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Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

In simple terms, people want airports, but nobody wants an airport near their house.

People buy homes near existing airports with very small discounts for the inconvenience.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The people who work at them do.

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