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Comment by jorisboris | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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?

> 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 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.

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.

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