC the easiest way was to do the E or LIRR from Penn to the AirTrain anyway, so might as well streamline the whole shebang.

The Madrid airport offered this service, but it wasn't very popular, nor widely known. You checked in your luggage downtown and hopped on the subway to get to the airport with just your carry-on. I can't find any reference now, so it must have been discontinued.

You can do something fairly similar in Japan. They have luggage shipping services that are quite cheap and reliable, and have some days of storage built in. So you can take a train between cities without carrying everything, or maybe skip your big luggage at one city in your itinerary and have it at your hotel in the next city. You could also deliver it to the airport, but you have to build in some hours of lead time.

30 years ago that was an option in Almaty (was extremely convenient for me, as we lived literally 2 block from there). You could check in, drop baggage, go through security and then ride on a bus directly to the plane. Same in Moscow, not sure about other cities (did not fly to other locations back then).

However, this was only partial solution, as it worked for departures only, not arrivals.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Алматинский_аэровокзал

This is an option in Hong Kong https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/services/complom_checkin....

This just makes me wonder about a purpose-built train that allows airport luggage carts.

I certainly understand that sentiment, but a ton of people commute 30 miles daily (or more). Even if you live "near an airport", you probably live 15+ miles from an airport. Tottenham London to Heathrow is 24 miles by car. The British Museum to Heathrow is 19 miles. Columbia University on the Upper West Side to JFK is 17 miles. DC to Dulles is 26 miles. Downtown Denver is 25 miles to the airport. SF to SFO is 14 miles. LA to LAX is 20 miles. The Loop in Chicago to O'Hare is 17 miles. Dallas to DFW is 21 miles. Houston is 22 miles. Seattle to SeaTac is 15 miles.

Most cities don't have airports that close to the city. Maybe you live in San Diego and the airport is right there downtown, but most people are traveling to get to their airport. Ok, maybe you don't want to take a train and can hire an airport van or whatever, but you're likely traveling a distance to get to an airport.

I'm not saying that it isn't nice to have a more convenient airport, but if we're being realistic about climate change air travel is going to have to be something we do sparingly rather than often. People in the US, UK, Germany, and France currently emit an average of 15t, 5t, 8t, and 5t of CO2 respectively. A trip from NYC to London will be 2t of CO2 - which probably needs to be around 40% of your annual CO2 budget. That is to say, an inconvenient airport should be an inconvenience very few times per year.

Making other things in your life more conveniently located should be a much higher priority - the things you'll use daily, weekly, or monthly. An airport is something you'll use infrequently - or will have to use infrequently if we're going to be realistic about climate change. Plus, as I noted, 30 miles isn't really that inconvenient compared to current situations in most cities. Even the "close" airport in London is 20+ miles away from most of London. Is there a huge difference between 20 miles and 30 miles? That's less than a 10 minute difference by car. With a high-speed train it could be a lot less. Paris to Lyon on the TGV averages 167 MPH. At that speed, 30 miles is covered in 11 minutes.

I certainly understand the desire for convenience, but airports are something individual people use infrequently (or will have to use infrequently given the reality of climate change). If getting to the airport is annoying, it's probably not an annoyance in your life frequently.

And yet all aviation combined is responsible for less than 3% of total carbon emissions. Permanently grounding all aircraft will make no appreciable difference. All the major manufacturers are currently sold out for the next decade; even if there were an additional major surge in demand for air travel enough to impact this number, it would be impossible to fulfill it.

I will vote against whoever tried to make my flights less convenient

So demand rail service that drops you off inside the airport right at the security line.

Demand baggage pick-up and delivery services be offered.

Having someone pick up your checked luggage the day before you fly out, walking off a train right into the airport, and then getting on the plane w/o any fuss, is amazing.

VS the American Standard of waiting in a huge line to weigh your checked luggage, that you just paid an Uber 60-80 to carry for you.

Then the new airport will never get built, it'll get horribly congested, and your flights will still be less convenient. Probably by quite a lot too.

I realize not everyone can just pack a carry-on, but as one of those types, traveling with "4 big bags" anywhere just seems insane to me. What do you bring that takes up so much space?

Things for the family maybe?

Hiking gear.

Isn't a big thing about hiking, that you want to hike as light as possible?

Yes, but presumably the hiking involves different gear from the rest of your trip. And certainly backpacking does. It wouldn't be 4 big bags in general but would almost certainly involve checked luggage. (You can't even bring hiking poles in carry-on.)

To get to the "popular" rocks of Patagonia for example, would require many many giant packs.

So the intense mountaineering of that region at BASE requires a porter team to help haul bags of clothes, food, toiletries, litres upon litres of water. Not even considering hiking/climbing gear.

Add in the layer of "most of the world is not the west", where you can just buy these things close to your destination then throw them away. You for example need to be absolute certain of the shoes/boots/crampons/skis, and also have a backup.

I do this all the time, but the bags start mostly empty and get filled up with purchases over time.

Then you would fly via SEA?

> I don't want to carry 4 big bags in the train when I travel international

Japan has this really cool service where you can get your bags picked up from your hotel room and taken to the airport or from the airport to your hotel room. It costs max around $20 USD.

> I don't want to travel 30 miles if my plane get cancelled.

My local airport (Sea-tac) is almost 30 miles from Seattle. It can easily take an hour driving to get there. I do agree that taking lots of luggage onto the light rail (WHICH DOESN'T DROP YOU OFF IN THE AIRPORT!!) is a bad idea.

But I am one of those people who despises checked luggage, since it can add another 30+ minutes to checking in. Compared to carry-on and TSA pre-check, where I can walk into the airport, through security, and be at my boarding gate in under 10 minutes.

But hey, Seattle is, as much as I love it, not a world class American city. Let's try NYC.

It can take over an hour to get from midtown Manhattan to JFK driving.

It also takes over an hour on the subway.

Oops, another bad example.

You know what, I am starting to think flying out of Boston Logan[1] is pretty nice.

But seriously, if you want a huge international airport, you need a lot of land, and you don't want to put that smack dab in the middle of a city, unless the land got paid for long ago, and even then, you'll be stuck with an airport that you cannot expand.

Meanwhile a train from Tokyo to Narita Airport is under 20 minutes.

[1] I legit like flying out of Boston Logan, the big dig was expensive but wow was it effective. Also shout out to Bogota Colombia for having super clean streets around its airport. It was an amazing second impression flying in (the first impression being how beautiful the city is from the sky!)

ha, seeing boston called out as maybe a model intl airport :p

As a counter to that, I did 3 weeks around the world, planes every other day, international every 4 days or so. Not a single customs, baggage, check in, transport problem until getting back home to good ol' logan airport.

The "passport validation" line was somehow over 1.5 hour. Only two international planes coming into this terminal the entire time, and they legit reformed the line like three times for some reason????

That cascaded into missing our bus back to new hampshire, which cascaded into being late for a work commitment.

Wasn't that big a deal but was very funny.

My understanding is that in Japan you can have your luggage portered to your hotel separately.

It works exactly like that in London. All the airports (other than City) are quite far out, so everyone takes the Tube there. And it works.

You even have to take the tube if you want to go from one terminal in Heathrow to another :) well or a bus or something but usually walking isn't an option.

-I- would be entirely fine with an airport with those transit restrictions.

mdk (Shadowcat's resident responsible adult / business person) however has three kids, and two adults trying to wrangle three children as well as luggage makes trains much, much less attractive as an option.

So I think "fantastic to imagine, DOA as an idea in practice" applies, I'm afraid.

Taxi infrastructure is entirely plausible in a project with heavy restriction for private cars.

I.e. build all the roads you want but don't make long-term parkings available.

Fair point, I was thinking about "cargo traffic only" as in the original though experiment.

Coaches with a dedicated luggage section would quite possibly help as well, and it occurs to me that you could have a train with baggage cars ... but having never had to travel with more than one small child I can't say how acceptable those options would be to parents in general.

>> Also, make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport by other means, only allow cargo delivery there through the road network. This disincentives people from e.g. building hotels close to the airport, which would then attract further settlement, which would ultimately lead to noise complaints again.

Or go one step further and just put on barriers to block the trains too. Don't let anyone near the airport unless they walk/bike the few miles. That will drive up servicing costs but will dramatically lower congestion. If don't correctly, virtually nobody will ever get to the airport. It can then be closed altogether, thereby eliminating any and all future noise complaints.

Seeing thought process is interesting. This would face even greater backlash fro locals/local economy.

-No way for business around the development to organically grow. - a built in tourism-choke IE; no reason to use the airport save cargo or business -Jobs funneled to and from the city, not the local area. -millions spent by local taxpayers on two high tech infra projects they see little benefit to.

> run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport

Woah, that's a good ways out there

That is often the experience already when using a big hub airport. Because by their very nature they draw people in from across a region. And that naturally leeds to congestion and inconvenience. Rail is a help but may not be fast if you don't live close to the right stations.

I think hubs are often setup to serve airlines running lots of connecting flight rather than the regional population. They would be happier flying out of a small local airport on a narrowbody and flying direct or connecting elsewhere.

See: DIA

> provide a high-speed, maybe even maglev train there.

They wanted to do that in Munich

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TboWvVERU

It's been 35 years they've discussed that possibility. It's never going to happen. The costs of high speed rail across the mountain are simply too high.

It'd be easier and cheaper to landfill the sound - or do what is slowly happening and start using Paine Field.

Paine field is the new seattle area airport.

I don't think they believe Paine Field on its own is going to be able to accommodate the expected air travel growth. Yes, it's serving some commercial air travel now, but the consensus was there needs to be a new airport for all this growth.

it barely has any flights anywhere this now

Is there a reason for that? Can it handle more?

NIMBY

Paine Field would seem to make the most sense but there really isn't much room to expand it. It can probably help in the short/medium term while a new, from scratch airport is built elsewhere.

Paine field can't support what is needed and can't be expanded. But it will continue to service a small percent of the overall need.

The state has created a new commission to start the new airport site selection process over again, but this time it will just be a recommendation.

The previous project that had been going on for many years was site selection and not just recommendation, but their selection(s) pissed off the people and so the whole thing got just got killed recently.

Wasn’t that the idea behind Denver? It’s outside the city by a decent amount (or was when started). I assume proximity to the mountains was also a consideration.

The newer airport is really less convenient to the mountains than Stapleton was. (At least in terms of distance. Not sure about driving time.)

Ah, I meant that putting the airport farther from the mountains means the planes can take off heading west without circling around.

I don't know if it's that far, however.

Stapleton was still east of Denver. I think the siting of DIA was probably more that there was a bunch of flat relatively empty land even further east. It's been a while since I flew into Denver but my recollection is the airport is pretty hell and gone from the city.

It is, but in the last 20 years of visiting now and then, it is much more built up on the way "into town" - it used to be that you'd pass that hellhorse and see nothing for 40 minutes but a sign telling you not to stop for prison hitchhikers.

Now there's tons of developments - which is always a problem for these airports. I remember when SEATAC was far outside the city and everyone hated it, now it's crammed in the middle of the Seattle/Tacoma metro area, which is all one big blob city.

Stapleton is now "in Denver". I had never been to Denver until a few years ago, and was out for a run with a running club based out of a sports store in a strip mall in Denver proper. I asked what the control tower was for, and someone said they used it for training, which made sense. It wasn't until later on that I realized it was the OLD Stapleton control tower! Right in town! Surrounded by stores and condos and a park.

What is a bit interesting to think about Denver was that rocky mountain arsenal closed in 1992 about the same time as stapleton in 1995. They ended up spending about 2 billion to clean up the rocky mountain arsenal to make it a wildlife refuge and meet all those standards, and spent five billion on Denver international airport. I'd imagine the environmental cleanup would have been substantially cheaper if they just devoted that swath of land (much nearer to downtown Denver actually) for the airport and devoted the swath of unpolluted land Denver airport presently sits on for a wildlife area, maybe one that won't end up being hemmed on all sides by Denver suburbia in time like the present rocky mountain arsenal. There is nothing but empty fields east of dia until you hit Omaha or Kansas City, so wild populations wouldn't be trapped in the preserve so much like they are in these nature preserves surrounded by urban areas and busy roads.

The other problem was that the legislature restricted the commission of where they could look for a new place, it had to be less than X amount of people and other restrictions.

In theory there was a good place for an airport if those restrictions were removed

Paine Field is about 35 mins away from Seattle and serves airline traffic as of a few years ago.

And it is so much better I routinely pay hundreds more to fly out of Paine Field.

Its hit or miss if you can get the flight you need or of there and it always costs more from what I can see.

Paine Field is also unnaturally large for a "little suburban airport" because it's the site of the largest building in the world, because it's a Boeing assembly plant.

Are you thinking of Boeing Field? Paine is a tiny little luxury airport with 4 gates.

Maybe you've got them reversed? I've never been to Boeing Field, but I've been to Paine, and...

"Paine Field is home to the Boeing Everett Factory, the world's largest building by volume..."

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

Exactly. Paine Field is tiny as a commuter airport, but it's got huge tracks of land (it's more than half the size of SEATAC and has a 9000 ft runway).

I've been to Paine, and apparently I just ignored everything outside of the passenger facility. Oops!

One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there.

That would have been an interesting idea before the railroad right-of-way was turned into a multi-use trail. There's another rail corridor that goes through Stampede Pass, but I don't know that it would be usable for "high-speed rail" (nor do I know that it even goes anywhere useful).

What’s comical is how hard it is to get to many urban US airports - why their isn’t the equivalent of the Heathrow express to serve New York city’s three airports is absurd

Sure would be nice to just pop out to the Gorge for an afternoon of music though!

> There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation.

The commission was hampered by rules that stated they couldn't look into increasing the existing airports capacity.

"Survey responses also conveyed members’ views on what kind of options the Legislature permitted them to consider — the 2019 legislation prohibited considering sites in King County, or those near military bases. Some members noted that those constraints hindered their search efforts, with some doubting whether it’s possible to have a new airport operational by 2040." https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/state...

The "next" airport is basically just expanding SeaTac. There's plans to add a second terminal in SAMP https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/1805... And then even WSDOT's project for the new 509 extension is to allow freight traffic to reach the seatac airport.

Outside of that the other regional airport to be used is king county international airport -- even back in 2005 southwest looked into using it.

Paine field, while it has the capacity is not where the demand is for passengers. Secondly, I don't think many people realize the bottleneck for SeaTac airport is not just passenger traffic but freight traffic. It's why the airport commission keeps choosing sites south of Seattle aka Pierce County or Thurston County because it's close to the port of tacoma. They aren't going to choose Paine field.

Paine field is already loud as hell all the time so I'm glad it's a non-starter.

I regularly fly to SFO from Paine field, it is 20 more minutes drive for me from Mercer Island but the experience of the airport is worth it. The lobby that is like a nice W, no security lines whatsoever, and seeing all the green pickle birds being assembled is really nice. I'd fly other places if they were offered. The place can handle a lot more traffic but yeah, the freight isn't going to go there...

Make Paine field airport bigger and accept international flights.

I love that airport. It should be bigger and is north enough that it has its own population.

Also US needs to build more high speed rail. We are over-reliant on airports.

Consider how the FAA handled the Nextgen project and continually gaslight anyone negatively impacted over the last 10 years, I would be against any airport built within 10 miles of where I live too. Not surprising people would be against it. It doesn't have to be so bad, but it is.

When building https://randomairport.onrender.com/ I noticed that US and Euro airports always look very different

Somehow US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas, even in the direction of the runways, while Euro airports don’t seem to have this problem. And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports.

My assumption is that Us cities are just bigger, both in population and in the amount of surface they claim (lower population density)

Most US airports were built early before we had the current population. When they began as airports, they were mostly on the periphery, with exceptions.

Actually, apart from the largest US cities your average european city is larger. The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people.

That’s only if you count within strict city limits. Metro areas, not to mention MSAs consists of larger pops.

Right. That factoid is only true because cities in the US tend to avoid mergers.

The US had 62 statistical areas with a pop. over a million in 2020 (plus San Juan, PR).

"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply"

I did not believe this and googled it. It is true.

1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.

There is no significance in counting only the people within an arbitrary geographic boundary that is a city’s legal jurisdiction.

An airport serves a metropolitan region, composed of many cities, and there are at least 50 with 1M+ people.

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

Counting "city population" is nearly a pointless exercise. What matters is the metro area, otherwise you get some pretty useless results. Austin, TX is tenth by city size in the US, with just under a million people, while San Francisco is 17th, with about 800k. But Austin is a much bigger percentage of the total Austin metro area, while the Bay area is ~8-10 million people total. As such, SF feels like a much bigger city in nearly every capacity.

Yeah, it is basically always is a bit pointless without context. Same with e.g. Paris. Paris itself is "tiny". But Île-de-France (the Paris region) has over 12 million people.

Another one: just 7000 people live in the City of London

And Vatican has population of 524... With Rome's metropolitan area being 4,3 million... But maybe that is stupid comparison.

Vatican also has 5.9 Popes per square mile, highest in the world

This is disingenuous; "City of London" is a tiny, central district of London.

It is most emphatically NOT "London, the city", in exactly the same way that Civic center is not the city of San Francisco.

It's just confusingly named.

There is no other definition of London, the city. There's the Greater London region, which is 9m people, but that's it.

Parliament, for example, is in the City of Westminster, one of 32 boroughs which (+ the City) make up Greater London.

When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council. that's exactly what "greater london" is, so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs.

"the city of london" is just a confusingly named area inside a city called "London", it's not a city.

It's more of a city state encircled by greater London. The City of London has a separate government and rights that predate England, inclusive of the right to opt out of any parliamentary law or ignore the mayor of Greater London. The City of London even considered remaining in the EU after the brexit vote, but it wasn't logistically feasible.

> When normal people talk about a city, they're talking about an urban area under the jurisdiction of a mayor and city council.

Normal people where?

London has only had a mayor since 2000. Each borough has its own council, there is no London council.

You don't know what you're talking about and you're projecting (North) American ideas onto other countries.

> so when people talk about a city called London it's safe to assume they mean the 32 boroughs.

Except it's not. Colloquially, some borough are not considered to be in London. Bromley, for example.

That's not an example; you're just taking advantage of your hapless interlocutor's assumption that you're speaking English.

The City of London and the city of London are distinct legal entities.

Sure, but Paris is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world, so Paris proper feels large even though it's only, what, 2 million people or so?

I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying that SF feels bigger than Austin because of the surrounding metro area? I guess I'd assume that feeling is from population density (SF being 18.5k/sq mi vs 3k/sq mi in Austin), rather than the metro area. But maybe that's because I'm a new yorker that doesn't have a license, so cities to me are what I can get to on foot, which means the denser they are the more like a real city it feels to me.

Part of it is our definition of cities versus metro areas. Boston's population is technically only 650k but Boston proper doesn't even include Cambridge which is like not including one of the boroughs when talking about NYC's population.

Granted, we still have a lot less metro areas with over 1 million people but there are still ~50 of them.

Is this something fairly unique to the US or do other countries do this too? that is, having a city boundary that's relatively small compared to the metro area.

I don't know if it's common to other countries, but a big factor in the US is race and class. There was a ton of "white flight" in the US starting in the 60s with white middle class and above fleeing cities to the suburbs. As such, they specifically did not want their adjacent town to be annexed by the major city.

In plays out pretty comically in Austin TX in my opinion. You have these teeny affluent enclaves (search for "Sunset Valley", "Rollingwood" and "Westlake Hills" near/inside Austin) that anyone else would consider "part of Austin", but they don't vote in city elections or pay city taxes (but they certainly take advantage of all the benefits of being close to Austin...)

In Spain it happens as well. The official city population numbers quoted by most sources are actually the population of the city's municipality. Sometimes municipalities are large, including rural areas and small towns close to the city, while other times they are smaller and leave outside areas that are effectively boroughs of the city (you walk down a street and are in a different municipality, without even going through any non-urban area). Some years ago there was a project to merge municipalities, focusing especially on cases like that, but it failed spectacularly because it required consent from all municipalities involved and the smaller ones never wanted to merge (partly because it's advantageous for them to not pay big city taxes but still use their services, but I suspect mainly because mayors don't want to just give up their position and go find another job).

This makes rankings by population rather biased and spawns many endless discussions on whether city X is bigger than its rival city Y (and sometimes it might actually have real-life consequences, say, when the central government comes up with some funds for cities of size greater than some threshold).

Well, Paris is either very dense or not very depending on what arrondissements you're counting. London has The City, that doesn't even have many residents and then there's really the city core and greater London.

That's fairly common in France. Most "big cities" aren't that populous by themselves, but the metro area has much more people.

The US went really hard on cars and single family housing. Without a lot of older cities in many places the surrounding land was cheap so people spread out (also due to racist zoning laws, “stimulating the economy”, general greed, etc it’s kinda hard to point to a single reason).

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/27/this-is-the-en...

It really depends on a number of factors:

* Age of the city

* Natural boundaries (rivers, mountains)

* How government is setup, in some countries (and in some areas of countries) many things are done at the city level, others bump a lot up to county, state, or even country government. The USA manages schools at the city or below, and so city boundaries become well-fought over.

Whenever you see "Unified" you're seeing something built out of smaller, usually city-related, parts.

Canada has/had that too. Eg: Montreal used to be a pretty small part of the Montreal metro until they merged all the cities on the island. Even then it doesn't include it's north and south chores.

France does it too. Paris Proper has about 2 million people; the Paris metro area is about 10 million. China does it in reverse, they define a "city" which includes mostly farmland and rural areas, artificially upping city population figures.

That’s because Chinese cities are bigger than US counties let alone individual cities.

If you look at the list of most dense “cities proper” [1] China doesn’t even make the list because all of their cities include huge swathes of rural land. Beijing for example is over 6,000 square miles while NYC is only 300 sq mi and the city of LA is only 470 sq mi.

The US has dozens of counties with more than a million people [2] and most are much smaller than Beijing or other Chinese cities. The only city that is comparable to an American one is Hong Kong, the rest are much bigger.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_pop...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populous_co...

You are missing the forest for the trees. US cities are smaller in a pedantic sense. That is why planners and intelligent people use Metro area statistics for population, traffic, infrastructure planning etc.

Dallas population about 1 million. Dallas metro - 7.7 million. This is an important distinction missed out.

That just goes to show you how sparse american cities are built... the sprawl just builds up outside of the city with low density.

Not that I disagree with the sprawl assessment, it’s just that I think many cities have comically small boundaries on the map.

The sprawl isn't always low density. Normally it is but some have dense areas.

European airports have train service to most destinations.

Nobody cares if the airport is 45 minutes away because going back and forth is made seamlessly easy, and you can eat or read the news during the trip.

> US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas

The US in general is very densely built up. The distinct lack of green space in US cities is very noticeable to the non-US observer.

So I think its more of a case that US airports are surrounded by "less" densely populated areas.

> And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports.

With the exception of the limited number of buildings of historical interest, In general the US doesn't do history in its buildings. They'll happily tear stuff down and build a shiny new thing in its place.

As I understand it the whole concept of green belt / urban conservation is also fairly minimal in the US mentality, so large land grabs for building and expansion of airports are easier in the US.

Meanwhile, in Europe, most airports have history and grew organically. And the whole green belt / urban conservation thing is much stronger in Europe. For example, London Heathrow started off life as a single grass runway with a few simple buildings and grew organically over time. Its growth ultimately limited by the city that grew around it, and so you end up with for example the present controversial discussion over the possibility of a third runway. I would hazard a guess that if Heathrow were in the US, the third runway would have been built and operational by now !

> The distinct lack of green space in US cities is very noticeable to the non-US observer.

Huh? I felt the exact opposite in France. Many French cities have a bunch of nice parks, but everything else is wall-to-wall pavement. I always felt the common refrain about there being dog shit all over Paris is because on many streets there is barely a patch of grass for a dog to even go, so if you have a rude person that doesn't clean up, the shit is going to be where you're much more likely to step on it.

I think it's less about the inner cities and more about the suburbs. In the US there are certainly lots of little bits of curb with plants on, but little in the way of large useful green space.

Comparing the LA metro area to almost any European city, it's stark how much more unused or usable green space there is in Europe. The US seems much more binary – you're either in a city, or you're outside one, it's not like the US is lacking green space at a national level!

Yeah but compare the San Diego metro area just a little south and it’s overwhelmingly full of green space. I live in SD proper and there’s several open space parks within walking distance that are measured in the square miles with tens of miles of trails each, not to mention the recreational parks in every neighborhood and kids parks that are every few blocks. The suburb cities in the county have even more open space and the center of the city has a large central park as its primary feature.

YMMV significantly depending on the specific metro area. The suburbs of Seattle like Bellevue and Richmond were like that too - full of large parks and natural reserves everywhere.

> suburbs of Seattle like Bellevue and Richmond

Redmond?

Part of it is people not recognizing "San Diego greenspace" because it's mostly brownspace. San Diego is built on a huge sprawling system of canyons, many of which are parks and have trails, but they're brown and ignored.

https://www.alltrails.com/lists/san-diego-canyons

If San Diego was as wet as some European cities, those would all be amazingly green.

I think people’s perception is colored by coming out of the decades long drought in the California megacycle. We’re back into the wet part of the cycle and everything is vibrant green now!

Well, vibrant and green for another 2 months maybe.

European cities are nicer about having a manicured park but not an actually useful park beyond sitting with a book or a smoke perhaps. LA metro area (and a lot of american style in general) parks are chock full of amenities europeans would be lucky to have. For example look at Pan Pacific Park. Three baseball fields. A soccer field. A rec center. Playgrounds. A couple tennis courts. A public pool. A library branch. A post office. A holocaust museum. Bathrooms. Exercise equipment. Picnic tables and grills. And yes, plenty of grass for sitting with a book or a smoke too.

Then there are also much bigger parks with some hiking trails through more natural/unmanaged areas like griffith park or the sepulveda dam area or the hansen dam area, that also have all of these amenities (save for the holocaust museum) and even more. Sepulveda dam has archery, a rocket launch pad, and a model aircraft field. Hansen dam also has the archery but also a lot of equestrian activity and people keep horses in the area.

To act like the greenspace is not available or unusuable doesn't speak to what is actually there for use today.

Overall, agreed. Some nuance:

> […] but not an actually useful park beyond sitting with a book or a smoke perhaps

Yes, and grass to play improvised football or things like it.

> chock full of amenities europeans would be lucky to have

Not really, because European social life is not organized-activity-oriented. At least nowhere near my perception of American life (8y in CA).

In Europe, you meet first (let’s hang out, meet at a cafe, in the park) and then roam around and maybe do something spontaneous. In many cases, this involves mixed ages (kids playing, grandparents etc).

> Bathrooms

Yes. To be fair, I think it depends on how urban it is. In bigger parks like Golden Gate Park SF, the homeless don’t bother to go that far. If you have bathrooms near urban centers they tend to get misused and scare away regular folks anyways.

> To act like the greenspace is not available or unusuable doesn't speak to what is actually there for use today.

The green space in the US wins overall (again based on mostly CA), if you commit to the car ride to get there. In fact, if you count the national/state parks it might be best in the world.

In terms of green space integrated into urban life, I would say Europe is way better. In the US you can’t easily “integrate” green space that way into car-centric urban sprawl, because everything is already compartmentalized and divided and driving distance afar from other parts.

I live in Paris and was recently in the US, and I strongly disagree - US cities have much less greenery, be it trees on the streets, mini parks or big parks. Most French cities have parks all over the place, and in general lots of squares with trees, random trees on the streets, etc.

I live in the US and was recently and Paris and I strongly much more disagree. Paris was claustrophobic it was such an urban hellscape. There's a reason Haussmann wanted to raze it to the ground.

He did raze much of it to the ground, and created a number of parks and two forests in the process, as well as trees on pretty much any new street. Even the very old (medieval) parts like the Latin Quarter and Marais have mini parks all around.

Cities in the USA do not have many things like big parks (Central Park in NY, Balboa Park in SD) but what they do have is a lot more grass next to the sidewalk type of greenery, except areas that are dense enough that they've all died (like LA near the airport).

Haven’t spent a lot of time on the US east coast but on the US west coast we have low density sprawl with also not that many parks.

Western US generally has a huge edge on the east in terms of parkland. Both in terms of urban parks that can be quite substantial in size and amenities offered (e.g. golden gate park in SF or griffith park in LA, about 2x and 5x larger than central park in nyc, respectively), but also the vast amount of acreage that is either nature preserves or publicly owned state or federal land. 80% of nevada is federal land. In Las Vegas, you can go from gambling at caesars palace to hiking in red rock canyon in about a half hour maybe even less. Also in California at least, the coast is public land, you can sunbath on the sand in front of multimilliondollar malibu estates just fine. In the east many beaches are actually private property, and depending on the state this could even be most of them.

What you want are local parks you can walk to, so you can go out for a walk in the park. I don't see much of that in San Francisco, there are some parks but they haven't put local parks in every neighborhood as you would need.

The cities I am used to have parks at most 100 meters away from any home and a pretty large park 200 meters away, then anyone can go out and enjoy the park. San Francisco on the other hand seems to require driving to the park, but there isn't enough parking for everyone to enjoy the park anyway so most people don't have reasonable access, not comparable at all, the parks are giant though but they don't do anything for local neighborhoods. New York is kinda bad at local parks as well, but much better than San Francisco.

SF is one of the best ones in fact. In SF in particular, every resident lives a 10 minute walk to a park. They have 220 of them.

I was thinking more about how it's not very easy to walk to many parks. Most of the park area I'm aware of is more of a "you have to drive X miles" instead of being able to walk by or through a park on my way somewhere.

> The US in general is very densely built up

Sprawl might be the word you are looking for. US is only #186 in population density by country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

Comparing the US to countries is very misleading, because there are huge areas with no people which should be ignored. The density of Wyoming pulls down California, and California itself is so large that the central section pulls down the coasts.

For example, density of Southern California is 420.39/sq mi, but the density of the LA Metro area is 541.1/sq mi. Density of California is 253.52/sq mi, and the USA is 87/sq mi.

Southern California is roughly the size of Greece, with a population double of it.

When comparing the USA to Europe, it's better to compare states. The US is less dense, but you can ignore huge swaths of "flyover country".

> The US in general is very densely built up.

This is the opposite of reality. The US is sprawly and low density.

Of course, that's exactly the problem: sprawling over more space means that it's harder to get to open space for an airport.

The US has 14 of the 35 busiest airports in the world. Europe has 6, if you count the UK/Heathrow.

If you discount Heathrow, Europe doesn't even have one in the top 10, whereas the US has 5 in the top 10.

The airports are different because the traffic volume is different.

> If you discount Heathrow, Europe doesn't even have one in the top 10, whereas the US has 5 in the top 10.

What a silly statement. "Europe doesn't have one in the top 10 if you remove its one entry in the top 10."

The UK has a long history of trying to distinguish itself from Europe. Even before Brexit.

Had I not said what I said, I would have just as likely have had angry Brits in my comments.

You're also really missing the forest for the trees here.

Considering population and size I'd expect more. It would be interesting to see what is different that they don't have more.

Trains take a lot of passengers away from air travel

> Considering population and size I'd expect more.

London has like four major airports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airports_of_London

So does New York and LA. Not special.

The 2nd tier airports in the LA area are all quite small. The fourth busiest London airport (Stanstead) has more traffic than the busiest non-LAX airport (SNA).

Not even that, Istanbul airport is in the top 10 too. Maybe he meant EU? But that’s not really Europe as a whole

Only half of Istanbul is in Europe (yes, the side with the Airport) and the other half and the rest of the country is Anatolia/Asia Minor.

Turkey has many of the political markers of being in Europe but is really a unique situation and its leaders like to take the best of being European and not-European where it suits them.

Do most people consider it a European country? Doubtful. I've never known any Turks who considered themselves European...even the super cosmopolitain globe-trotting kids of Turkish diplomats that I grew up around.

What political markers? IST is in Europe, and SAW is not. We are talking about airports in continents.

is turkey culturally aligned with europe? not really.

actual continents are too big, that's why in news you get more detailed breakdowns into areas like middle-east

Turkey is culturally aligned with lots of places thanks to its history and geography. Aegean Turkey and Greece shares cuisine, tradition and even folk songs. Tends to happen after living together for hundreds of years.

Both sides of Istanbul have airports, yes, airports.

Yes but only one of those two airports is the subject of discussion. The other airport doesn't matter in the context of the conversation.

Sooooo what's your point?

The US has no alternative forms of transport. Taking an airplane is the most convenient way.

In Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the UK taking a train is faster and more convenient (even if more expensive often)

The distances involved often lend themselves to air travel being more convenient even if there are trains. There's a sweet spot for distance where trains make the most sense, but after that a plane will end up being faster even with all the dead time at the airport.

I live in Dallas. Door to door, a train would be faster and more convenient than a plane for me to go to Houston or Austin. A direct flight will always be faster and more convenient for me to go to Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Seattle, etc.

Dallas to New York is ~1,400mi. That's like Madrid to Warsaw. It'll take me ~6 hours everything included to go that distance by plane. What's the travel itinerary for Madrid to Warsaw? Is it direct (same level of convenience)? Is it faster?

Some context, the Beijing–Kunming high-speed train takes 10 hours 43 minutes (including 6 intermediate stops) to travel 1,710 mi.

The US is also much, much bigger. Germany is about the size of Nevada. France is about the size of the entire Eastern seaboard.

The US would definitely be better served with better rail infrastructure, but there's no getting around the fact that Seattle to Boston is 200 miles longer than Lisbon to Moscow, and slightly longer than Edinburgh to Aleppo.

If you look east of the Mississippi, the overall population densities aren't really that bad, and should be able to support high speed rail easily.

...except for the fact that within metro areas, US cities are designed in a very sprawly way that's hostile to public transit. This is an entirely unforced error that has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with culture. We deliberately chose to make our cities sprawly as fuck through various regulations.

A park and ride high speed rail system in those cities would probably stand on its own if it actually does save you time and cost.

Park and rides are somewhat of a stopgap measure. You really need walking/biking/bussing to rail to be effective last/first-mile options, in order for rail to be effective and popular too.

Its not perfect but that doesn't mean its the enemy of good, it can do a lot to reduce trips. Its also a drop in replacement for how a lot of people presently use their airports with long term economy parking lots, and it makes it a lot easier to justify connecting that up with more substantial transport down the line once you have that initial park and ride station.

Yeah I'm not against them, but it's very much a modest, incremental measure, like going from no bike lanes to painted bike lanes in the door zone.

You need much bigger changes to truly make HSR viable imo.

I imagine most anywhere that would get an hsr would also have a present day bus system that can have routing better oriented to serve the new infrastructure. Bike lanes are always nice but I imagine not very many people are going to want to start their inter city trip with luggage in tow trying to lug that around on a bike.

You might be surprised. High speed rail isn't always about trips where you need a lot of luggage, and cargo bikes are popular in places with good bike infrastructure.

Of course, the number of places with actually "good" bike infrastructure isn't very high. There's the Netherlands...and that's about it. And even the Netherlands doesn't really have "great" bike infrastructure as a standard (though it does have it in some places).

The Acela corridor is well suited for HSR. A few years ago Amtrak was trying to divest its long haul routes that lose money and reinvest in upgrading Acela, which would make it profitable. Unfortunately the plan fell through for political reasons.

> Somehow US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas, even in the direction of the runways, while Euro airports don’t seem to have this problem

London Heathrow is entirely hemmed in by surrounding urban areas. Flights landing at Heathrow fly directly over central London (with great views of iconic buildings).

It is technically possible to extend the runways somewhat but actually doing so is a planning / political nightmare. Heathrow is located just inside the M25 (the main London orbital motorway) immediately adjacent to the junction of the M25 and the M4 (the busy motorway that goes West from London). So not only is Heathrow virtually impossible to expand, it's in an area known for its horrendous rush-hour traffic. It does have a railway connection to central London, but this is a partially underground line with multiple stops (every few minutes in practice). Journeys to Heathrow from most places in the UK can be horrendous.

Gatwick, London's second airport, is ~30 miles South of the city, and does have reasonably fast rail connections. Gatwick does have space for a new runway, but lots of factors have prevented this.

Heathrow has had the Heathrow express train for years and years, and now also has the Elizabeth line; both very quick to get into C London.

> Heathrow express train for years and years, and now also has the Elizabeth line; both very quick to get into C London.

Yes, my mistake. Haven't tried the Elizabeth line. These do help if you are travelling to / from London but getting to Heathrow from the South West remains challenging. My nearest station is Brockenhurst (which although small is on a London mainline). It's 80 miles by road, or by rail, a 2h 10 minute journey (with typically 2 to 4 changes, longest is 2 hrs 40 mins) that would cost £87 (!) travelling tomorrow off-peak. Not fun with suitcase.

Elizabeth Line is fantastic, absolutely game changer for going East-West.

Making a runway longer only lets bigger planes land.

To really expand an airport, you need to add parallel runways, and that is a ton of land.

And if you have too many parallel runways, you end up with too much time spent taxiing around.

A lot of British airports emerged out of WWII air bases. I am not sure how they were chosen exactly. But they probably wanted places that were flat, dry and grassy with lots of space. They could have considered proximity to places that needed to be defended or suitability for launching attacks. And they knew that airfields were likely to be bombed.

In Munich/Germany plans for a new airport (as a successor to München/Riem) started in the 60s. Construction started in 1980. The airport went into operation in 1992.

Obviously the people in the Erdinger Moos didn't like the decision to build the airport there and many lawsuits ensued that lead to a stop of the construction for three years. In the end and the last lawsuit I think there was no option of another appeal so that was that.

In the end I think it just came down to a question of national interest where you can't have some individuals stop a project like this because an airport is needed in the area and it has to be built somewhere.

> you can't have some individuals stop a project like this because an airport is needed in the area and it has to be built somewhere.

Environmentalist opponents of airport construction will often disagree with that premise - for example, pointing to the rise of videoconferencing and remote working.

> And an airport can’t be too far from a city and remain useful, since travelers need to access the city, workers need to be within commuting distance, and so on. In Canada, Mirabel airport was built 35 miles from Montreal, surrounded by a 79,000 acre buffer zone to prevent any issues of incompatible land use. Mirabel was expected to replace Dorval (today Montreal-Trudeau) as Canada’s main eastern airport, but, in part because of its long distance from the city, this never happened, and Mirabel stopped serving passenger traffic in 2004.

It was because of very stupid mismanagement and lack of connections, not the distance.

The old airport remained opened and continued serving domestic flights, while international ones were moved to Mirabel... which was extremely dumb because Montreal was the major interchange point between international arrivals and smaller locations not served directly by international flights in Canada. So most of the utility of Montreal airport was killed, and airlines started serving other airports in Canada to do the same thing.

Also, there was no good link to the airport - it shouldn't have opened without a direct at least somewhat fast rail link, but it had no good road nor rail connection.

Also, it was put in the wrong place - one of the potential locations was midway between Ottawa and Montreal and could have served both cities, but politicians decided they don't want that.

That sounds like exceptionally poor planning. Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights? It should have been the nexus for domestic travel to connect to the big hop to Europe, meaning it should have had a ton of domestic routes as well feeding it.

It's the main counterexample to 'The Olympics are good because they force the development of infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't get built' argument.

Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'

All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.

A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.

I thought the main counterexample to that argument was the fact that it has never worked anywhere.

From what I've heard, the Olympics have failed to benefit every city that's hosted them except LA, and the reason they were good for LA was specifically that no new infrastructure was built to accommodate them.

I think Munich did well in 1972. They got a lot of public transport and most of the sports facilities are used a lot.

Shame about the security, though.

Many will disagree with me, but the Vancouver Olympics prompted construction of some things that I would consider vital to the Sea to Sky region - the highway upgrade being the biggest.

London as well, or at least broke even. (Although of course this is complicated to assess and contested).

Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).

Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.

> It's the main counterexample to 'The Olympics are good because they force the development of infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't get built' argument.

> Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'

That's just poor and short sighted planning, nothing specific for the Olympics. Paris for instance isn't making any such short term infrastructure decisions, only rushing to finish some stuff before the Olympics (e.g. line 14 to Orly, while failing others like line 15 South which was supposed to be ready but won't).

It is a common enough thing with the olympics to consider it specific to the olympics even though it hapbens elsewhere.

"exceptionally poor planning" is common in big projects like this.

As soon as the design/planning teams gets big enough that there are many people who barely know eachother, they start competing to the detriment of the whole...

Nobody wants their part late/over budget, so they do things to screw other parts of the project just so their part isn't late or over budget.

You also have large groups of various entities brawling over it, and you end up with compromises - where compromise means nobody is happy about anything.

> Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights

Yes, they decided they'll try to do it like Paris with CDG and Orly, but fundamentally misunderstood the differences the traffic - Orly mostly serves tourist destinations or places where lots of people living and working in France have origins in such as Portugal and the Maghreb from where there will be limited amounts of changes to international flights; and Air France is abandoning Orly and focusing entirely on CDG because even the small opportunity misses aren't worth the extra costs. And both are well connected to the city they're serving, including to each other with the RER B (okay it takes 1h30m, but at least it's a mostly direct connection). And CDG even has high speed rail to other cities.

Montreal isn't even close in terms of traffic patterns... and even if it was, the connectivity to Montreal (and ideally Ottawa) really wasn't there.

Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights?

It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.

   New York domestic: EWR
   New York international: JFK
   New York freight: LGA
   Chicago domestic: MDW
   Chicago international: ORD
   Houston domestic: HOU
   Houston international: IAH
   Dallas domestic: LUV
   Dallas international: DFW
   Paris international: CGD
   Paris international: ORY
   Washington domestic: DCA
   Washington international: IAD

Notice how some airports (IAD, IAH) specifically have "International Airport" in their codes.

It worked fine for a very long time until the airlines optimized into the hub-and-spoke system we have today, where connecting flights has become normalized.

Because people think now it's normal to have connecting flights all the time, the domestic airports have added international flights, and vice-versa.

What was once orderly and predictable has become very messy, and had a number of other side-effects.

I too thought 'international' in the name meant something. Until I worked with a guy who was into gliders. They named the large empty grass field that you had to drive for an hour to get to an 'international' airport. It was basically just enough to get a very small airplane aloft with a glider attached. They thought it was funny they pulled it off.

"International" in the name of an airport signifies that it is certified to receive international flights.

I'm pointing out the use of "International" in airport codes, not names.

you would think that.... This 'runway'/grass field was named an international. They thought it was funny to do. The naming group did not really seem to care all they cared about was the letter code was unique.

International means customs is there when you land your plane. Tiny airports near borders tend to be international while larger ones far away are not as nobody flies the from elsewhere anyway. some airports you need to make an appointment or customes will not be there.

It is a convention. And apparently not mandated anywhere. This grass field was in the middle of north carolina. It had a small building they kept their gliders in and another small shed for parts.

LUV is an airport in Indonesia, Dallas Love Field is DAL. DAL was forced to be a domestic-only airport from the Wright amendment as DFW was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere in '79, nobody would have bothered going out there if they weren't forced to by federal law. American Airlines wanted an airport, and the federal government gave it to them.

And sure, IAH is the bigger international airport in Houston, but it also carries an absolutely massive amount of domestic travel as well. My comment was about having an airport be almost exclusively international travel with few domestic connections.

> DAL was forced to be a domestic-only airport from the Wright amendment as DFW was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere in '79, nobody would have bothered going out there if they weren't forced to by federal law. American Airlines wanted an airport, and the federal government gave it to them.

That's more than a little revisionist: following the CAB's demand for a joint international-class airport (Dallas refused to use GSW, and DAL had gotten way too small for the traffic, and its runways too small for international jets), Dallas, Fort Worth, and the existing airlines signed an agreement to phase out cross-state operations at local airports and move them all to DFW. When DFW opened, all the airlines moved their non-local operations there per the agreement.

Except Southwest, who'd been created after the agreement, decided they were not bound by it, and enjoyed a now empty and easily accessible airport. And since Southwest's operations were initially intrastate, they didn't fall under CAB jurisdiction, which was the reason for DFW existing in the first place.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 then meant Southwest was able to expand to interstate traffic without being restrictible by a dying CAB.

Wright was passed to protect an airport which CAB had all but forced on the area (though to be fair CAB was paying for airports, which was why they wanted them regrouped). Plus bankrupting DFW would have completely broken DAL and aviation to the region.

Thanks for informing me to the history of the CAB decisions. In the end though, it still seems like American and Braniff weren't happy people were sticking it out with Love instead of their larger and fancier airport, and deregulation gave people the market to choose which airport they really wanted to go to until the Wright amendment forced people again. Even knowing this additional history of it being a joint decision pre-deregulation, I'd still argue my earlier viewpoint still has a good bit of truth to it. American Airlines (and a few others) wanted people to use the new airport instead of the airport the people wanted and got Congress to force people to go to DFW. GSW failed because people didn't really want it. DFW would have failed post deregulation as well if the federal government didn't force it to succeed.

FWIW I do agree this was ultimately a good thing in the end though. It would not have been good for DFW airport to fail, and the region definitely did need a larger airport.

It seems like we do agree with this line though:

> nobody would have bothered going out there if they weren't forced to by federal law.

> Notice how some airports (IAD, IAH) specifically have "International Airport" in their codes.

Since this is HN, we'll get ultra-pedantic...

IAH is technically "Intercontinental Airport of Houston", not "international" for some reason (full name is "George Bush Intercontinental Airport").

> It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.

Which, like urban highways, really doesn't make a sense in most cases if one spends a few minutes thinking about it. And especially doesn't make sense for an airport whose main traffic is connecting international and domestic flights.

Urban planners in many places in the 1950-1990 time were... special. Blindly copying bullshit that didn't make sense originally and definitely didn't make sense in their city.

Montreal isn't the only city that failed with a too-far-away airport. Tokyo built Narita against much local opposition (they still check your ID before you're allowed inside the airport, to make sure you're not an angry local resident), and the opposition resulted in not being able to build the transport link they wanted (the Narita Shinkansen). The result is a good hour wasted on conventional rail to get to Tokyo. (Sky Access kind of fixed this, but I think it's limited to 160km/h and still takes 40 minutes.)

Meanwhile, in the 2010s they expanded Haneda and started accepting international flights, and you can get to Tokyo via a variety of normal trains (and buses if your destination is on the Shinjuku side of things) in 15 minutes.

The whole thing is landfill, so no residents to be mad either.

Last time I flew to Haneda they made all the flights from the US arrive and depart at times when public transportation wasn't running, to discourage those flights, but it seems like they stopped doing that. So now it's more convenient for everyone, and Narita is largely pointless for everyone that isn't an extreme budget traveler (but I think Haneda built Terminal 3 for that use case... so... is there any reason for Narita to exist if you aren't visiting Chiba?)

Arlanda feels like another good example of a "far out" (23 mi) airport that works pretty damn well. 18 minutes on the train.

Arlanda is my favorite major-city airport. I'm not as well-traveled as many, but I've been to dozens and it's my favorite. I've transited between Stockholm, Norrtalje, and the airport in bus, tax, and train, with each being the easiest experience I've had with that respective form of transit.

Zurich Airport was much better for me, a few minutes to Zurich by train and they go every few minutes and tickets are cheap since those are the commuter trains. No need to plan, just go to the train station and hop on the first train and you are there in less than 10 minutes.

It really blew my mind when I first visited, I never thought getting to a major international airport could be that convenient. Swiss transit is so well designed.

Copenhagen is as good if not better than both, at least accounting for the population being double that of Zurich.

Metro and commuter trains run all day and all night (the trains also go to Malmø in Sweden).

Long distance trains go all the way across Denmark and as far as Gothenburg in Sweden, although there are very few been midnight at 4am.

Haneda is bigger, but not big enough to take on Narita’s 2019 42 million additional pax.

Most large cities have more than one airport anyways. London has like six, New York has three, Beijing has two, etc.

Eh, I get all that, but Narita is still quite useful as a transfer hub for passengers traveling between North America and East Asia. Haneda’s gate capacity is also a limiting factor, Narita is a necessary companion airport to soak up excess passenger demand.

I had to laugh out. The Japanese do not like the American tourists?

more like, Narita cost a lot of money to build, and the smart money if allowed to would just flood Haneda with as many flights as possible and leave Narita an empty husk.

Putting more restrictions on Haneda allows Narita to not be a totally useless airport.

What's the issue with 40-60 mins on a train to the city center? That seems very reasonable (and common) to me.

Exactly - it has to be holistic and actually planned out. If you want to run two airports in the same city, there really should be some form of quick connection between them, or each has to be so big as to be self-sufficient.

Moving an airport is even harder than just building one, because the airport often doesn't own all the businesses and land around said airport, and so is negotiation making those less valuable. And at some point, it's stuck - LAX is so enclosed in Los Angeles and LA is so big that you'd be quite far from it to add a new airport. You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.

> You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.

Ontario was repurposed, at least expanded greatly in scope. It used to be basically a UPS and FedEx airstrip with very limited passenger flights. But LAX was so overloaded and out of the way (for a lot of the IE and LA county) Ontario's passenger terminals were significantly expanded. Unless your destination is in the LA metro area Ontario (or John Wayne) is way more convenient than LAX.

It also should be connected to the national rail network so long distance trains go there directly. It greatly reduces time to switch trains when you're not directly from the nearest city.

Vienna did this with their airport.

Switzerland also has this, for example there is a direct train from Zurich Airport to Geneva Airport.

It is (in theory). There is a via rail track and stop < 1 km away.

That's inadequate. I don't want to drag my luggage around the front of the terminal looking for the shuttle bus to the station, wait for it to arrive, figure out paying for the bus (if it isn't free), then wait for a train.

The railway line should go underneath the airport terminal building. If that's not possible, a covered walkway is OK. Many significant European airports are like this.

If a connection on medium/long distance trains isn't realistic, at least there should be a metro (or whatever the 'best' transport the city has, e.g. light rail).

Compare:

Mirabelle: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=45.679722&mlon=-74.03861...

Vienna: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/48.1155/16.5329

Only if the airport is onithe way. Overall the city center is more important so don't slow down trains for people who don't want to be at the airport.

Yep, Paris CDG has a small version of this (high speed trains only, but this allows for connections between planes and rail to be made) which is getting expanded with a link to the regional network of the region right to the north of the airport.

It sounds like basically all of the issues amount to “it was too far away to be convenient.”

No.

They split the traffic between domestic and international making Montreal no longer useful as an interchange hub.

They failed to implement any proper connections to the city itself, which is related to but not due to the distance.

They also failed to place the airport in between two cities to have a bigger market for it.

Yeah, Denver Intl is out way outside of Denver and it's a major hub.

Another relatively new airport built far from the city it serves is Munich airport, located around 33 km (20 miles) from the city center, opened in 1992. The two major candidates for "relatively sparsely populated area" when the airport was planned (back in the 1960s) were a swampy area north of Munich (Erdinger Moos) and a forest to the south (Hofoldinger Forst). They picked the swamp, which leads to frequent fog problems. And they solved the problem of the old airport competing against the new one by simply closing the old airport (the company operating the new one is the same as for the old one, so no protests there). Some equipment was even moved from the old airport to the new one in an overnight relocation. But, as the 30 years from planning to opening show, even this remote location was not without conflicts. And, more than 30 years after the opening, there is still no fast train to the airport. The Munich-Nuremberg high speed railway line could have been routed by the airport, but (according to rumors) this wasn't done to protect the Nuremberg airport. Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s. Currently the plan is for an Express S-Bahn line, but since the S-Bahn tunnel in the city center can't accommodate any more trains, this will only be possible when the second S-Bahn tunnel is completed (the date for that keeps getting pushed back, currently it's 2035).

> Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s.

Edmund Stoiber explained these plans in a legendary speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TboWvVERU

As the article points out, expanding the two airports in Chicago are out of the question. And because it is more or less impossible to build a new airport, they are planning to build a "new" airport.

Which means that this tiny little thing [1][2], which handles a dozen or two Cessna flights per day, is intended to "grow" into a 4000 acre major international airport. When it grows to its full footprint, the western edge will be the railroad right of way that carries one of the Chicago commuter rail lines and the Amtrak route that serves the Chicago-UIUC-Memphis-New Orleans line. Plus an existing Interstate with existing interchanges a mile west of that. Very little infrastructure is needed outside of the airport boundaries. Still a lot of opposition though, and years behind schedule.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3774859,-87.676198,14.2z?ent...

[2] https://www.bultfield.com

Airport expansion is almost as difficult as building new. In my neck of the woods, some have suggested that the (primarily general aviation) Livermore airport would make a great “reliever” airport for the Bay Area jets, but this is constantly being fought by residents, mostly people in posh Pleasanton, which is on the flight path. It’s understandable that people don’t want more jets flying above their homes, yet, East Bay travelers would benefit the most from such development.

"...yet, East Bay travelers would benefit the most from such development."

True, but who do you personally know who would trade a small benefit every time they fly for a moderate nuisance at their house? I'm not sure even pilots would ask for the flight benefit.

Good point. The Livermore airport is pretty hemmed in already; it looks like it would be pretty difficult to do much expansion and you have all those houses that are already under the runway approaches. I'm guessing that when you say "Bay Area jets", you are talking private jets, not 737s, right?

In the case of the South Suburban Chicago Airport, noise is less of an issue. People don't want traffic and they don't want farms turned into warehouses and light industrial. And then the housing built for the thousands of jobs created.

It's essentially opposition to sprawl, which I think is a pretty legitimate concern. I think the state could try to do things to help prevent it from being as bad as it could be (forest preserves, open space, minimum zoning, etc). Though I don't think they want to, because the alternative to this airport is that the one just across the border in Indiana would get enlarged, leading to all that economic development going to a different state.

Unfamiliar with this, but are you suggesting that the airport would cover the railroad, or simply just finish before it?

If it covers it, then from the satellite pictures it would be trivial to bury the line in a cut-n-cover tunnel for little expense.

The fact that a rail line runs there already seems ideal for a modern airport.

The property line would end at the railroad right of way. A passenger station would be built to provide service to the airport.

The current talk is to build it as a cargo airport, but the original concept was a passenger airport to serve the growing population in Illinois and Indiana that find access to the existing airports inconvenient. There is every reason to believe that if it is built it will start serving passengers just as soon as they can get airlines to agree to use it for passenger flights. As you can see from the recent law, they are adding cargo to the list of reasons for building the airport; they are not replacing passenger service ;)

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=2531&...

Cargo airports should be built even further out, because cargo doesn't care about waiting around.

Of course, there's also the factor that cargo flights are insane to begin with, if you take a bit to think about it.

That project is a cargo airport, not passengers. At least initially.

South suburban airport is dead as dirt. Rockford and Gary have more than picked up the slack.

There's this classic French movie from the 70s, "Nous irons tous au paradis", where a group of friends buy a house really cheap. They can't believe their luck until they realize the house is next to an international airport (they visited the house when the air traffic controllers were on strike).

Here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aFksnIghQ

It's a little bit absurd of course that they didn't bother to check first, but it kind of works.

I live about 5 miles from an airport. It never occurred to me when I bought the house that there'd be airplane noise, but we happen to be right in the flight path. They're infrequent enough that I didn't hear any while touring the house. The house is well-insulated, so the noise isn't bad while inside. But while outside, it's loud enough that you have to pause a conversation when a plane goes by.

How did it not occur to you that there would be noise from airplanes if you live that close?

Or is it more of an airstrip where only ultra light aircraft depart?

Half the city is within 5 miles of the airport. I've lived in places much closer and never experienced the noise before. The difference was being in the flight path.

I'll also add that my perception of the distance to the airport was skewed by the fact that it's a 15 mile drive to the terminal entrance, but only 5 miles as the crow flies.

At least large parts of Boston are within 5 miles of Logan Airport. But I can say from personal experience that there are specific locations that are stop-conversation levels of aircraft noise which is not true of the city as a whole.

That's the real difference, you really have to be in an area for awhile to get a feel for it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/60wejw/noise_pollu... is San Diego, and you can clearly see the airport and even the flight path for landing planes - but which parts are actually affected and which are nearly unnoticeable requires boots on the ground.

And also, landing planes are quieter than ones taking off, and some airports face one direction most of the time.

https://balboapark.org/arts-culture/starlight-bowl-balboa-pa... - The Starlight Bowl is right under the flightpath and the actors would pause when a plane appeared.

There's a nice marsh I've sea kayaked to from Winthrop which is a community in greater Boston right across from Logan airport. (You could have easily landed your boat there at the end of the runway--presumably if you didn't mind serious people with automatic weapons paying you a quick visit.) I remember being there once with a friend and we got to talking with a local for some reason. HE TALKED REALLY LOUDLY. You understood why when a jet took off over the parking lot every few minutes.

I lived under the London Heathrow flight path. There are so many flights that the conversation would be paused for 25% or more of the total time.

Somehow, expanding this airport is politically desirable. 3 million people live under the flight path, and they are dismissed as rich or poor people who should have known better. They are rich and poor, there is plenty of range, and there certainly aren't a million spare houses they could choose to move to.

My father-in-law used to live in Federal Way, Washington, directly south of SeaTac. He swore you got used to it. The noise was amazing -- two parallel runways, his house just about smack in the middle between the two approach paths. Airliners would go over the house every minute (or less!) alternating between the runways. Flaps down all the way, gear down, making incredible amounts of noise. Inside the house you could tolerate it, but it was still noisy. Outside, you had to pause your conversation constantly as a plane went overhead.

SeaTac is well known, and the air traffic never really stops, so there is no way he did not know about it when he bought. I assume it made the house a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I guess it is the ultimate demonstration of a free market. For the right price, people will put up with anything.

It was the same for me in my previous apartment. I remember we were even amazed on how closely a plane was flying above the highway shortly before we took the exit towards the apartment when initially visiting, but didn't make the connection to how that would affect the apartment.

In the end, it wasn't a big problem, we got used to it quickly.

I assume you're in the US? If so, a noise disclosure was one of the required seller disclosures when transacting a house. We received this in both NC & CA when purchasing (and took it seriously).

If one film about people living near an airport isn't enough, I can recommend an Australian film The Castle (1997). It's a comedy, total classic.

Has anyone ever tried to build an airport where the terminals and actual flight ops area was miles away (noise, etc).

Basically I'm picturing something like an urban train station (plus TSA, and customs) that would be located downtown. This is where you'd have check-in, security, baggage claim, etc. After clearing security, you'd get on some sort of rail transit (monorail, maglev, subway, whatever, doesn't matter THAT much as long as it can get out to the flight area in 10-15 minutes.

Basically put the people bits where it's convenient, and the noisy stuff where it isn't.

I love this idea. Hong Kong has something kinda like this with bag check in town, and then a train to the airport. It's extremely convenient

Are there any other major international airports in the world that have the equivalent setup of Hongkong? For other readers: There is a fast-but-not-high-speed direct train from city centre to the airport. At the city terminal, there are tiny airline checkin booths where you can leave your bags. Magically, they are transported to the airport.

I remember flying into Germany once, my ticket including the train, and my luggage having been sent on ahead to the Lufthansa terminal at the other end.

(I forget which city now, maybe Frankfurt?)

It was very cool except for the part where it was apparently so normal that they'd keep responsibility for your luggage that there wasn't (that I noticed, at least) any warning that was going to happen. I spent a while at baggage claim going wtf and eventually found a desk with somebody who took pity on me and explained.

A+ would use service again now I know how it works.

Yes, TPE in Taiwan has the same setup. At Taipei Main Station in the city center, there are airline checkin kiosks and bag drops. You take the train to the airport, and your bags are ingested into the baggage system for you.

https://www.tymetro.com.tw/tymetro-new/en/_pages/checkin/ind...

There are companies selling it: https://amadeus.com/en/portfolio/airports/off-airport-check-... but I've not seen anything as remote as Hong Kong.

I seem to remember Japan would let you check your luggage at the hotel and they'd handle a freight forwarder to your next hotel, which is not quite the same thing but related.

The Heathrow Express used to have this at Paddington station, though I think it closed a while ago.

A similar idea which is available in London though is Airportr - this is a company which will send someone to collect your bags from your home/hotel and then inject them directly into the airport baggage system for you (if you're flying with the right airlines and checked in online). I've used it a few times and it's very good.

I'm not sure what you'd really gain. As it is, you can check-in online and I'm mostly just going straight to TSA Pre-check. It's all a trivial part of the airport infrastructure. And there are a bunch of reasons to have gates that you actually board the planes from.

Convenient drop off in town instead of having to drive 45 minutes, and then pay to park your car. By placing all the security stuff at the 'town end', that would also allow for things like lounges, etc. The actual terminals could be very compact since you wouldn't head out there until it's almost time. Could use a small-vehicle people mover type system... imagine scanning a boarding pass when you get on the vehicle, and instead of dropping you at a central station, it dropped you right at your gate?

In town is only convenient if you live in town or are visiting there. Where's the parking? Where's the rental car service? The actual terminals are a pretty trivial part of the total airport area.

Not to be trite, but "people who live here, or people who are traveling here" is sort of their target market.

So now you'll have the in-city checkin version and the in-airport checkin version? Because you definitely need parking and rental cars somewhere convenient. "Here" means a greater area serviced by a large airport which is a lot more than a city.

There probably would even be a market for an in-city bag drop service. But it wouldn't replace people driving to the airport.

If the airport wasn’t way outside town, many of those people wouldn’t need to park, as they could just take public transit or an Uber, and the same would also mean that many people traveling in won’t need to rent a car.

In the us transit isn't normally good enough. most people rent a car. I wish that would change.

I pretty much never rent a car if I'm going into a city. But I'm often not actually going into the city that an airport services.

Heck, I drive most places (disclaimer: I mean "actual cities" here) in my own car, but I'll just leave it at the hotel and get around via Uber primarily, but I'll happily use subway or light rail or something like that when it's available and the end points are close. I have somewhat limited mobility these days so I can't just trek 10 or 12 blocks at both ends of every journey like I know some of y'all do in places like Seattle, but anything up to 4 or 5 blocks I can manage unless it's extremely hot.

What's the benefit of having security outside the airport?

There are tons of airports that connect to cities by rail transit. Within the recent past, I've been in three of them, PVG, HKG, and KHH. In no case do they put security outside the airport.

For one thing, subway lines have multiple stops. In order to make sure that everyone who's going to the airport has to go through security, you'd want security to occur after the last stop before the airport... and the site after the last stop before the airport is the airport.

For another thing, why would you want to subject people who aren't going to the airport to airport security?

When was the last time you thought "this check-in process would be better if it took up a lot of space in the city center, even though the time requirements wouldn't change"?

Now, rail transit to PVG takes multiple hours. But if you replaced the subway connection with a dedicated rail line with one stop in the city center and one at the airport, that wouldn't help much - that just means that people living nearer to the airport have to travel backwards to the city center, subject to the speed of the subway, so they can take the dedicated airport express to the airport.

The point of doing it this way is that the secure perimeter would extended all the way to the central station. That's the whole idea. Essentially, this urban hub is "the airport" in terms of traveling to it. Think of the actual hub -> board gates/runway connections as like a really long people mover, not just extending a subway line and drawing a new dot.

Trains could travel on a totally grade separated route with strict access controls. Having the last mile part of the train journey controlled by the airport instead of some civic transit authority would allow for a much more reliable system, since they would be insulated from disruption to the larger system, and could also make situation specific choices for optimization.

For instance: Compared to standard transit, many people will be bringing carry on luggage... so probably best to scale everything up maybe 25%...physically make the car wider. Wider doors, wider aisles. Luggage racks everywhere... maybe to a standard width but only have two seats on one side, and luggage rack on the other.

How do you exit? Do you take a train back to city center, or do you have an option to exit near the runways? I wonder if you'd end up with multiple entry points with this model.

You likely would. The simplest example would be a high-speed train that connected two airports (either two existing, or an old and new). You could imagine a high-speed subway that connected JFK to EWR that was about 30 minutes or less. Now you don't have to work out how to get to a specific airport, you get to the closest one.

For people without luggage, the difference is minor; but if you are checking bags it would be a huge advantage to dump your bags as soon as possible.

The trouble with this plan is that downtown land is more expensive than rural land. The land area you need to efficiently build the check-in facilities will be similar whether you put it on site or away from the airport. So you'd spend more for the off-site and then still have to build a people mover that provides zero benefit to anyone not going to and from the airport.

It makes far more sense to build the airport far away and add a public rail service to it that can also serve non-airport passengers.

In an urban environment you can build UP. Airports avoid structure over 40 or 50ft to avoid interfering with the controllers visibility.

Instead of having one giant check in hall you could have one floor per airline, for instance.

Airports because of noise have plenty of space nobody else wants so building out isn't an issue.

The exact issue under discussion is "We can't build airports where people can get to them because of how big loud and annoying they are". I am proposing a mitigation aka problem solving.

That isn't a mitigation as making them smaller is not an option. They need to be large becouse of noise.

> The point of doing it this way is that the secure perimeter would extended all the way to the central station. That's the whole idea.

You forgot to describe any benefit of this idea.

One problem is that this plan is bad for everyone in the half of metro closer to airport or coming from other direction. They would have to go out of their way. Or the airport would need checkin facilities, then what is the point of the downtown check in.

The other problem is that regular trains are better because they stop at intermediate stations and can run more frequently because serving regular traffic. The Elizabeth Line is better than the Heathrow Express.

The only way I can see it being advantage is the check in and security is done on the train. That would save time, But that would require a train twice the size with pre and post security areas, and luggage space.

The claim:

> Despite their importance, airports are enormously difficult to build, not only in the US but around the world.

The evidence: all about the US, with a brief sentence about London Heathrow.

New international airport construction projects started in 2021-2022 include Sydney, Mumbai, Addis Ababa, Manila, Cavite (Phillipines), Dong Nai (Vietnam), Noida (India)…

Sounds more like this is just a ‘you’ problem :)

Very interesting to see how the noise of jet engines declined significantly. While reading the article I kept thinking, it feels like investing in noise reduction would really pay off, and then a few paragraphs later, there it was.

I'm also intrigued by small airports, like the one in Rio, Santos Dumont. The shortest runways in the world.

If you could reduce noise and control pollution, it is very nice to have an airport accessible by mass transit, like in Portland, Oregon. Feels like a sweet spot for government intervention.

Some small airports made sense at the time they were built, but no more (either because planes are bigger now or because construction around the airport was not adequately restricted in ensuing decades. Congonhas in Sao Paulo is an example of this, where it can only handle smaller domestic flights now because of the way the city has grown around it.

Here's a satellite photo: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a27d24_a65c83caab794facb0...

(it would be like when you're landing at Reagan airport in DC and descending over the water... except that it's skyscrapers)

...and here's a story about Congonhas airport:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/culture-of-chaos-the-cra...

which reminds me: maybe people don't oppose airports just because of the noise, maybe they're also worried about plane crashes (I know the chance is low, but probably much higher for those living near an airport than for the average passenger).

I have several Brazilian friends (mostly in/around Campinas) in SP state who refuse to fly in/out of Congonhas because of that risk. Thankfully now Viracopa is even more convenient and nicer.

Honestly, the irritating thing for Americans flying to Brazil is the frequent need to fly into either Rio or SP and then domestically transfer to the other, due to paucity of flight options [at reasonable prices].

Yet, airlines fight deary for slots at Congonhas, because lots of people want really badly to land there.

The same can be said for Santos Dumont, that requires specially adapted planes, with reduced capacity to fly there. Or Pampulha that is more extreme, and airlines keep entire models of planes on their fleet just so they can fly there.

Going from 120-110 down to 100-90 isnt really a significant decline, it went from unbearably torturous to really annoying. Airports nowadays still create significant noise pollution in their surroundings.

Yes, from the graph it seems we've almost reached the asymptote and noise isn't going down much from here.

>it went from unbearably torturous to really annoying

That's like saying the difference between getting stabbed and pushed isn't big since both are physical assaults. It is. 120 is at the level of ear injury and pain even in the short duration of a takeoff. 90 isn't.

You are aware that DB is a logarithmic scale?

I'm not going to say 100db isn't loud but db is a logarithmic scale, so even 110 down to 100 isn't a 9% reduction but an order of magnitude drop. Literally the difference between a jackhammer and a nail gun.

Sound drops 4x for each 2x increase in distance from the source. So another way to put it is, if you cut sound by 10x, you are cutting the distance of severely noise polluted area around by more than 4x.

> Very interesting to see how the noise of jet engines declined significantly.

I know people who used to live under the flightpath of Concorde arrivals/departures.

Lets just say they were very happy when Concorde was retired from service. ;-)

Obligatory YouTube movie from 2007: https://youtu.be/i1ShTUVIzCI?t=41

I wonder if open (unducted) fans (if they catch on) like the CFM RISE will reverse this trend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojVNOj-q3SQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkHKet7rp4o

Very interesting read - would love to see something similar on why Denver’s airport rebuild/expansion has been such a disaster.

2 years after the start, a 34 year $650MM+ contract was ended - https://denverite.com/2023/04/21/dia-great-hall-audit/

2 years? Let the guys in Berlin handle it for 10 years and then you dream of Denver guys.

They are trying to expand the Trenton-Mercer Airport. One of the justifications is airport expansion would “increase tourism into the City of Trenton”.

Anyone who has been to Trenton, NJ will understand what is wrong with that idea.

How much does Bent Flyvbjerg's work on megaprojects impact this?

Around 2000, he used to claim that either people didn't understand the scope of very large projects, or that there were shenanigans involved.

One of Flyvbjerg's more recent papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0003

> In the early 1980s, Dallas Fort-Worth Airport covered as much land as the city of Dallas did, and Denver International Airport is as large as the city of San Francisco.

This... doesn't fit into my head.

Cities are smaller than you think and Airports are larger.

Remember the famous "freeway interchange the size of Florence" image. It takes the small size of "old Florence" and compares it to a modern cloverleaf. Area goes up real fast because it's the square.

Central Park in NY is about seven times the size of Vatican City.

They're probably referring to the official city limits, which can be tiny, as opposed to the total Dallas metro area. The latter is what people actually tend to think of when mentioning a city.

I might be wrong though as I know nothing about Dallas, in which case it also doesn't fit into my head.

The two runways in my city's fairly small, low traffic airport are roughly 1.7 and 2.42 miles long (2.745 and 3.9 kilometres to be precise).

It doesn't help that the city of San Francisco is quite tiny, only 7 by 7 miles. When you consider that Denver International has to fit six runways as well as its apron, terminals, hangars, various facilities, and the transit space needed to link all these plus an acceptable amount of buffer space for safety and noise reduction...yeah.

I don't have the numbers but I bet if you picked examples from China instead the story would be different: It is much easier to build today than it was in the past in terms of the actual building work.

What is getting harder and more time consuming in certain places is the regulation and the processes around building a large piece of infrastructure.

It’s nice that they’ve improved the noise issue, but there are a bunch of other environmental problems with airport construction and aviation generally which have not been solved and there doesn’t seem much interest in solving.

It’s probably for the best it’s hard to build airports whilst that remains the case.

In short, it's short-term interests and skewed incentives.

A classic example particular to US airports is why transport links are almost universally terrible. The answer is: parking. Parking is a huge revenue source for airports [1] so airports don't actually want good public transport links and when you do have them (eg the JFK AirTrain) they're unreasonably expensive. Airports are making up for "lost" revenue. This has been a huge problem as Uber and Lyft have cut into airport revenues.

The real reason this is a problem is because airports make almost nothing from the planes using them. Shouldn't the planes be funded the airport?

Another case study springs to mind: Sydney. Sydney has a very central main airport but it's relatively small compared to demand because it was planned for so long ago. It can't expand: the land around it used now. Sydney has been talking about building a second airport for at least 40 years in Western Sydney (originally named Badgerys Creek). This is much further from the city but has had all the usual planning problems eg developers build homes around the proposed site and then residents complain about the proposed airport that was proposed way before those homes were built. IIRC a similar thing happened around LAX.

This was so much of a hot potato that one Australian government just gave planning permission for Sydney airport to build a third runway in the dead of night and then ran. There are funds to noise-proof affected homes and this was wildly controversial.

I believe the Western Sydney airport is finally happening. I haven't looked at the planes but it doesn't include an efficient and relatively cheap high speed rail link to central Sydney, it's going to struggle.

In the Western world we really need to examine how the supremacy of private property rights and utter car dependence mean we can't build anything, let alone have anything nice. It seems like Asia is the only place where non-horrible airports get built.

[1]: https://www.orbility.com/news/64-parking-is-a-huge-money-mak...

LAX actually bought out a lot of the built neighborhood land around it and cleared it for expansion, so its not an impossibility.

Airlines should go build their hubs in a better geographical location than major cities, like O'hare. And pay for it with their own money.

At ORD for example, something like half of all the air traffic are connecting flights. There's a bit of money to be made by gate fees, but the pressure on the surrounding suburbs (I don't even know if the neighbors even get those fees, since the airport is technically within Chicago's city limits) to allow whatever expansion is necessary for American and United to make more money ferrying people over our homes is untenable.

What's untenable about it? The busy airport has been there longer than most people have been alive. People who live in the suburbs knew what they were getting into.

Tell that to the people who lived in the heart of Bensenville that's now a runway.

What's your point? You could say the same thing about almost any major infrastructure project. We can't allow a handful of residents somewhere to veto everything. This is exactly what eminent domain was intended for: as long as they received fair compensation then it's fine.

You can't say "they know what they were getting into" when the state shows up and demolishes half a community that had been there for 130 years. I don't think anyone expects the state to force them off their land or their town demolished.

> We can't allow a handful of residents somewhere to veto everything.

We also shouldn't allow non-residents to profit off the pain of people who actually live where the infrastructure is.

My point is that the surrounding suburbs are suffering the pain of being adjacent to an airport while deriving very little benefit, and those do benefit want to expand to increase traffic. Chicago gets quite a lot out of the increasing traffic through O'hare while the people that actually live nearby don't.

We also shouldn't allow non-residents to profit off the pain of people who actually live where the infrastructure is.

Sir, this is the entire point of a suburb. Suburbs exist so their residents can take advantage of the infrastructural, entertainment and commercial benefits of a city without having to contribute to said municipality. Do you really lack that much self-awareness? By virtue of living in the suburb in the first place, you, yourself, are engaging in the very activity that you are decrying.

I think you're being willfully argumentative.

ORD is critical not only to travel and commercial interests in the region and nationally, but also to military and national interests globally. I'm not even going to sit here and try to explain to you the geographically strategic nature of Chicago's location to the US because you clearly aren't here to listen to reason. I'll just say that you asserting that suburbanites don't like ORD is not even close to a good enough reason for the rest of us to abrogate the societal contract with military and commercial sense.

If you are displeased with the nature of Chicago's suburbs, perhaps you'd be more comfortable in another metro area? ORD is not going anywhere, but you can go elsewhere if it pleases you to do so.

Your reply is quite rude. I didn't say we should tear up ORD, I was pointing out the flaws with expansion. And every government except Chicago seems to be in agreement with that, which is why the Peotene project exists.

No, every suburban politician is in agreement with it and have demanded a study for a boondoggle go forward to placate entitled suburbanites like yourself. This exact plan has been tried, and failed, in many cities around the world. The only places it worked are places with high-speed rail. Does Chicago have high-speed rail?

The problem in this country is that we coddle lefties and righties even when they have ideas deleterious to our own good. But I get it, politicians have to play to their crowds. No matter how ill-informed and uneducated those crowds may be. So we spend billions on billions doing things like moving water from Colorado to the middle of the desert for Scottsdale Arizona. Building airports to nowhere like COU so people can attend college football games I guess? And replacing bridges in Minneapolis that never would have fallen if we had put the infrastructure dollars into maintenance where they belong in the first place, instead of pork barrel projects for entitled special interest groups demanding things that make literally no sense at all.

It's not "entitled" to be against things that negatively impact oneself and don't provide any benefit. I think skepticism of expansion in the name of progress or to make it easier for companies to make profits without contributing back to the communities they negatively affect with their growth is reasonable. Particularly in Chicago, where capital investment in infrastructure at the expense of the communities they displace has a history of entrenching social and political problems (for example, Lake Shore Drive cutting off the lakefront, the Eisenhower, Edens, and Kennedy expressways demolishing communities and segregating what's left). Building things up is not always a net good.

Twenty years ago, they decided to bulldoze a community to relieve ORD's growing traffic instead of investing in the Peotene airport. And now, there is nowhere left for ORD to grow. There's nowhere for Midway to grow. If we've accepted that Chicago is a hub for air traffic, it needs to go somewhere that can handle it - and the choices are the south suburban project (for which the land is already secured, and there's political support from the state, feds, and local government), or the Dupage airport. There's less money and interest involved in the latter. The other choices are Rockford, Gary, and Milwaukee - all of which have stagnated as passenger and cargo destinations.

Expanding ORD is a political fight between DuPage and Cook county, and the only city that's truly in favor of it is Chicago and Cook County - because they're not impacted by it, and they get the gate fees and sales taxes at the terminals. Meanwhile, Will County is inviting the development, and they need it! The south suburbs have stagnated for decades, and could use the investment. The western suburbs and near west side don't need more air traffic. Particularly when the growth the airlines want is not to ferry more passengers into the area, but to move them through to other destinations, and to handle more cargo.

And it's not just "entitled" suburbanites that are against expansion at O'Hare. United and American have said they want the expansion of Terminal 2 and the O'Hare 21 project halted because the increased gate fees that fund it are making it uneconomical to use ORD as a hub. When even the market rejects expansion, we need to look to alternatives - and the south suburban airport is the best candidate, particularly for cargo.

What I'm saying is that this isn't rampant pork barrel spending, or "coddling" people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's our elected government listening to what their constituents want without caving to industry demands, or the tax priorities of a singular community. Keep in mind, half of the population of metroland Chicago isn't in the city. They have voices that should be heard too.

Why would an airline have any business in acquiring, getting approved/zoned, and constructing an bespoke airport close to a major metro that would presumably only benefit that airline? Airlines already operate at razor thin margins, specialize in only the transporting aspect, and would not be the best party to oversee the development of airfields and airports. Additionally, companies other than the major airlines use an airport, from cargo carriers (large jetliners to “FedEx feeder”-type routes), private operations like NetJets, and even privately owned and operated aircraft all use it.

This is solidly the domain of a local company, collective, or a local municipality that understands this business and every aspect of it. Airlines are happy to pay usage fees (landing fees, gate fees, leasing) to specifically not deal with airport operations unrelated to their own fleet and operations.

We need to find ways to improve the process from initial concept, terminal layout, retail spaces, and public ground transport that connects to the city center.

Also, usually the airport is there before homes were built so every owner in the flight path made the decision to live there.

I think you misunderstand my comment.

Airlines should not be building a "bespoke airport close to a major metro" that only benefits that airline. They should be building their hubs in the middle of nowhere and serve only connecting flights out of them, because it's the fact that the hubs are in the metros that cause problems.

When half of the traffic through the airport isn't destined for the metro, then half the traffic doesn't need to be going through it.

> Also, usually the airport is there before homes were built so every owner in the flight path made the decision to live there.

I don't want to respond to this because I think it misses that opposition to airport expansion isn't just "planes loud." There is not a place in west suburban Chicagoland unaffected by the expansion of O'hare. It is not just about the flight paths.

The airlines don't even want it anymore.

I quite like the idea of dedicated hubs a decent distance away from anything else, but you'd still need to staff and supply it so "the middle of nowhere" probably isn't feasible.

Airlines make an airport a hub because half the people are going there, not because of the half that aren't.

If they could sell their gate slots and use another hub at a reasonable profit, they would.

Of course, we're past when everyone wanted 747s and giant Airbuses so perhaps the hub and spoke system will slowly melt away into smaller more direct flights.

This way the airline can be nearly certain of getting plenty of gate space. Delta played a strong role in building Atlanta Hartsfield.

Airports are one thing that the government has to be involved in either way.

You can't just tell airlines to pay for things themselves but then also give every suburb the ability to veto construction on land in other cities.

The correct answer here is to ignore local landowners and build the airport. Airports have tremendous benefits to the country and the greater area. I feel badly for the folks who have to take the costs - and I wouldn’t be opposed to some compensations - but fundamentally we’re talking about helping a few people (who could move) at the cost of most people. I feel especially strongly about this in the case of people who moved in after the airport existed. You knew exactly what you were signing up for.

Technology has come a very long way in reducing noise exposure and noise levels over communities by dramatic levels.

The core problem now is not one of airport traffic but local communities near airports that allow residential development in places they really shouldn’t. These days it’s less the airport trying to move into someone’s backyard but someone building their backyard next to an airport then complaining about the airport.

My understanding is that electric airplanes are much quieter but batteries do not have a high enough energy density to make an electric airliner with more than very short range.

I wonder if it would be feasible to make some kind of hybrid that uses electric engines for takeoff and landing and regular jet engines for the rest of the flight?

That would add massive complexity and excess weight (lugging around the battery and all the fuel), which makes it a nonstarter

A 3m wide fan spinning at 3000RPM for takeoff will be loud wether it's being driven by a gas turbine or an electrical motor.

Largescale use of electric planes still seem like sci-fi for the time being, but you did get me thinking that airships would likely produce a lot less noise pollution than planes.

There is a huge political battle in Poland right now regarding a new airport. It's more controversial than nuclear plants and new rail combined.

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

> Most NIMBY difficulties stem from the asymmetric nature of the costs and benefits of a new project: a new apartment building, for instance, will benefit a city overall (slightly lowering housing costs and slightly increasing the size of the city’s labor market), but those benefits are diffuse. The costs, on the other hand – traffic, parking, construction disruption – will be borne almost entirely by the surrounding residents, who will thus rationally oppose it.

I have always wondered why we don't structure payments of some form to balance out the local costs of infrastructure etc. NIMBY is rational with the economics as they are; but would you really be as opposed to a local power plant if energy costs for the area near the plant were subsidized by some percentage? Balance out the local costs with a local benefit.

NIMBY is not rational! Its a biased selfish decision that protects ones own, shrouded in "community" -- Except I'm directly involved with my community and none of the loud talking NIMBY's ever show up... GET LOST.

Or the other way around: as a tax with a Georgist flavor. If your land has a value of $x/m^2 when free of zoning restrictions, but your neighborhood really wants to keep it free of noise / traffic / high buildings or high density, and as a consequence land value drops to $y/m^2, that is perfectly fine but it will cost you $x - $y each year.

>I have always wondered why we don't structure payments of some form to balance out the local costs of infrastructure etc. NIMBY is rational with the economics as they are; but would you really be as opposed to a local power plant if energy costs for the area near the plant were subsidized by some percentage? Balance out the local costs with a local benefit.

I've seen this proposed for various things like onshore wind farms (e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60864097), but there usually has to be a limit to the subsidy/discount/bribe - otherwise it wouldn't be viable for the company that wants the infrastructure.

I saw something suggested in the region of 25% discount on electricity bill for people near such a site, for up to 10 years. I don't think that such a temporary benefit would be enough to convince me of having something nearby if I thought it was permanently detrimental to the neighbourhood or my property. (Not that I'm claiming to be a NIMBY).

> otherwise it wouldn't be viable for the company that wants the infrastructure.

Well, isn’t that a proof that the benefit doesn’t balance the downsides? What if the answer were really “We shouldn’t build more infrastructure, we shouldn’t overpopulate this city anymore” ?

This actually isn't that uncommon for airports. The first example which comes to mind is London City Airport which pays for local homes to have noise insulation fitted[0]. I believe doing this has been a condition of them being granted planning approval to increase the number of flights they operate a number of times over the years.

0. https://www.londoncityairport.com/corporate/environment/nois...

This has been done in various ways, I seem to remember a nuclear power plant that just took over property tax for everyone around it.

The problem with these kinds of "structured bribes" is that they're made with the people living there at the time, but those people move or die, and the newcomers grumble.

The new Nancy Bird Walton airport in western Sydney is interesting. The existing airport is very close to the CBD and residential areas, and completely hemmed in by those and the bay it sits next to, so has little room to expand. It's also subject to a strict curfew being so close to residential areas.

The new airport is huge, being built at an impressive speed, and is going to be on a new metro line (which strangely doesn't link up to the existing metro lines in Sydney, and won't have a direct non-stop rail link). It's being built in a location that's currently "the middle of nowhere" so that it has scope to expand (they're currently building about half of what's already been planned for).

Sounds very similar to Dulles in Washington DC. We eventually ran a rail line to it, and it eventually wasn’t the middle of nowhere any more.

Hopefully the rail link takes less than 60 years in your case =)

Sydney Metro is being expanded out to it; construction's already underway, and is targeted at opening at the same time as the airport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sydney_Airport_line

Yeah, but it doesn’t link up with the M1 line so there’s no interchange. Also the rolling stock isn’t compatible as it uses a different power system to the other lines, and the trains are a slightly different size making them incompatible with the M1/2 lines

Similar to our Airport in Calgary, AB. They built a tunnel under a new runway as part of their expansion, including specific right-of-way for rail extension from the downtown, and still there's nothing connecting it. Meanwhile they're going to drive a train right through the downtown core, connecting a light industrial area to the south with a ritzy residential area to the north, rather than the relatively easy and inexpensive line extension to the airport. I think a requirement of being a world-class city is you can take direct mass transit from the airport to the downtown core, but not here.

Dulles is very much still in the middle of nowhere for me. It takes an hour to go from Capitol Hill to Dulles on the Silver Line, usually longer or about the same time than driving in rush hour. It is 11 minutes to DCA on the Yellow Line. What has made Dulles not the middle of nowhere is the growth in the Northwest VA suburbs, Reston, Ashburn, all those server farms and defense contractors shifting the center of gravity in the DC region.

This sounds like Australia hired some consultants from the US for the design. In particular the metro to nowhere part.

Several times my flight from LA to Sydney would get a good tailwind, arrive early, then just circle out in the ocean so they could land after 6:30 am and avoid a giant fine.

Not sure it is in the middle of nowhere. Last time I checked the Sydney basin isn't that large and is geologically bounded as a "smog basin". Its only about 7 miles/10km to all the suburbia around it by map - in all directions but the south which ironically recent flight paths were not marked in that one direction. Given due to mountains and airspace restrictions around that area flights are going to go over existing housing present quite some time back (30 years +). Its also oddly an airport not near sea for noise abatement in what is mostly a coastal bound city.

Knowing Australian real estate I'm pretty sure land around there was already marked for development before the airport was proposed as well (Oran Park, Twin Creeks) with many established suburbs in the flight path vicinity as evidenced by all the local news reports (Penrith was mentioned a lot just doing a google search now).

This was more of a case where the NIMBY's lost out for once I think. But generally NIMBYs in lower social economic areas generally do lose out which is what Western Sydney is. Its only the wealthier suburbs who successfully lobby against development in general. This is common worldwide; and an effective strategy to build more airports - place them in areas where its much harder for the community to build resistance (time poor, not as well connected to powerful interests, less wealthy, etc).

The sad part about this, as the article alludes to, is that the benefits are diffuse and are often enjoyed by people in areas not in the vicinity of the airport. The costs (noise, air pollution, etc) are borne by the locals.

O'Hare airport sits some 40km outside Chicago. It seems like a long way away from the city.

Narita airport is about 80km east of Tokyo.

Osaka is about 500km west of Tokyo. Osaka's airport is just 15km outside of Osaka.

To travel from downtown Osaka to downtown Tokyo would involve 95km of ground transport in addition to the flight. Or you could take the train, which would involve about 20km of transport besides the high speed rail.

You might think that nobody wants to live next to a train station, either. Or even next to a rail line. But I wonder what difference there would be in resistance to a new airport vs a major train station within 5km of a neighborhood.

> You might think that nobody wants to live next to a train station, either.

Huh? Properties next to train stations usually have higher prices. Electric trains are clean and quiet.

I understand that suburban communities sometimes fight public transit stops in attempt to preserve "neighborhood character" and whatnot. That could be what the other user is referring to.

Or even next to a rail line.

Not a commuter train, but here's a neighborhood where the rail goes right down the street. Literally freight trains driving past your front yard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odWcZagJlAs

> O'Hare airport sits some 40km outside Chicago.

It's more like 25km (15 miles) to the city center and 4km (2.5 miles) to the city limits, although technically O'hare is within the City of Chicago. There's a strip of City land between the eastern edge of the airport that cuts through the suburb of Rosemont to connect to the Oriole Park neighborhood (although that might be Edison Park), on the far Northwestern edge of the city.

40km will get you to the far south side of the city, for which there's Midway.

An airport is very simple to build if you ignore regulations (laws keep getting worst too because they mostly only add them and rarely subtract them... Soon it will be like building a nuclear reactor).

Only if either:

a) the airport is far from any other humans b) the horde of humans your airport angers do not also ignore regulations OR your airport has its own sufficiently large private army

People say this but rarely give specific examples. My experience is that things seem simple on the surface but are actually more complex than you’d expect.

As an example, I’ve seen people complain about building codes and why they can’t they do what they want with their property. But they don’t consider that fire services, for example, need to be able to rely on those codes.

Lots of complex issues, but the distance one is manageable: put the check in / security part of the terminal in the city or at its edge and then send the passengers straight to the appropriate terminal (and their luggage straight to the baggage management) via HSR. You could have multiple check in terminals to expand the catchment area.

That assumes you're coming from the city and now you need acres of parking in a more built-up urban area.

I mention you can have other terminals as well, and those in other urban areas can be connected to transit. You spread the parking around; in cities it’s often easier to take transit.

> Similarly, not only are many of the users of an airport tourists who don’t live in the area, but at hub airports they might merely pass through without interacting with the local region at all.

Why not create hub only airports (in the middle of nowhere) and enforce them via no hub policies around cities?

Staffed by people flown in daily from some city half an hour flight away?

This is mainly focused on noise levels. They did not focus on large runways and the water runoff calcs and flight paths and elevation restrictions on neighboring buildings etc.

It’s easier to put in an airport first and then build a city around it than the other way around.

> The FAA was so concerned about reactions to jet noise in Washington DC that it didn’t authorize jets to land there until 1966.

Interesting how that could be considered as interfering with the democratic process nowadays.

I liked the design of the circular run way airport.

I seems for me that for most airports its hard to build logistics withing...

How about more night take offs? Many US airports "close" at 12AM.

Somehow I doubt that the solution to "airports cause too much noise pollution" is "let's stage more of the noisiest aircraft operations right when people are sleeping".

I had a private flight two years ago. The place was close to a garage. People who are ultra rich visit those places. Airports are just like prisions for common people, because they need to spend hours in it.

One economic problem is that the express train to or from the airport (if there is one) is that a roundtrip ticket can quickly cost more than the roundtrip airfare these days.

That is yet another barrier for disadvantaged people.

When the airport is closer to the city they are often included in the normal public transit system and thus a lot more affordable.

why not put the terminal in the urban area and have a fast train/ferry/whatever to the runways

lovely and well researched article. and all the more reason to support high-speed rail :)

This seems to be referring only to large international airports.

Wikipedia lists 383 airports in the US, only 30 of which are "large". None of the muni airports are on the list. There's so many of those! I can think of 5 within a short drive of my home; there's got to be thousands in the US.

So, no shit building big noisy busy things on huge plots of land is hard! NIMBYism scales.

Don’t build another airport. Better invest in a high speed train network.

I would be pretty upset if all of a sudden my house was under the flight path of a new airport (and the associated economic consequences) but I always find it surprising how annoyed people get that put a house near an airport and then complain about it, where one of my parents lives there is a small but fairly busy private airport that has been there close to a hundred years, so almost no one that lives by it now can claim to have been surprised by its existence when they moved into (or built) their houses, yet their is perpetual noise complaints and a surprisingly vociferous group that wants it shut down. Similar thing happened where I went to college (house prices were lower near campus - because you had to put up with being near several thousand college kids) and then people move in and complain about the college kids!

Why wouldn’t you? It’s a land arb. You get cheaper land then use political power to raise its desirability. Common trick.

You can do it a few ways. Get a place near a nightclub then force the club to shut down. Almost certainly they have some regulation they’re not following.

Same with schools etc. Or sometimes the city will be planning an affordable housing thing on a lot. No one likes that so you’ll get the homes next door for cheaper. Then you can lobby for the place to become a park. Boom! Your home is now more valuable than it would be.

It’s just political arbitrage.

This shouldn't be down voted, this type of arbitrage is common and the parties engaging in it know the baked in risks. It is no different from the common gambit of buying land outside of cities zoned as industrial or agricultural and then waging politics to have it rezoned as residential to dramatically increase its value.

The cool solution I've seen to this problem is to have some process for identifying the class of people who are affected by [locally burdensome thing] and then allowing the proponents (a business, the government, etc.) to negotiate some settlement with that affected class directly, with a majority vote used to accept the settlement.

For example, everyone near the airport could get some property tax relief or share of an annual payment that would go away if the airport went away.

This way a small minority of vocal opponents cannot effectively oppose something that would be good for everyone, but if something is irredeemably terrible and unfair locally affected people can block it.

This is absolutely how it should work. Negative externalities should be paid for by the source of them. It can be difficult of course to find where that price lies, but this is what all those lawsuits were about. It’s a shame they didn’t just bake that cost in from the beginning, instead of failing to take responsibility and then having to be forced to do so.

This is Coase's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

Yes and no. If someone buy land at scale, and tries waging zoning politics...yeah, okay, arbitrage.

Vs. if John Doe buys a house near a substantial airport, then claims he didn't know? No, sorry, nothing's gonna change in his favor. Maybe he imagined it would, and planned...but that's just the difference between ignoramus and fool.

That’s just a matter of ability. A few guys can easily stall things. It didn’t take many to force Sonoma to change. All these attempts have risks. You can always try. Sometimes you’re powerful enough to get change in your favour. Other times you’re not and it was a good bet. Other times you’re not and it was a bad bet.

Besides, this is quite refined now. I just put nana in the house. People can’t resist old people. She’ll have medical issues that need quiet etc etc.

My landlord did something like that with a few buildings for the big London sewer project. London actually paid him for new windows and things like that.

You just apply the force. Most taxpayers don’t notice this stuff so you can get hundreds of thousands out of it.

Many government projects are slow, too, so you can do this for ones where they’re announced but no work has been done. Bam, free upgrades, earthquake retrofit, etc.

This is so so how the world works in reality.

I would say it is short sighted land arb. Density and land prices go hand-in-hand [1]. The causality is less clear. Higher land prices necessitates more units and being able to build more units increases land prices. Cities build airports because the expected economic impacts and increased tax revenue growth justifies the large expense. That's the long view. Your same reasoning should mean some entity is willing to lobby to open up construction and reduce height limits so they can build more. The reason this does not happen is because it is easier to block things than it is to change things. I'd say this is some type of societal second law of thermodynamics.

[1] - https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/Bertaud_-_Th...

This is not "arbitrage" though. It's not risk free, etc.

Rent-seeking is a better term for what the OP is describing.

One can be surprised by the traffic increase. "When I moved here 25 years ago, there was one flight in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now it's every 5 minutes from 6 am to 10 pm and they're trying to extend it post 10 pm!"

There is also contemporary research, i.e. chronic noise exposure having subtle effects on health, that are accepted as true that would have been laughed at 2-3 decades ago.

Who expects a city and its economy to shrink though?

This is what happened in my childhood home. We lived within a couple miles of a mid-sized airport. We could always hear the planes to some extent, but over time they expanded their cargo operations, which typically fly at night. They also added a new flight path that went directly over our house, so it became common for 747s to fly 2000 feet above us every 15-20 minutes through the night. I was fortunate to be a heavy sleeper.

Portland, OR has a similar problem with the raceway.

People buy houses near Portland International Raceway and then complain about the noise of race cars. Just doesn't make sense to me.

You don't say? I know more than one bar that was shut down after someone moved in above it with the explicit warning that it is a bar.

Noise is killer, even if you don't think it is. A well rested adult will not have any problems stomaching a single noisy night. But if every night is noisy you are going to fall apart after a while. Dosis making poisons etc. On a related note, sexism is bad for a similar reason. It is not about one asshole making one comment, once. What makws it bad is getting those constantly and from all kind of directions.

I once lived next to a main road and when I moved after a few years, the first night in a silent room felt like someone had lifted a sack of bricks from my chest. And I play in a rock band, so not the noise averse type.

Reminds me of that person protesting a Beer Festival in Golden Colorado. On their sign they stated they wanted to keep alcohol activities out of Golden but the city is home to Coors Brewing Company.

https://kdvr.com/news/trending/golden-residents-anti-beer-fe...

Jack Daniels distillery is famously in a dry county in Tennessee. It's legal to distill it there, but illegal to purchase it in county.

https://thesterlingtraveler.com/jack-daniels-distillery-tour...

This is not surprising if you think about it.

You understand a new airport generating complaints based on loss of value.

Have you considered what successfully getting an airport shut down might do for the nearby property owners?

It's not uncommon for people to try to (often successfully) tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own land, simply for the benefit of the one trying.

Its akin to shortsellers actively campaigning against weak companies. Sure Theresa small burn of interest but if you can leverage and move the needle, profirs'

Same people that buy a house next to Disneyland then complain about the fireworks and traffic. They just don’t consider it and the disclosures about it if any are often buried in documents they’re rushed to sign.

That's similar to people who move to the countryside then complain that the farms nearby stink.

That's happened to my area.

It used to be the countryside; now's it's the suburbs.

But now the suburbs complain about the smells from the few farms that are left.

I used to live above a Japanese bar in the centre of Melbourne, Australia. It was a busy street in a busy part of town. (Robot, for the locals.)

Of course this place was sold, both to renters and buyers, as ‘hip’, it was ‘the inner-city lifestyle’, it was ‘everything on your doorstep’.

And yet the neighbours. My god what cretins. Noise! On a weekend! They couldn’t bear it.

I think it should be flat-out forbidden to complain about noise if the thing you’re complaining about existed when you arrived.

What did they say about it, if you asked them?

You never know: Maybe the bar owner has been a jerk to them, maybe it could be quieter. Also, a transient resident can have a much different perspective than someone who is there permanently.

I wonder if landlords should be required to disclose noise sources.

As a renter there's no easy way for you to know that every Friday night the bar a block away has music so loud you can hear it in your apartment til 2am or that a band practices at the school down the street etc...

You generally have about 5 minutes too look around a apartment and a few more to look around the neighborhood and then sign a contract for $60k not knowing the place will be unacceptable once you actually spend a week there.

maybe this is only a problem in expensive cities like SF/NYC/LA where when you find a place you have to take it immediately nor lose it to the line of people ready to rent

To be fair to the GP, that part of Melbourne is very, very busy. But Melbourne is very expensive and you do have to compete with other renters. It’s a nightmare to find a good spot especially if you’re in a hurry.

I think another aspect is that to someone who lives in the area - like a real estate agent - it’s obvious that it would be noisy at night. Why else would you want live there? There are multiple bars in every laneway. Many of them are open until the wee hours.

So while I agree with the sentiment I think it’s difficult in practice.

"maybe this is only a problem in expensive cities like SF/NYC/LA where when you find a place you have to take it immediately nor lose it to the line of people ready to rent"

This. Everywhere else people usually can and do take the time to explore the area of the potential new home.

"I wonder if landlords should be required to disclose noise sources."

Maybe, but maybe they also don't know about those school band practices, so how to enforce it, but in general there are noise maps.

Robot is a great bar! I used to work in Flinders Lane, it’s the best part of Melbourne. Still grab lunch from Yen Sushi Noodles in Centre Place when I visit.

But yeah it would be noisy. Great spot to live for a while if you’re young. A lot of my favourite places didn’t make it post Covid tho.

Ha! I bet I've seen you in there. Yeah we were in our 30s, absolutely loved it. This was from 2007-2010~ish.

I can't believe Robot survived. Yoshi's done well there.

Some counterpoints:

'I was there first' doesn't give you more property rights than the other person.

The amount of or location of the noise could change over time.

If the airport has been careless about noise for 20 years, that doesn't make it ok for them to continue.

Yes, property values IS local politics.

Race tensions is fundamentally about property values.

Policing is about property values.

Road construction and transport infrastructure is about property values.

Bike paths and parks are about property values.

That's a massive oversimplification.

A lot of that viewpoint is informed by the Detroit white flight phenomenon.

I find it hard to believe that every single white person in a neighborhood would be so racist that the mirror arrival of a single black family would trigger the mass migration of all white people from that neighborhood

No, it really was the property values. Of course, the property values exist under those rules because of inherent racism. There's no denying that.

Perhaps all the white people were just covering themselves by saying oh, we are leaving because of other people's racism, not because of ours. We are leaving because our property values are decreasing from other people's racism.

> As air travel greatly expanded in the 1960s and 70s, there were “no more virulent domestic conflicts… in the advanced industrial world than those over airport construction.”

I can't keep reading this article seriously. Civil rights movements are the obvious domestic conflict at the time, but even in transportation this is wrong. There were huge conflicts in "highway revolts" [1] or conflicts over suburbanization, urban renewal, and how much of the city to turn over to cars. The kind of thing Robert Moses started but governments around the developed world were doing in these decades. Governments siezed entire neighborhoods deemed to be "slums" to build a highway so suburban commuters could have an easier commute downtown.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt

Good article but it's many thousands of words with one simple answer: noise pollution.

I lived directly under the path of an airport's takeoff vector. Planes would frequently take off just a few hundred feet above my house. You actually get used to it, but as I've gotten older my hearing loss is more than it should be and I suspect that was a major reason.

Sounds like Midway (MDW). Even with noise abatement procedures, planes take off and land “hot and heavy” which is louder than usual nearest to the airport.

Noise pollution _and_ air pollution. I love the pretty browns and purples of my sunset over YYZ, but it's filthy. Every time I come home, the smell is disgusting.

Mirabel was well planned, but was undone by events.

Montréal in the 19060s was the undisputed centre of Canada for business, culture, population, sport, politics, and international relations. Canada expected to grow by millions of people, and we expected a large number of them to settle in Montréal. 35 miles was a modest buffer zone anticipating enormous suburban sprawl.

The whole project was derailed in the 70s by the terrorism of the FLQ, and then the 1980 secession referendum. Suddenly, banks, insurance companies, and foreign offices took flight and moved on down the road to Toronto. Montréal _lost_ hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs, and hundreds of thousands people as anglos and jews fled. Montréal sunk into a 15 year depression. Toronto became the new centre of Canadian business, culture, and sport. Toronto became a major Jewish city, and immigration shifted for good. The influx triggered a property bubble (and then the condo-crash of 1989).

The growth of Toronto of the last 40 years was planned for Montréal, and had it happened there, Mirabel would be a thriving international airpot. Toronto was unprepared, but Montréal had been planning for decades. To this day, Montréal _still_ has more subway track than TO.

And who knows -- maybe they wouldn't have all left if you didn't regard them as "anglos and jews"

mtl was absolutely not the indisputed business center of Canada in the 1960s.

Headquarters and capital were already moving towards Toronto by the 60s, following the opening of the St-Lawrence Seaway, the growing importance of the american economy for Canada and the progression of the quiet revolution which saw the province become way less interesting for the old money from the Golden Square Mile.

The FLQ was also most active in the 60s, culminating in 1970 with the October Crisis and then nearly seized to exist in the 70s/80s bar the occasional bombing by the RCMP (see the Keable, Mcdonald commissions and Robert Samson)

The 1980 referendum did lead to what a few economists dubbed the "Montreal Effect", and there's certainly some factual basis to it in the form of the flight of many anglophones from the province, but arguing that the sovereignty movement was mostly if not solely responsible for this trend we were seeing before it was on the radar instead of precipitating the ongoing changes is overstating the case.

That said, Mirabel was a disaster regardless of the following growth of mtl. It was rushed for the Olympics, the plans to properly connect it fell before it became clear that mtl's population wouldn't grow as fast as predicted and airlines absolutely loathed it from day one.

I’m not sure we disagree. I consider the quiet revolution, the FQL, the nationalist movement, and the PQ to be all of a piece -- the same thing in different generational clothing. I'll agree that far-sighted foreign money saw the writing on the wall as early as the 60s and started making new investments outside of Quebec But actually moving running businesses is much more disruptive, and only happened later. The whole process took decades, and culturally, Montreal was the capital well into the early 80s. Toronto didn't even have a baseball team until 77.

I probably underweight the impact of the seaway. Me experience is in office work. And there, Hogtown was decidedly a solid second city -- like Chicago, or Lyon. Commercial banking was booming. But RBC, BMO, and many insurance companies still had their head-quarters in Montréal in the 1960s. RBC moved their headquarters in 1976, and BMO moved in 1977. Sun Life moved in 1978.

It think it is obvious that the condo boom/crash of the 1980s was a direct consequence of 400k wealthy people moving en mass over a decade. Just an enormous bolus of money.

The discussions of the day make are explicit that the PQ, the nationalist movement, and bill 101 in particular were driving the exodus.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/history-through-...

As for Mirabel - agree. The plans made sense in the 1960s when the planning started, but the shift to Toronto was underway before they broke ground in the mid 70s. But politics is run by older people, and their imaginations are rooted in the past, not the future. Toronto has the mirror problem -- run by Orange-order children who long for the days of zipping down the Kingsway to downtown in 15 minutes. We're only now moving into a generation of leaders who grew up with Toronto as the centre of Canada, and realizing we need infrastructure to match. We spent 40 years without building a thing while millions moved here.

   > Toronto became a major Jewish city

I am confused by this part. Can you please explain? On the surface, it doesn't read well. Maybe my English isn't so good.

It means there are lots more Jews living in Toronto now.

'major' is in terms of its relevance to the wider Jewish community, which is inevitably going to be affected by how many members live there.

None of the various sorts of people being stupid about Jews are involved :)

Yes. I mean it in the same way that Toronto is a major Italian city. We have more people identifying as Italians than all but 6 cities in Italy.

Long & interesting...but a pretty good tl;dr; is: "NIMBY's are why we can't build any major infrastructure any more".

For every other non-native speaker like me, lmgtfu: NIMBY (/ˈnɪmbi/, or nimby), an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard", is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed infrastructure developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations.

In simple terms, people want airports, but nobody wants an airport near their house.

And the state really shouldn’t care about these few. Probably rich enough to move but don’t want because blah blah.

"Few"? Almost no-one wants to live next door to an airport.

I think they meant: For any given site, theres proportionally 'few' people that would be disadvantaged

Yep. You cannot just put them just anywhere, so if a location has been found and some people don’t like it, well, that happens. Like others said; everyone wants to fly but they don’t want the bad side. Fine but it happens.

But almost everybody wants access to one. This is coming from someone who lived a a kilometer away from the main airport of Istanbul at the time[0], for a long time. I was really disappointed when it was closed as the benefit of access was 100x better than the noise cost.

Of course, everybody has different priorities and getting a huge noise source in your backyard after you decide to call a piece of land your home would be frustrating.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk_Airport - used to be a very busy airport.

Eh. As someone who used to travel a lot living 50 miles from the airport was a bit of an inconvenience but certainly one I could live with. Just took a bit longer to get to the airport. I wouldn't have wanted to live next to it.

Yeah me too, I live an hour's drive from my nearest airport and that's more than close enough - mainly because that airport is London Heathrow, meaning I can catch a flight to basically anywhere in the world from it.

Living close to a small, poorly-connected airport would be far less convenient than living further away from a major airport.

If this was true, areas around airports would have been non-residential or at least stupidly penalized in land value. They don't seem to be.

In fact when you live close to an airport you stop caring, perhaps not unlike smoke alarm chirps but without danger to your life.

The people who work at them do.

...same as with major roads, train lines, power lines, power plants (including but not limited to nuclear and wind), affordable (i.e. high density) housing etc. etc.

Not all of that. Railways are relatively quiet and very useful, someone living near one will might well use it very frequently.

I have lived near a freight railway, and I assure you they are not quiet

I lived near several 80%-passenger railways in England, and they are not silent but they are quieter and less annoying than roads.

Most of the trains were electric, including the freight trains.

US experience is different, with big diesels and primarily freight. I'd rate them as similarly annoying to a divided highway, but I suppose it depends on the region and the specifics

There are a million train spotter videos on YouTube, and given the audience I'm unlikely to find one filmed in someone's back garden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-wyR316550

(The navy blue trains with yellow 'noses' are high-speed commuter trains, the dark blue, gold and white ones are the high-speed trains to France, the plain white ones are normal-speed commuter trains to London.)

I think the continuously welded rails are the biggest improvement, as they remove most of the "clackety-clack". Instead you get the "hiss", but that's only noticeable from really close.

People buy homes near existing airports with very small discounts for the inconvenience.

what does lmgtfu mean?

For every other non-native speaker like me, ttbomk: lmgtfu, let me Google that for you.

Can you do an eli5 of what ttbomk means?

"To The Best Of My Knowledge". (I had to Google it, too.)

Or was that an ironic reply?

afaict that was serious

Let Me Google That For U (usually LMGTFY)

Your definition is accurate, but I think it is incomplete. The stereotypical NIMBY doesn't want something in their backyard, but they still want the advantages of it existing. They want it to be place in someone else's backyard.

People opposing airport construction still want to fly. They just want someone else to have the noise.

> People opposing airport construction still want to fly.

Maybe they do in America. But in Europe there's not much need/want of frequent flying for the average citizen.

In 2022 (according to Statista) there were around 500 million passenger-flights, compared to the 800 million in the US. Accounting for population differences, that means that Europeans fly around half as often as USAians. Yes, that is less, but it is still a lot.

>People opposing airport construction still want to fly.

In this age of big data, is there a way to quantify this? My gut feeling is that this is a very heavily Pareto-like distribution, with maybe say 5% of the population accounting for 90% of the passenger miles or flight segments. With the majority of the people flying a handful of times (or less) in their life. And even then, "want" is probably a strong qualifier, since I'd also think the majority of the flight miles are for business travel. You may "want" to keep your job, so you have to fly sometimes. If we had to drastically curtail flying in the future, I'm guessing that not too many people are going to regret missing out on the business meetings to Detroit in January, compared to say, vacations in Florida.

> as well as support for strict land use regulations.

Perhaps superficially, but no, not necessarily. A large part of the NIMBYism seen in places like SF is opposition to projects that do conform to land use regulation. The entire "by-right" movement is that, if the proposed project is legal (it meets zoning, codes, etc.), then it should be permitted to build. NIMBYs opposed that.

YIMBYs mostly aren't opposed to land use regulations, either. (Wanting to change the zoning of an area, or changes the specifics of the regulations is not "against land use regulations", or treating them any less strictly.)

The term NIMBY is thrown around too much. Yes, there are far too many cases where NIMBYism is taken too far. On the other hand, there are legitimate cases.

I lived in a small, fly-in community for a while. I was very close to the airport, and some people had houses within a few hundred meters of the runway. There was noise, but it was managable because there were only a handful of flights per day (none at night) and there were no jets (the airport could handle them, but it was only intended for emergencies). But that is not the type of airport people are talking about here. They are talking about large airports with constant traffic during most hours of the day and night, with the planes typically being larger and much louder. These are the sort of airports that people can expect a significant loss in the quality of life from. I would expect people to be vocal about it.

In my experience as soon as the airport grew to the next stage. Local enforcement agencies begin staging out of the airport and then everyone gets to hear when the sheriff deputy's are getting their night flight hours in. I'm in agreement with you, calling someone a nimby for not wanting an airport near them is unreasonable.

Yeah, NIMBY gets used way too much for I want something and screw anyone who has negative externalities as a result.

The data the author presents spells out that aircraft are still twice as loud as passenger cars at their quietest. The majority of traffic through smaller municipal airports is very loud propeller aircraft. I don't believe it makes anyone a nimby to not want a freaking airport nearby. I don't think anyone should have to live with such disturbances without voting and ample regulations. It should be incredibly difficult to get airports built. The commerce benefits to the town/city come at the direct expense of health and quality living of residents. The article fixates on noise pollution, but what about exposure to cancerous chemicals? Actual pollution from emissions? Traffic consequences?

It's not just some affluent boomer's view or lawn getting impacted. Personally, I never want to live in vicinity of an airport ever again in my life.

It's a strange piece. Most of the obstacles to airport construction that it describes are nullified by the other obstacles that it also describes.

Airports can't handle the liability they incur because imposing airport noise on housing is a regulatory taking. But also, if you build an airport at such a remove from the city that no housing suffers, housing gets built out toward the airport.

Except of course, it's not a taking if you were there first. If the housing comes to the airport, there's no liability.

Also, airports don't work without being close to their city. When they tried to build Mirabel airport 35 miles from Montreal, it withered and died from being too far away.

This is transparent nonsense; 35 miles is not even a long distance. The airport you use if you live in Santa Cruz is SFO, more than 60 miles away. (There is a closer airport in San Jose, which doesn't go to convenient locations.) It takes a long time to travel between any major airport and its city. HKG is separated from Hong Kong by the ocean. A 40 minute drive to the airport is considerably better than is typical now!

If Mirabel withered and died from being 35 miles outside Montreal, that can only be because Montreal's air transport needs were already met.

Agree. 35 miles was a reasonable buffer for anticipated growth. Mirabel died because immigration patterns shifted from Montréal to Toronto as a result of the FLQ and the 1980 secession referendum.

   > HKG is separated from Hong Kong by the ocean.

Most would say the Victoria Harbour. Do you say that Manhattan is separated from Brooklyn by the ocean? No.

Sure, this is classic NIMBYism. I understand: we live in a very quiet area, and would certainly oppose something that would dramatically change that.

However, what I do not understand are the people who move next to an existing airport, and then complain about the noise. We used to live near a major, international airport. Planes flew overhead. That noise was implicitly factored into the price we paid, and we certainly had zero room to complain. But lots of people did anyway, soaking up lots of time and money that would have been better spent elsewhere.

When I lived in San Diego, I worked near the military airport now known as MCAS Miramar. My coworkers and I were honestly stunned by the people who sued after moving in nearby claiming that they had no idea the place they filmed Top Gun would be that noisy.

A better idea: Tear down the old MCAS Miramar and build housing and parks. Rebuild the airbase in Nevada or the California desert. Yes, it was bad planning to allow so many residences to be built near an airbase, but too late to undo it now.

You’re welcome to lobby your congress members for that but until the military says they’re moving it’s a mistake to buy a house there if you can’t live with the noise.

This is called “coming to the nuisance”[1] and in most jurisdictions the complainers have no case.

I’m sure it doesn’t stop them from trying though. Reid-Hillview airport[2] in San Jose has been there since the 1930’s, long before anyone who currently lives there, yet is constantly under attack by residents and threatened with closing.

1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/coming_to_the_nuisance

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid–Hillview_Airport

How many planes were taking off in 1930 vs. today?

If you bought a residence in 1930, are you never allowed to complain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor

I think if you bought a residence near the existing airport, any time after said airport was built, knowing full well there is an airport there, you should not be able to complain that there is an airport there.

Playing Devil's advocate, air travel is a much larger business than it used to be.

Over time the number of flights, size of aircraft and time of flights can change. This can lead to increased disruption over time. It's not unreasonable to complain about an unexpected increase in disruption.

You can factor some of this into the price, but you can't factor in unknown-unknowns.

Sadly, that sort of entitled idiocy (move next to an existing, then complain) is definitely not limited to airports. It doesn't matter if it's other nearby infrastructure (major roads, railroads, power lines, whatever), or lack of infrastructure (water, sewer, flood control, etc.), or the nicely-maintained vacant lot next door, or what.

people will complain about anything - in my very little town, about 25% of the roads are not paved. People would move into town, buy a house on a dirt road and then come to the town council to complain that their road was not paved.

General aviation is in decline, so really there's no need to build new airports.

Based on what? It got hammered in covid but is back in a big way now.

general aviation, small airports have been closing down for years. It’s not a growing hobby.

I mean, in that case the original point doesn't quite make any sense. The article is very clearly discussing the larger airports associated with commercial aviation.

So by general aviation, you mean flying lessons?

TIL general aviation = non-commercial civilian aviation

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

I think air travel is becoming more popular actually.

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